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King Arthur and his knights are to actual feudal knights what Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne and Scrooge McDuck are to modern wealthy people.
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Apr 3, 2021 08:31
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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. In the Amadis romance (famously mentioned in Don Quixote as his favorite book), the titular hero is perfectly chaste (except on a single fateful occasion), while his brother Galaor, well, quote:Herewith she went presently forth of the chamber, and making fast the door after her, left the two lovers alone: by which means they spent this night so amorously, as they that have tasted like fortune may conceive, and therefore need I make no further talk thereof.
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Apr 3, 2021 13:03
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Ghost Leviathan posted:King Arthur and his knights are to actual feudal knights what Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne and Scrooge McDuck are to modern wealthy people. . . . . yeah that's actually fairly accurate. Dammit. Gaius Marius posted:
It's not a "source" as such but the "Knight" episode of Terry Jones' Medieval Lives is a decent treatment of this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITy2xuGR7o
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Apr 3, 2021 13:04
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People might want to take a look at "The Romance of the Rose". Its about a man who's trying to get inside the "Garden of Love" and has to get to the center, where he can find and pluck a single rose thats in the center of the garden behind high walls. Not sure i need to explain the metaphor here...
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Apr 3, 2021 14:35
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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." So he's French.
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Apr 3, 2021 15:06
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The Romance of the Rose is notable for being so goony that Christine de Pizan ended up writing The Book of the City of Ladies in response. Great Courses has two lecture series by Dorsey Armstrong, one on King Arthur and one on the "great minds" of the medieval world, and I really recommend them. Should be available on Audible.
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Apr 3, 2021 15:07
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I've actually been trying to find some information related to this chivalry topic - the codes and norms of warfare, especially as they govern (or fail to govern) the conduct of aristocratic officers and the expectations thereof - in later eras, specifically in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. If anyone has a lead (especially to a journal article as libraries are closed in my area) I'd appreciate it. Actually I'd even appreciate a lead on a journal article on the chivalry/romance topic itself.
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Apr 3, 2021 15:25
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Epicurius posted:People might want to take a look at "The Romance of the Rose". Its about a man who's trying to get inside the "Garden of Love" and has to get to the center, where he can find and pluck a single rose thats in the center of the garden behind high walls. is it about the backwall?
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Apr 3, 2021 19:38
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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. I think you could broaden out from that into how a lot of concepts have to be conjured and created before they exist, and literature has always been a good way of getting ideas out there about how people should act to this day, even though it may not be as impactful as like a direct advisor to somebody important or like an influential priest preaching, at least in that time period. It still helped shape people's later moral ideals. From what I've heard, I think that Bushido was probably more successful in influencing behavior than Chivalry, maybe because Japan had a warrior class that stuck around for long enough to hit a period of long peace where they were mostly idle instead of having to develop and stay pragmatic and practical with the less-noble side of warfare, and also they found themselves under a single state government that didn't want them to cause trouble and was itself drawing on Bushido to form its concept of how this warrior class should stay regulated and incorporate that into law. Weirdly I've never heard much talk about what happened to European knights towards the end of their relevance beyond just either settling into being a landowner or getting folded into more modern armies or mercenaries.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:19
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I haven't read it but my understanding is that Don Quixote is about, in part, the son of the last generation to live under medieval norms trying to make his way in a world restructured in a way that the social class his parents belonged to no longer makes sense
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Apr 3, 2021 21:25
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cheetah7071 posted:I haven't read it but my understanding is that Don Quixote is about, in part, the son of the last generation to live under medieval norms trying to make his way in a world restructured in a way that the social class his parents belonged to no longer makes sense Maybe? I haven't read it either, but my impression is that in the original novel, Don Quixote is literally mentally ill (largely because he doesn't get enough sleep) rather than so idealistic he's figuratively mad like in later romanticized interpretations, which would complicate that a bit.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:35
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one of the reasons Don Quixote is so good is that it's a bit ambiguous what his deal is. What you note about his social class is true, but Cervantez is also satirizing the pretentions of that class, and the romances themselves. So, maybe he's a madman, driven loopy by staying up too late reading these ridiculous chivalric stories; he's also the only "Don" who still stands for truth, justice, and the rest in a world that's stacked against him and those values. Imo the first book emphasizes the first themes, whereas the second book emphasizes the latter. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favour. It's one of the best things in the world, and 90% of what you've heard about it happens in the first 60 pages of an 800+ page novel.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:42
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Do you have a preferred translation or edition?
