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If I have questions about medieval chivalric codes and such, mostly in regards to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, would this thread be a good place to ask? It ain't ancient but it also ain't modern. Or is there a better thread anybody could suggest on where to discuss that sorta stuff?
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Apr 2, 2021 22:46
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:If I have questions about medieval chivalric codes and such, mostly in regards to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, would this thread be a good place to ask? It ain't ancient but it also ain't modern. Or is there a better thread anybody could suggest on where to discuss that sorta stuff? I suspect most of the people hanging out in this thread are the people who would be hanging out in any other theoretically more relevant thread. Go for it imo
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Apr 2, 2021 23:39
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This thread covers up to 1918 so you should be fine.
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Apr 2, 2021 23:59
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:If I have questions about medieval chivalric codes and such, mostly in regards to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, would this thread be a good place to ask? It ain't ancient but it also ain't modern. Or is there a better thread anybody could suggest on where to discuss that sorta stuff? Go for it, I only shut it down if it's both crazy off topic and going on for too long. This thread started as Roman history specifically so the entire middle ages are included as far as I'm concerned. The Roman Empire is still in living memory in 1492, which is the typical end date for medieval Europe when people feel the need to specify one. Which is now making me wonder if there were any people born in the Roman Empire who visited the Americas. There's a few decades in there where it could've happened.
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Apr 3, 2021 00:31
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ChaseSP posted:Onim's drawing is just the ancient equivalent of that one goon's bathroom sketch and it's perfect. I looked at some of the other sketches of his on Wikipedia, and one of them was especially wild Libluini fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 00:42
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Grand Fromage posted:Go for it, I only shut it down if it's both crazy off topic and going on for too long. This thread started as Roman history specifically so the entire middle ages are included as far as I'm concerned. The Roman Empire is still in living memory in 1492, which is the typical end date for medieval Europe when people feel the need to specify one. One of the mercenaries who fought for Pizarro in Peru was a Hellene. Imaginatively referred to by his companions as George the Greek, went with the future grandee Peter of Crete (this guy was Venetian despite the name). Both too young to have been Roman subjects, but George might have considered himself a Roman I guess.
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Apr 3, 2021 00:47
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skasion posted:One of the mercenaries who fought for Pizarro in Peru was a Hellene. Imaginatively referred to by his companions as George the Greek, went with the future grandee Peter of Crete (this guy was Venetian despite the name). Both too young to have been Roman subjects, but George might have considered himself a Roman I guess. His grandparents and possibly parents almost certainly were born in the Empire, and I can't imagine the identity would fade that fast. I don't think separate greek identity comes into play in actual Greece until centuries later.
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Apr 3, 2021 00:53
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:His grandparents and possibly parents almost certainly were born in the Empire, and I can't imagine the identity would fade that fast. I don't think separate greek identity comes into play in actual Greece until centuries later. Greek nationalism is another matter, but in the 16th century Western Europeans were definitely aware that some people were Greeks. How far the Greeks themselves felt that is another question I guess. El Greco being the most obvious example — he signed his art with his actual name, not the nickname.
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Apr 3, 2021 01:14
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skasion posted:One of the mercenaries who fought for Pizarro in Peru was a Hellene. Imaginatively referred to by his companions as George the Greek, went with the future grandee Peter of Crete (this guy was Venetian despite the name). Both too young to have been Roman subjects, but George might have considered himself a Roman I guess. poo poo. Yeah, he most likely would have identified as Rhomaioi, Greek identity as something distinct from Roman did exist at that time but was very rare.
