The idea of the medieval is always differentiated from the idea of the modern. For Coleridge and Keats it offered relief from urban and mercantile modernity. Modern medievalism rises in the 1970s when people lose faith in futurism. Debates like these can only be developed separarely, not gestured at in an essay like this, opening up for the first time one of the initatory gestures towards modern medievalism –though in fact Chretien deTroyes is a medievalist,and a good deal more positively than Voltaire and those who feel Chaucer might be a release from respectability (never in my experience female).
As commented above post-modern uncertainty may be contemporarily gratifying, but it didn’t help Jeanne at her execution. Texts relate to realities and have potentially real political and attitudinal impacts, and the savage sexism of this allegedly classic text deserves exposing.
Voltaire’s firm efforts to deny authorship of the apparently offensive elements indicate that he at least thought of it as an authorial text, but then he had not read Haydn White as way of disavowing responsibility in postmodern mode. The `mess’ of the textual state is a product of limuted shclkarship rather than ultra-modernity.
Just as the story of Queen Elizabeth onthe 18th C stage, with relfemale actorsalised, so the medieval myth is drawn into the physical emotionalisation of narrative, which will provide secondary energy for the tradition, and remain present as Tennyson reworks the Arthur myth in his first idyll `Merlin and Vivien’.
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January 7, 2014 at 11:05 pm
Agreed. I hope that you and others will continue the conversation in that direction. I’m ready to read more.
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January 7, 2014 at 8:39 am
The idea of the medieval is always differentiated from the idea of the modern. For Coleridge and Keats it offered relief from urban and mercantile modernity. Modern medievalism rises in the 1970s when people lose faith in futurism. Debates like these can only be developed separarely, not gestured at in an essay like this, opening up for the first time one of the initatory gestures towards modern medievalism –though in fact Chretien deTroyes is a medievalist,and a good deal more positively than Voltaire and those who feel Chaucer might be a release from respectability (never in my experience female).
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January 7, 2014 at 8:33 am
`Why’ is another essay: this essay breaks the ground of this curious proto-medievalism.
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January 7, 2014 at 7:12 am
Agreed.
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January 7, 2014 at 7:11 am
As commented above post-modern uncertainty may be contemporarily gratifying, but it didn’t help Jeanne at her execution. Texts relate to realities and have potentially real political and attitudinal impacts, and the savage sexism of this allegedly classic text deserves exposing.
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January 7, 2014 at 7:08 am
Voltaire’s firm efforts to deny authorship of the apparently offensive elements indicate that he at least thought of it as an authorial text, but then he had not read Haydn White as way of disavowing responsibility in postmodern mode. The `mess’ of the textual state is a product of limuted shclkarship rather than ultra-modernity.
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January 7, 2014 at 7:05 am
The point is that it is a mix, not a hierarchy, and both elements remain active.
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January 7, 2014 at 7:02 am
Just as the story of Queen Elizabeth onthe 18th C stage, with relfemale actorsalised, so the medieval myth is drawn into the physical emotionalisation of narrative, which will provide secondary energy for the tradition, and remain present as Tennyson reworks the Arthur myth in his first idyll `Merlin and Vivien’.
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January 7, 2014 at 6:58 am
The best; it’s Merlin speaking.
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January 7, 2014 at 6:57 am
The medieval irony is doubly used, both to amuse about the past and to license modern satire, as the Scriblerus reference indicates.
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