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Apr 3, 2021 21:51
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What do the weird bootleg fanfictions of Don Quixote emphasize? That's one of the more interesting parts about it to me, how it was framed as being a story the writer just translated from somewhere else and other people just copied that framework to write their own stories.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:What do the weird bootleg fanfictions of Don Quixote emphasize? That's one of the more interesting parts about it to me, how it was framed as being a story the writer just translated from somewhere else and other people just copied that framework to write their own stories. Wasn't that because there was no real tradition of fiction writing yet? A whole lot of fiction until well into the 1800s was framed that way, as epistolary, to get around the audience skepticism problem. "Why am I reading this, if it didn't actually happen?" Well, if the writer's mother's first cousin's uncle swears it's true and here's a letter from him containing a story containing a poem about it, and the author is just acting as a historian collecting and assembling primary sources, maybe it actually did.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:What do the weird bootleg fanfictions of Don Quixote emphasize? That's one of the more interesting parts about it to me, how it was framed as being a story the writer just translated from somewhere else and other people just copied that framework to write their own stories. 
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Apr 3, 2021 22:43
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cheetah7071 posted:Do you have a preferred translation or edition? I'm a fan of early modern/eighteenth-century lit so I enjoyed the Tobias Smollett edition, which I believe is the one that Wordsworth publishes. If you like early novels, you'll enjoy that. I've also read a recent Penguin edition which I found satisfying. The next time I read it I'll likely read the early seventeenth-century translations, which I'll probably have to bootleg out of the internet. SlothfulCobra posted:What do the weird bootleg fanfictions of Don Quixote emphasize? That's one of the more interesting parts about it to me, how it was framed as being a story the writer just translated from somewhere else and other people just copied that framework to write their own stories. Holy poo poo the weird bootleg fanfictions of Don Quixote are an amazing story! It's not as widely known that there were two parts - what we'd view as a sequel now - with 10 years separating them! And the second part addresses their existance! I haven't read any of them (idk if they exist in English) but from what I gather from Cervantez's second part these bootleg ones emphasize the wacky adventures (more windmills and slapstick etc), because as Don Quixote is going around the countryside he hears about these events and his reaction is "well that's stupid, why would I have done that? Why would anyone do that? There must be an impostor about trying to besmirch my good name!" This tells us two things: 1) Early readers liked the clownish and burlesque aspects of Don Quixote 2) Cervantez made a visible effort to move his character somewhat beyond those aspects (even though book 2 still has lots of slapstick episodes). Another early piece related to early Don Quixote reception is Francis Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle (which is more in my actual wheelhouse), which we can look at as an early reading of that novel. It's a meta-theatrical English play written between the two parts of Don Quixote's publication, and it seems to follow the same formula - a character reads some romances, decides that this is a good idea, and goes on adventures. And it too balances sympathy for the character of Rafe, the Knight of the Burning Pestle, with sympathy for his chivalric idealism in an unchivalric world (even as he's running around swinging a gigantic syphilitic penis at giants and other miscreants). It also notes that tension between what the audiences want from him (wacky adventures) and the higher values that he's trying to achieve. There are some fun performances of Knight of the Burning Pestle online, mostly done by low-budget student theatre groups, if you're interested in that. I think of it as the most glorious mess ever to grace the English stage. Fuschia tude posted:Wasn't that because there was no real tradition of fiction writing yet? A whole lot of fiction until well into the 1800s was framed that way, as epistolary, to get around the audience skepticism problem. "Why am I reading this, if it didn't actually happen?" Well, if the writer's mother's first cousin's uncle swears it's true and here's a letter from him containing a story containing a poem about it, and the author is just acting as a historian collecting and assembling primary sources, maybe it actually did. There was a great tradition of fiction writing by 1600. I think of the Don Quixote bootlegs more as evidence that nobody gave a poo poo about copyright, even then. It wasn't fan fiction - it was baldfaced profiteering (by the booksellers, not by the authors).
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Apr 3, 2021 22:55
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Fuschia tude posted:Wasn't that because there was no real tradition of fiction writing yet? A whole lot of fiction until well into the 1800s was framed that way, as epistolary, to get around the audience skepticism problem. "Why am I reading this, if it didn't actually happen?" Well, if the writer's mother's first cousin's uncle swears it's true and here's a letter from him containing a story containing a poem about it, and the author is just acting as a historian collecting and assembling primary sources, maybe it actually did. I'm not sure how expensive, though. How expensive were books back in the day, anyway, especially once there was at least some kind of printing press?