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Apr 3, 2021 01:14
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So there's a situation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a 14th century English story) where Gawain, one of Arthur's Knights, is staying at a castle. It's near Christmas so they're all feasting and then the lord of the castle Bertilak makes a deal with Gawan that tomorrow, he'll go hunting and Gawain will hang around the castle and whatever either of them wins they'll swap at the end of the day. Gawain agrees, and then goes to sleep. When he wakes up, Lady Bertilak goes into his room and basically flirts with him, while he tries to politely turn her down while never insulting her. This escalates escalating over a couple of days from flirting to her basically going "Yes I'd like to bang you Gawain." Okay, sure, we discover this is in fact all a game she's playing, but the logic she uses specifically takes some time to call him out for deflecting, on the grounds that deflecting is...unknightly? Specifically on the second day, lines 1508-1530, she gives a speech which condenses down to "One of the stories they say about great knights is that they're great at love, so how come you, who's so famously great, haven't made a move on me, even though I've come to you twice already? If you're really such a great knight you'd definitely be down to bang." If I'm interpreting it right she's doing a peer-pressure thing, going, "Great knights would definitely commit adultery in your situation, you should be like them!" I'm almost completely ignorant of what medieval Englishmen thought about this but my guess is that committing adultery is not, like, chivalric? but it's also possible I'm flat-out wrong, and that a high-status knight was expected to go around having extramarital sex whatever women they wanted, kind of like how it wasn't necessarily great for a high-status Roman male but it wouldn't necessarily destroy their social standing. On the other hand the backdrop of Arthurian legend, and the poem itself, is extremely Christian, and unless medieval Christianity had drastically different views of what's sinful or not, this seems...bad? Or is that just the poet doing a rhetorical play by contrasting the ideal (Gawain) with the reality (the knights in real life aren't as chivalric as the stories)?
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Apr 3, 2021 02:46
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We actually discussed that in the SA Book of the Month thread when we did Green Knight a while back: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3842608&pagenumber=2&perpage=40&userid=0#post479364263
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Apr 3, 2021 02:56
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:So there's a situation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a 14th century English story) where Gawain, one of Arthur's Knights, is staying at a castle. It's near Christmas so they're all feasting and then the lord of the castle Bertilak makes a deal with Gawan that tomorrow, he'll go hunting and Gawain will hang around the castle and whatever either of them wins they'll swap at the end of the day. Gawain agrees, and then goes to sleep. There were strains of medieval thought in the "courtly love" tradition that glorified adultery to a degree. In fact, Arthurian stories played a role in that. Lancelot, including his affair with Guinevere, was created by Chretien de Troyes in the 12th century. Chretien's patron Marie of France supposedly argued that true love cannot exist between husband and wife. Obviously the Church formally disapproved of adultery then as now, but Christianity wasn't the sole source of aristocratic values. How widespread the pro-adultery view really was is hard to say, though, and of course the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is pretty clearly against it. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 03:10
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When did people in Europe start brushing their teeth?
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Apr 3, 2021 03:17
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Arglebargle III posted:When did people in Europe start brushing their teeth? From what I've seen of British smiles, never
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Apr 3, 2021 03:19
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Arglebargle III posted:When did people in Europe start brushing their teeth? Yesterday. Gaius Marius posted:From what I've seen of British smiles, never E: But seriously the British have a lot better dental health than Americans in regards of stuff like cavities and gum disease but they have more crooked and colored teeth because the state will pay for dental care but not vain cosmetic stuff like whiter or straighter teeth. And also the Brits allow non-hunks on TV which means you can be a famous actor with crooked teeth and bad skin while in America you need to be basically a genetically perfect speciment with reflective shark like teeth if you wanna be a even just a weatherman which affects the popular perception a lot. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 03:26
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BOTM thread posted:Worth considering that a huge, huge part of Gawain's character is that he fucks near-constantly, while also being extremely gracious to women (there's a couple of variants on this - he either accidentally gets a woman killed or is under oath to be nice to ladies), which all plays into the text's deconstruction of his nature, and the uncanny understanding that the castle's inhabitants have of the same. Wow, ok, that whole sequence insanely hilarious, and also seems wholly different from how Gawain was characterized in the poem. Actually it makes Bertilak's whole plan hilarious! Silver2195 posted:There were strains of medieval thought in the "courtly love" tradition that glorified adultery to a degree. In fact, Arthurian stories played a role in that. Lancelot, including his affair with Guinevere, was created by Chretien de Troyes in the 12th century. Chretien's patron Marie of France supposedly argued that true love cannot exist between husband and wife. Obviously the Church formally disapproved of adultery then as now, but Christianity wasn't the sole source of aristocratic values. How widespread the pro-adultery view really was is hard to say, though, and of course the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is pretty clearly against it. You know I didn't even consider that that chivalric norms (or at least some subset of them) could so strongly diverge from religious norms. I'm clearly out of my depth here but I think my pop-culture conception was that chivalry was an outgrowth of religious norms adapted by the ruling class as, like, a more restrictive, holier-than-thou thing that justified their position in society by basically saying "Look how Godly and strict our codes of conduct are, that's why you have to listen to me, the most chivalrous person in the room, when I want to tax you." Also I was not aware that Lancelot was a French import, either! That's pretty funny.
