Eric Blair has made this
point occasionally: a lot of what we think of as 'Medieval' is really Victorian. The Arthurian renaissance that accompanied Victoria's rise and reign gave us a lot of the symbolism we associate with Malory and older things. Romantic music and opera, art, literature: and this, eventually, gave us Tolkien and Robert E. Howard.
Pretty illustrations.
That looks wonderful. I'll have to take advantage of one of the few benefits of living in the city and go see it!
ReplyDeleteAnd William Morris
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris
Medieval is sort of like what CS Lewis says of the Renaissance.
ReplyDelete‘the Renaissance’ can hardly be defined except as ‘an imaginary entity responsible for everything the speaker likes ... Renaissance becomes the name for some character or quality supposed to be immanent in all the events, and collects very serious emotional overtones in the process.
I've always said that the real Middle Ages was more like modern-day gangs or mafia than anything else-- fixation on not being "dissed"; a hierarchy of more and less important bosses, with the lower bosses dependent on the higher ones and owing them "soldiers" when called on; controlling an area to the point that the gangs literally "own" it; a big base of powerless and disarmed peasants who are being "farmed" by the gangs for money and status; everything done with the threat (and often the fact!) of violence hovering over. A tournament was just like the staged/arranged fights between gangs today, right down to the women dolled up in luxury clothes to show off and watch their men fight, bunch of flunkies in the gang colors, trash talking to start, etc.
ReplyDelete--Janet
@ Janet - most of history is like gangs, if you squint and want to see it that way. I try to look for those places in history where people rise above that, or at least aspire to, however briefly.
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