Today I read a selection of Wyatt's poems contained in the Norton.
Generally, I like him. What later authors by 1557 (Tottel's edition) take to be crude I take instead to be gracefully blunt. He states his images well, and though he does not soar, I prefer him to some of the more elaborate conceit masters.
Generally, his poetry turns inward, a tendency one sees in his translations of Petrarch. Where Petrarch refers to a particular Lady, or to Love personified, Wyatt takes both of these at a level of distraction, reducing the clarity just so that we see that his struggle with Love is not represented externally, but is instead doubled by another internal metaphor or trope. Even in his struggles with women's inconstancy, the struggle is as much with himself and his own voice as it is with external causality. Thus his addresses to his harps, rather than to the women directly.
I shall briefly list each poem, its form, its correspondent if it has one, and then a few sentences about its themes.
The long love that in my thought doth harbor
from Petrarch, Rima 140
Pet. Sonnet
Love as a military host, bold and hardy in displaying itself. Too much for his intended lover, who rejects such boldness by teaching patience. He then turns inward into his own forest (wilderness), the epitome of the wildman. Wyatt is like the faithful squire, and unlike the translation, his service to Love is indistinct, since, "For good is the life ending faithfully" (14).
Whoso list to hunt
from Petrarch, Rima 190
Pet. Sonnet
The hunting trope, presumably alluding to the pursuit of courters for a love. The uncatchable hind/hart. Presumably wild, but truly proscribed due to Caesar's authority, the king perhaps preserving what only he can hunt, or perhaps preserving it for its own sake.
Farewell, Love
Pet. Sonnet
Speaker turns from love to philosophical happiness. Several images (baited hooks, rotten boughs) that depict love as deceptive. Instead, Seneca and Plato, both of whom could be considered prime thinkers on eudaimonia.
I find no peace
from Petrarch, Rima 134
Pet. Sonnet
The love that gives no peace to the speaker irks him, filling him with contradictory feelings. The mystery line that defines all of these contradictions: "I love another, and thus I hate myself." What does this mean? Another besides himself? Another besides his current lover? It would be interesting in either case, since it seems to indicate that he views all love as a change, a potential unfaithfulness that he bemoans as inevitable in "Divers doth use." Interestingly, Wyatt does not refer to Love as an abstract figure, nor the Lady as a subject. Instead, they are all abstracted in the phrase "I love another," which produces the productive inward turn in the first place.
My galley
from Petrarch, Rima 189
Pet. Sonnet
His galley is led by a tumultuous Lord, presumably love though neither translation nor original state it outright. It is steered ruthlessly, but it is soon revealed that error and ignorance wreath the ship, and it does not know where it is going. I think of the introductory image in Augustine's De Beata Vita, where one example of false philosophy involves getting lost in deep waters. Wyatt's tie to philosophy in Farewell, Love makes this tie attractive and plausable, though not at present provable.
Divers doth use
Pet. Sonnet
He talks of reactions to women's infidelity. Some sorrow, some rage. Wyatt decides he will do neither, though his reactions indicate he is doing a little of both. He claims that he will let it pass, and think that nature ("kind") is the reason that women are so fickle. I'm unsure whether the attestation is sincere or mocking of the opinion stated. Only a man scorned would say such a thing? Maybe. It reads interestingly whether sincere or not.
What vaileth truth?
Rondeau
This seems to allude to the rhetoric of courtliness, where deceptions and doubleness conquer over truth, since the best feigner turns out to be the most successful. Then he associates in the last three lines the previous discourse with a mistress with unrestrainable cruelty. Here, too, "what vaileth truth?" It's a little confusing, but I take the mistress to represent the previous court, now combining his trope for changeability with this.
Madam, withouten many words
Balladic (abab)
An appeal to direct answer from a woman. Say yes or no to proposal, but give the answer straight.
They flee from me
(ababbcc, iambic pentameter)
Women compared to ducks or swans that once were fed from his hand but fled. The second describes the encounter in terms of a woman who undresses, kisses him, and asks, "Dear heart, how like you this?" (14) The last urges that it was no dream, and he bemoans the forsaking, while asking "what she hath deserved." I'm frankly baffled here.
My lute, awake!
Balladic (aabab)
Futility of song in love. Nonetheless, he plays in order to play out her infidelity. After turning from the wounds on him done by rocks, waves, and Love's arrows, he turns to her and vengeance by old age, which will wreck her appearance. At the end he ceases the song.
Forget not yet
Balladic (aaab)
He urges that his faithfulness not be forgotten.
Blame not my lute
Balladic (ababccd)
Can be read in conversation with "My lute, awake!" He asks forgiveness for the lute saying the truth, while also deflecting criticism of himself by insisting that the lute is the one playing the songs. They obey him, but by asking for forgiveness of the lute, he asks for his own forgiveness as well. Most of this appeal is thus wrapped up in his own voice, save the fifth stanza that begins "Blame but thyself..." Again scorned, such that he breaks his lute in the final stanza but then immediately finds new strings to play again, those that urge him to shame her.
Stand whoso list
from Seneca, Thyestes, ll 391-403
ababcbdacd(?)
Not entirely sure on the rhyme, but it seemed to suit. I like it, it's tricky. He basically says that those on top will fall with much renown, but also with much tumult. On the other hand, he will live without much renown, but mercifully by old age.
Who list his wealth and ease retain
Balladic (aabab)
In a similar strain to the last poem, bemoans the fate of those who are at the height only to later fall. His allusion to the Bell Tower indicates that he partly thinks of himself now imprisoned. A Boethian moment, to be sure. "Who hastes to climb seeks to revert." Such happiness at the top of worldy happiness is only insecure.