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Apr 3, 2021 04:00
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:You know I didn't even consider that that chivalric norms (or at least some subset of them) could so strongly diverge from religious norms. I'm clearly out of my depth here but I think my pop-culture conception was that chivalry was an outgrowth of religious norms adapted by the ruling class as, like, a more restrictive, holier-than-thou thing that justified their position in society by basically saying "Look how Godly and strict our codes of conduct are, that's why you have to listen to me, the most chivalrous person in the room, when I want to tax you." FreudianSlippers posted:Yesterday. British people look like pears
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Apr 3, 2021 04:11
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Gaius Marius posted:If I'm reading this right I think you might have the wrong impression of religion in the time period. History isn't written by GRRM, those people actually and truly believed in the bible and their faith, it wasn't some pageantry to convince the mindless sheep to fork over cash. I, uh, I'm never read any GRRM or watched Game of Thrones, so I'm not sure what exactly that means with regards to religion. To clarify, I don't think nobles didn't believe the religion I mean sort of that I thought chivalry is like religion+? Like, you have "things every good Christian does" and then chivalry as "the higher, stricter code of conduct that us nobles hold ourselves to that gives us the moral right to rule." Of course, I'm almost certainly wrong; if that viewpoint is insanely off I'd be happy to be corrected. e: It occurs to me typing that out that there's not necessarily any overlap in between "chivalry as a religious outgrowth" and "chivalry as a parallel ideal alongside religious ideals" though. I'm not sure why I assumed chivalry evolved as an expanded form of religion, other than that every time I read a King Arthur myth in childhood/college they seemed super Christian. MuffiTuffiWuffi fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 04:34
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:
When we're talking about chivalric literature from the medieval period, it's more that the literature was attempting to establish an ideal for behavioral norms upon the ruling class. I kinda covered this in an even older thread I did a long time ago now on Arthuriana generally: quote:The other part of it all was that these Arthur stories provided a way for people to talk about the central moral dilemma of the middle ages: reconciling Christian morality with the fact that knights were gigantic murderous assholes who wandered around slaughtering everyone who got mildly inconvenient or who looked like they might have three spare coins to rub together. ( Terry Jones actually does a good job talking about this problem in one of his BBC Medieval Lives episodes (or you can read the book).) https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3617881#post427361837
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Apr 3, 2021 04:35
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:I, uh, I'm never read any GRRM or watched Game of Thrones, so I'm not sure what exactly that means with regards to religion. To clarify, I don't think nobles didn't believe the religion I mean sort of that I thought chivalry is like religion+? Like, you have "things every good Christian does" and then chivalry as "the higher, stricter code of conduct that us nobles hold ourselves to that gives us the moral right to rule." Oh do not worry I'm not an expert, I just see a lot of people who see the world of the past as a bunch of manipulative priests tricking people into believing things for their own enrichment. GRRM being one of the foremost example of that nonsense, in works like his A song of Ice and Fire, and when he fully explores the concept in The Way of Cross and Dragon.
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Apr 3, 2021 04:39
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:Wow, ok, that whole sequence insanely hilarious, and also seems wholly different from how Gawain was characterized in the poem. Actually it makes Bertilak's whole plan hilarious! "The Middle Ages in Europe" covers 1000 years of dozens if not hundreds of languages striving to survive and thrive without posting. There were a looot of different sources of pressure pushing and pulling people. And yeah people took their religion seriously, but they also had jobs and privileges and preferences. Chivalry had a lot to do with keeping relations between knights from becoming too bloodthirsty and self-defeating, more than anything else.
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Apr 3, 2021 04:40
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I thought ASOIAF made it pretty clear that there were genuine believers (including priests) in the various religions of the setting, some of whom were even good people. I think the idea that nobody in Westeros believes in their own religions comes mainly from the TV show.
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Apr 3, 2021 04:44
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I don't think that genuinely believing in a societal structure which benefits you is at all a contradiction, and you'll miss part of the picture both with a purely religious analysis and with a purely economic analysis
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Apr 3, 2021 04:53
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FreudianSlippers posted:
back when shows like csi were on vogue i used to laugh at every time there was a homeless person or similar - often a victim or witness or something - and they always had perfect teeth. no matter how much the markup, prop and staging department worked to make them look dishevelled - the teeth always stood out to me.