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Apr 3, 2021 22:55
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DACK FAYDEN posted:yeah, I hear Pierre Menard wrote it menard's version has way too many allusions, you'd need a companion reader to explain everything to you
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Apr 3, 2021 22:57
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Nessus posted:People have known about fiction for a long time, although there was certainly less structure to it. I imagine the real obstacle to a book like this would be that a book is real loving expensive. Books weren't cheap. Paper was the limiting cost factor from a commercial perspective, so cheap printed materials tended to be short and crowded and in small text to get as much text per page as could be managed. Big folio editions like those of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson - or the Gutenberg Bibles - were high-status objects.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:58
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CommonShore posted:There was a great tradition of fiction writing by 1600. I think of the Don Quixote bootlegs more as evidence that nobody gave a poo poo about copyright, even then. It wasn't fan fiction - it was baldfaced profiteering (by the booksellers, not by the authors). Nessus posted:People have known about fiction for a long time, although there was certainly less structure to it. I imagine the real obstacle to a book like this would be that a book is real loving expensive. Why is it considered the first real novel, then? Was it just the first popular long-form story to be written in the era of the printing press, and hence able to be mass-produced in book format and available in the reach of more than just the very rich?
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Apr 3, 2021 23:48
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I don't think I've ever seen anyone ever describe it as the first novel. Tale of Genji is the one I hear named for that.
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Apr 3, 2021 23:53
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My local bookstore had the penguin edition on their shelves so I guess in reading Don Quixote now
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Apr 4, 2021 00:17
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Gaius Marius posted:I don't think I've ever seen anyone ever describe it as the first novel. Tale of Genji is the one I hear named for that. It's considered the first modern western novel. That's a lot of qualifiers, but whatever.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:32
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass
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Apr 4, 2021 00:43
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Fuschia tude posted:Why is it considered the first real novel, then? Was it just the first popular long-form story to be written in the era of the printing press, and hence able to be mass-produced in book format and available in the reach of more than just the very rich? Because people who study book history look at a novel as a genre, not simply an extended prose narrative. The definition I use is that a novel is a) an extended prose narrative, b) with a critical, usually middle-class perspective, c) a realist approach to representation in before "realist" is a genre, fine, "verisimilitude", and d) produced for a commercial market. The earlier print prose romances (e.g. Mallory) are aristocratic and fantastical, whether they celebrate or critique chivalric ideals as we were discussing w/r/t the Arthurian corpus. The ones before the printing press (and I think this applies to The Tale of Genji, too) regardless of the content couldn't have been mechanically reproduced for a commercial market, and most of them were again aristocratic or clerical. These are just genre markers, but for me C and D are critical - consider that even something wildly fantastical like The Lord of the Rings is at its core a commercial product produced as a meditation on commonplace human fears and psychology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rag_9J1ZC2g So Don Quixote is called the first novel because it's the first text that really hits all four of those points. And the title of "The First Novel in English" usually goes to Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave, which also gets called a romance, too.
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Apr 4, 2021 01:45
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Is Gargantua and Pantagruel too fantastic to fit?
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Apr 4, 2021 02:41
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Epicurius posted:Is Gargantua and Pantagruel too fantastic to fit? In my Great Books class they were described as fantasy and satire rather than novels.
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Apr 4, 2021 02:50
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Deteriorata posted:In my Great Books class they were described as fantasy and satire rather than novels. The problem with that is, you know, is "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" a novel? It's fantasy. It's satire.
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Apr 4, 2021 05:38
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I think by the time of Don Quixote the ages of knights and chivalry have already faded into distant myth and legend, and the point at the start is that he's part of a crumbling old aristocracy stuck between a rock and a hard place; he owns a lot of fancy old stuff including a big house and a library, but he's got little to no income and if he takes an actual job he'll lose his noble status that exempts him from paying taxes (which would likely be high for said big house and library) so he's basically got nothing to do but read and fantasise til he loses touch with reality. A lot about the book would probably be called postmodern if it wasn't from hundreds of goddamn years ago. There's a lot of commentary about said books of chivalry, with the most educated people in turn (a barber and a curate) being asked by Quixote's family to burn the books hoping that'll snap him out of his madness, which they aren't keen on and end up stealing a couple of favourites for themselves. And you get things like the author intervening in the story, characters reading early parts of it, even pointing out supposed plot holes and cliffhangers left hanging. And IIRC the synthesis in the end is kinda that while Don Quixote may be crazy, he's also genuinely trying to live up to ideals of a knight that never really existed and there's certainly worse things to be. The unauthorised sequels and such could probably just be summed up as what we'd call adaptations and riffs that tend to be shallow and exaggerated, reducing characters to base and often inaccurate stereotypes based on the bits people remember the most; Don Quixote charging at windmills while Sancho Panza tries to rein him in, Sherlock Holmes wearing a deerstalker and holding a magnifying glass while Watson bumbles behind him, etc.
