Word: mundy
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...Sicily, scholar, scientist, quarreler with Popes, prodigious lecher, successful Crusader, political innovator-is a blazing figure in a period in history (the first half of the 13th century) that the casual student too often slides by. The attention is caught briefly, perhaps, by Frederick's nickname, Stupor Mundi (wonder of the world), and by accounts that his scientific curiosity led him to experiment with live servants. But ahead, amplified by history's hindsound, are the first horn calls of the Renaissance. The temptation is to leave Frederick for the grandeur born two centuries later...
...romances (he fathered legitimate children by several queens and was responsible for numberless bastards; in addition, making no distinction between sexes, he carried on a lifelong affair with Pier della Vigna, the lowborn lawyer who may have invented the sonnet). The novel is not, like its subject, a stupor mundi, but it is a careful, craftsmanlike job, done with intelligence and conscience...
...young man, he was a stupor mundi," Finley said. "He lived very thoroughly the life of a professional scholar. He was not very active in the House, but he loved it. He got to know some of the undergraduates and sometimes he would come up behind one, tap him on the shoulder and quote some unintelligible Latin, or English which sounded like Latin...
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi...
...this new novel, the fourth volume of a quartet, Author Durrell continues his absorbed investigation of contemporary Alexandria, the 2,000-year-old Egyptian seaport that he calls the "royal city and the anus mundi." Durrell delightedly wanders Alexandria's dust-tormented streets, blinks in its lemony sunlight, and pokes curiously through its stews, brothels, and hysteric festivals. Keeping him company is a clutch of God-haunted characters who live, love and die with tautly stretched minds...