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Apr 3, 2021 04:58
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America has so very many completely unnecessary sets of braces produced every year.
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Apr 3, 2021 05:03
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:e: It occurs to me typing that out that there's not necessarily any overlap in between "chivalry as a religious outgrowth" and "chivalry as a parallel ideal alongside religious ideals" though. I'm not sure why I assumed chivalry evolved as an expanded form of religion, other than that every time I read a King Arthur myth in childhood/college they seemed super Christian. Chivalry as a whole is not exactly an outgrowth of Christianity but developed in symbiosis with it. So that type of honor based system has christian character in Europe, whereas the equivalent in the middle east would be influenced by Islam, or in Japan by Zen Buddhism and Shintoism. That sort of honor based based code of norms doesn't develop from a top down but rather with the culture as it matures. Think of sitting at a place setting, If you set down and grab the set of utensils to your right, everyone else must also do so, otherwise someone will not have the tools to eat. Chivalry works the same way, The code develops before anyone thinks of it, inadvertently in order to facilitate a mutually beneficial relationship. Silver2195 posted:I thought ASOIAF made it pretty clear that there were genuine believers (including priests) in the various religions of the setting, some of whom were even good people. I think the idea that nobody in Westeros believes in their own religions comes mainly from the TV show. His work The Way of Cross and Dragon really shows that he's a very lapsed catholic with a really strong anti church sentiment which is probably influencing my thinking, As far as I remember from the novels the one priest who cares for the hound is the only truly good religious person of the seven, everyone else is either and unthinking zealot, a disgusting opportunist using the faith to enrich themselves, or an unthinking automaton blindly following the other two. cheetah7071 posted:I don't think that genuinely believing in a societal structure which benefits you is at all a contradiction, and you'll miss part of the picture both with a purely religious analysis and with a purely economic analysis Yeah, I think the Latter is more common now which leads me to concern often. Edit:Since I can't figure out how to incorporate this organically Zach Twamely wrote a book on the concept of honor in British Diplomacy around the first world war, Worth a look. I think a lot of people view the modern era with realpolitik eyes which really isn't the case, even for a lad like Bismark. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-matter-of-honor-zack-twamley/1123863431 Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 05:09
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Anyone who is or was ever religious is a simple moron and should he mocked. Every priest ever in any religious sect since the foundation of Ur is by just a creepy perv. E: I was going for a  atheist thing but I was several drinks deep and also a dumb bitch so that didn't come through.Sorry FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 05:22
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but the thing is that chivalry didn't develop before anyone thought of it. in fact, it was thought of specifically to try to envision a world where knights were, generally, not huge pieces of poo poo all the time and if they were then there were good knights that would kill them it's a cultural reaction to the absence of a code of conduct. it is a product of explicit, conscious thinking about the social problems of the day and interested in spreading itself as the ideal for the aristocracy to follow (primarily by being in entertaining stories and poems). people misunderstand chivalry as something that actually existed before it was written about, but while there were certainly many clerical treatises on a knight's duty within a christian context, an actual unified-ish sensibiltiy about how aristocrats should behave was not a thing
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Apr 3, 2021 05:29
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FreudianSlippers posted:Anyone who is or was ever religious is a simple moron and should he mocked. 
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Apr 3, 2021 05:53
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FreudianSlippers posted:Anyone who is or was ever religious is a simple moron and should he mocked.
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Apr 3, 2021 05:59
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Pretty sure that much like bushido, most of the actual codified values and ideals of chivalry were a post facto invention made up long after the warrior class had become irrelevant to justify their ancestral pillaging and/or because it made for good entertainment. Arthurian stories in particular are much like comic books and movies where there's tons of different takes on the same set of characters and old stuff blended with new. Look at like, the old Donald Duck comics from like 80 years ago now and compare to the recently concluded DuckTales reboot, and ponder what that kind of thing is going to look like to someone 200 years from now. I think Gawain's attempts to politely deflect the Green Knight's wife's advances are basically trying to balance not being a jerk- and worse, a bad guest- by sleeping with his host's wife, but also not trying to look unmanly for not wanting to have sex with an attractive woman. Either that or the other thread's interpretation where the Green Knight is angling for a triad.