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Apr 4, 2021 05:56
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Not sure how you can accept Tale of Genji as a novel and say novels require a middle-class perspective.
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Apr 4, 2021 06:22
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If Don Quixote were set in the modern day, the title character would've watched nauseating amounts of anime, just the trashiest poo poo imaginable. And he'd have done up his armor like a gundam, but otherwise the story would be the same.
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Apr 4, 2021 06:24
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packetmantis posted:Not sure how you can accept Tale of Genji as a novel and say novels require a middle-class perspective. One man's eternal gently caress quest is 100% relatable to anyone regardless of class or setting.
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Apr 4, 2021 06:37
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Bongo Bill posted:If Don Quixote were set in the modern day, the title character would've watched nauseating amounts of anime, just the trashiest poo poo imaginable. And he'd have done up his armor like a gundam, but otherwise the story would be the same. I'm not sure I would call trashy anime this generation's Bushido.
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Apr 4, 2021 07:39
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WW2 History channel specials about Patton.
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Apr 4, 2021 07:55
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This generation's Don Quixote is obviously reading about 19th-20th century revolutionaries, making an online persona about it and posting a lot.
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Apr 4, 2021 07:57
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Bushido and chivalry are notably different in that the Arthurian stories were written while knights were out there tiltint at each other and persecuting everyone else, while the now-popular texts on bushido were written by people who hadn’t even born when the mostly peaceful Tokugawa era began.
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Apr 4, 2021 08:04
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Grevling posted:This generation's Don Quixote is obviously reading about 19th-20th century revolutionaries, making an online persona about it and posting a lot. To fight every internet foe To bear with unbearable sorrow And to browse where the wise dare not go To write the unstoppable burn And to love pure and chaste from afar To type when your arms are too weary To fight the eternal mod star This is my quest To battle that star Ooh, no matter how hopeless No matter how far To fight for the right Without question or pause To be willing to march, march into hell And to say "gently caress the mods" And I know If I'll only be true To my internet friends That my heart Will lie peaceful and calm When I'm finally banned And the world will be better for this Oh, that one goon, scorned and covered with scars Still strove with his last ounce of courage To write the unreadable, the unreadable The unreadable post Nessus fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 08:20
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Grevling posted: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. Honestly it's not even an anachronism, that's just not how ruling-class ideologies work ever. It's extremely rare for the people who benefit to be truly cynical about this stuff. Of course knights genuinely believed in chivalry, precisely because it said they were special and good and badass protectors of the common folk, even when they did nothing to uphold its theoretical tenets. If there's an appealing worldview that not only justifies your privileged position in the social order, but makes you feel good about it, why wouldn't you buy into it? It's always like that. 19th century racists totally believed that objective science proves their innate superiority. Modern billionaires may pay people to promote the idea that they're all benevolent job creators and big brain entrepreneurial geniuses, but there's no reason to doubt that they also eat that poo poo up themselves. Ideas like that don't come up as cynical efforts to exert social control, but as post-hoc rationalizations. For powerful people, just like the rest of us, it's a lot easier to convince yourself that everything you're doing is morally good than it is to constantly keep up a facade.
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Apr 4, 2021 09:04
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Ghost Leviathan posted:King Arthur and his knights are to actual feudal knights what Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne and Scrooge McDuck are to modern wealthy people. Fun fact: People actually cosplayed as king Arthur and his knights in the middle ages. Edward 1st for example arranged a tournament in 1209 where every contestant had to come dressed as a person from the king Arthur legend. The knights' squires would interrupt a feast dressed as peasants with bloody clothes who would beg their knights to save them from rebels in the area. The king would then tell them the next day that "yeah that was just fiction, but I totally need you guys in an upcoming battle and remember how you all swore to uphold king Arthur's ideals last night." In 1278 a noble lady cosplaying as Guinevere arranged a tournament in Le Hem in 1278. The story in that tournament was that sir Gawain's sister had been kidnapped. Over a hundred knights participated. One knight, only known as "the Knight with the Lion", got so into character that even when he lost his helmet he tried to conceal his real identity. The pope tried to ban these tournaments in 1314 because he feared that so many people would die in the tournaments that he wouldn't have enough people to send in the crusades. The ban didn't work and they continued for another two centuries. Alhazred fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 11:39
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