Reddit reviews The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Canto Classics)

This wikipedia page about chapter and verses in the Bible gives some context about when the modern numbering system came to be, and the different systems that were used before.

If you are looking for how people used to cite the Bible before the Stephanus numbers...well, citations as we know them were not really a thing in the middle ages (see C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image for a fairly accessible look at how medieval scholars used previous works). If you look at the writings of the early church fathers (Augustine etc.), you can see how people used to quote the Bible. Many times it's just "As John says..." or a more specific "When Jesus was talking to Nicodemus he said..." No chapters or verses, but someone familiar with the text could find the spot. Here's a website where you can see early church father allusions/quotations of the NT.

You can even look at the New Testament and see how they "cited" the Old Testament to see this in action. Usually your English translation will give you the cross reference notes so you can look back to the OT verses to compare. Look at the place where Jesus says "you have heard...but I tell you", or where Paul is quoting the Law. They didn't even cite the book usually! I suppose people must have just been more familiar with the texts and knew where to look. Or more likely, people didn't have access to the scrolls as much as we have access to Bibles on our own nightstands today and had lots of the text memorized.

A few thoughts:

At one point Lewis and Tolkien were going to write companion novels about space and time. You can see echoes of this in the last chapter of Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in CSL's Space Trilogy when he mentions that space has been cut off from human travel and now any future voyages would be through time. There's also echoes of what might have been in JRRT's Notion Club Papers, which has a time-travel element, but was never published.

In addition, JRRT did not care for the Narnia series because he felt it lacked a coherent theme. However, in the controversial Planet Narnia, Michael Ward posits that CSL actually did have a theme: the medieval view of the planets (The Seven Heavens). There are definitely intriguing arguments made in the book, especially as he combines information from Narnia and the Space Trilogy into his thesis. I wouldn't say it's iron-clad, but if I was still in education, or had the luxury to write papers, this is an area I'd love to explore in depth - specifically the influence of Charles Williams on the evolution of CSL's thought.

If you're interested in aspects of their backgrounds that influenced their worldviews, I would recommend The Discarded Image from CSL (on medieval literature - my favorite CSL book) and The Road to Middle-Earth by Tom Shippey (on the philological undergirding of Middle-Earth). The Humprey Carpenter books are also good (JRRT Letters, Tolkien bio, Inklings bio) as are CSL's letters.

This is a bit too vague to provoke a good answer. Are you asking about physical beauty, artistic beauty, natural beauty, philosophical/theological beauty, architectural beauty...? Are you asking about all of Europe, or France, or Britain, or the Germanic nations? For the landed classes or the peasants? Are you really asking about the entire Middle Ages period, from the 5th through the 15th centuries — a thousand years? Good answers require good questions; this is very vague. (And a lot of doing the work of history, and thinking seriously about history, is about asking the right questions.)

That being said, if you are interested in understanding the intellectual, aesthetic, and philosophical worldview of this period, one of my favorite books is C.S. Lewis' _The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature_ (1964). I have been reassured by my medievalist friends that it is still held in high regard as an introduction to the medieval worldview, with an emphasis on how people back then saw the universe as being ordered. It has some relevance to your question, depending on how one interprets it.