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Apr 3, 2021 06:07
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty sure that much like bushido, most of the actual codified values and ideals of chivalry were a post facto invention made up long after the warrior class had become irrelevant to justify their ancestral pillaging and/or because it made for good entertainment. Jazerus posted:but the thing is that chivalry didn't develop before anyone thought of it. in fact, it was thought of specifically to try to envision a world where knights were, generally, not huge pieces of poo poo all the time and if they were then there were good knights that would kill them I'm interested in any sources you have on this topic though, I love reading about this nonsense
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Apr 3, 2021 06:19
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Jazerus posted:but the thing is that chivalry didn't develop before anyone thought of it. in fact, it was thought of specifically to try to envision a world where knights were, generally, not huge pieces of poo poo all the time and if they were then there were good knights that would kill them Interesting. So these stories in the medieval period were explicitly utopian works with social engineering aims.
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Apr 3, 2021 06:28
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Jazerus posted:but the thing is that chivalry didn't develop before anyone thought of it. in fact, it was thought of specifically to try to envision a world where knights were, generally, not huge pieces of poo poo all the time and if they were then there were good knights that would kill them The way I understood the discussion is that no one is saying there was a time when knights were good and benevolent, but that it's anachronistic when high born characters in modern fiction are cynically aware that they're exploiting the peasants and if there's a kind of ideology that (we might say) justifies that oppressive relationship, they only pretend to believe in it for the rubes, it's a fiction that only the masses need to believe. I have no idea if this was ever the case, just have a hunch that it's projecting something modern into the past. Grevling fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 06:33
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City of God.
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Apr 3, 2021 06:33
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By this I mean look at chivalry in the context of City of God and the end of the western empire. Edit : and in a Neoplatonist, idealist not materialist context
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Apr 3, 2021 06:39
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Bar Ran Dun posted:City of God. My brain is so hosed I read that in Bob Page's voice I should read the drat work but Augustine's loving peaches are a constant thought in my brain space and i'm fearful that his further works will only destabilize my thought processess.
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Apr 3, 2021 06:50
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Speaking of adultery and knights. Daniel of Beccles wrote a handbook for knights called Book of the Civilised Man where he said it was okay to gently caress other women as long as they weren't nuns, godmothers or close relatives. If a knight is approached by his lord's wife it's better to feign illness and go away. He also advised knights to empty their testicles quickly with a high class prostitute. He also writes that knights should just ignore his wife infidelities because, and I quote: "The lascivious woman throws herself around the neck of her lover, her fingers give him those secret touches that she denies to her husband in bed; one wicked act with her lover pleases the lascivious adulteress more than a hundred with her husband; women's minds always burn for the forbidden. what she longs for is a thick, leaping, robust piece of equipment, long, smooth and stiff... such are the things that charm and delight women." His advise to the jelaous man is: "if you are jealous, do not whisper a word about it... when you are jealous, learn to look up at the ceiling."
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Apr 3, 2021 07:46
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Alhazred posted:Speaking of adultery and knights. Daniel of Beccles wrote a handbook for knights called Book of the Civilised Man where he said it was okay to gently caress other women as long as they weren't nuns, godmothers or close relatives. If a knight is approached by his lord's wife it's better to feign illness and go away. He also advised knights to empty their testicles quickly with a high class prostitute. He also writes that knights should just ignore his wife infidelities because, and I quote: "The lascivious woman throws herself around the neck of her lover, her fingers give him those secret touches that she denies to her husband in bed; one wicked act with her lover pleases the lascivious adulteress more than a hundred with her husband; women's minds always burn for the forbidden. what she longs for is a thick, leaping, robust piece of equipment, long, smooth and stiff... such are the things that charm and delight women." His advise to the jelaous man is: "if you are jealous, do not whisper a word about it... when you are jealous, learn to look up at the ceiling." What century was this, and do we have a record of his swinger's club
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Apr 3, 2021 07:48
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Ha, I was kinda worried that given the low thread activity for the last week or so nobody would come and answer.Hieronymous Alloy posted:When we're talking about chivalric literature from the medieval period, it's more that the literature was attempting to establish an ideal for behavioral norms upon the ruling class. This is super interesting! Also your infodump thread from seven years ago is great, thanks for writing all that out. Alhazred posted:Book of the Civilised Man ...huh. I wonder if I can find this in English ('s apparently in Latin verse). Wikipedia says "probably from the beginning of the 13th century" which means it predates Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
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Apr 3, 2021 08:31
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