Mine own John Poins
ababcbcdcded... etc.
Addressed to John Poins, indicating the doubleness of the court in varying allusions and metaphors which indicate the praising of lesser skill (Pan to Apollo, Sir Thopas to the Knight) over those of greater. He explains this to explain his exile, and in the concluding parts explains that he has not gone to France, or Spain, or Rome to deal in such excesses and treacheries, but instead to "Kent and Christendom, / Among the Muses" (100-1). His emphasis on simplicity serves as the capstone of the poem.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Utopia by Sir Thomas More
I read the edition contained in the Norton Critical Edition, translated by Robert M. Adams.
Utopia, written in Latin, is a vision of an ideal society founded in the new world, governed by reason, based on the premise that all property should be owned by the common weal, rather than hoarded individually. According to the narrator of this vision, Raphael Hythloday, this results in a more efficient and harmonious form of government. I think of it as the contrary of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, where quite the opposite occurs - by living virtuously, they dwindle in number and wealth, because they only desire what they need, rather than desiring and getting excess wealth.
The book is divided into a prefacatory letter included in the 1515 edition, a first part that develops the frame story further and turns into a debate about the merits and demerits of rule at home, a second part where Raphael describes the Utopian approach, and an end letter (in the second 1517 edition) that discharges the question about whether it is fable or fact.
Both letters are to Peter Giles, an associate of More through Erasmus. The first letter presents the manuscript to Giles, variously claiming that it is a record, separating some of its claims from his own to preserve correctness ("I'd rather be truthful than correct"), implying authority through its other witnesses, and in short urging that all these notes be compared with Hythloday, indicating More's meticulous intentions. It's a quite pleasing frame, with rhetorical touches that would have made an eighteenth-century fabricator (like Walpole or Swift) proud.
Book 1 puts the frame story forward. In the midst of negotiation, More gets permission to go to Antwerp from Bruges to meet Peter Giles. While there, they meet Raphael, who despite appearances as a sailor claims to be a philosopher. He soon details his miraculous circumnavigation of the globe. But when Peter urges that these experiences, and his reasoning faculty, could be used to counsel kings, Raphael refuses. He claims that to do so would be futile, due to the deceptions of courtiers, the emphasis on warmongering instead of peace, the crossover between soldiers and thieves, and other reasons. He also carries into other criticisms, like that against bad schooling (zeal for punishment instead of learning), enclosure, games of chance, and so on (529). The Polylerites stand as a good but flawed counterexample to Europe's corruption. The courtiers reject the account, until the Cardinal approves - then they cling to it. Raphael rejects public service by this example as well. More suggests that he compromise and advise small steps rather than large ones, but Raphael says this is tantamount to supporting disorder. Then he gradually shifts to claiming that the root of disorder is private property and money. The Utopians serve as an example, partly descended from some early European contact, but separate from their present strife.
Book 2 describes Utopia in broad categories. Generally, the island is a crescent island just off the coast, reduced to an island by the work of a king. All people work six hours a day, and have the rest of the time for leisure. Intellectual engagement is highly honored. Only scholars and leaders are exempted from service, and they are only a few. Slavery is quite interesting, since it is a crime mainly for miscreants and immigrants, but there is the choice of mollification, and it is not generational. Population is controlled by colonies and redistribution. Farming is done by two year drafts. The island is well-defended. They trade, mainly for iron, but are sure only to trade their excesses. Gold, silver, and similar adornments are highly scorned - they use them to chain their slaves. All of these little details, and the ways that they negotiate with nearby nations, indicates a highly advanced society in the midst of relative savages. Utopia has some likeness to Europe (not least the Greek names, or the size nearly like England's), but in one passage discussing European nations as those who don't break treaties, it is clear that the New Worlders are just about the same as Europe. Such comparison is only fraught because of Raphael's tendency to make them seem more similar to us to make them comprehensible, legible. It scarcely serves as a surprise that Utopia's general deism provides welcome to Christianity, though it readily takes it into a polyreligious society that features mutual tolerance. Also, depictions of women are interesting, because they are given relatively equal standing for the time, able to go to war with the husband, trained in military combat, required to work equally. It is however still a patriarchal society - the wife second to the husband, the female priest rare, many women standing as wives. Also, its prohibitions against sexual proclivities is severe, with no sex before marriage and slavery for those who commit adultery. It seems like Raphael must make these notions clear, lest people think that the colony is too loose.
Finally, the end letter addresses a criticism that the fiction is indistinguishable to fact. His answer is partly that he wouldn't be so blunt as to use Greek euphemisms for names. He also appeals to Raphael, saying that they should go and view him, since he is alive, as well as the other witnesses. His ardent insistence on its truth makes me want to believe him. Perhaps the key is that it is better to be truthful than correct. In Thomas's account lies the key to any good fiction - its truth lies not in fact, but in what it represents. A little trite for this postmodern time, but still - I insist - correct.
Utopia, written in Latin, is a vision of an ideal society founded in the new world, governed by reason, based on the premise that all property should be owned by the common weal, rather than hoarded individually. According to the narrator of this vision, Raphael Hythloday, this results in a more efficient and harmonious form of government. I think of it as the contrary of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, where quite the opposite occurs - by living virtuously, they dwindle in number and wealth, because they only desire what they need, rather than desiring and getting excess wealth.
The book is divided into a prefacatory letter included in the 1515 edition, a first part that develops the frame story further and turns into a debate about the merits and demerits of rule at home, a second part where Raphael describes the Utopian approach, and an end letter (in the second 1517 edition) that discharges the question about whether it is fable or fact.
Both letters are to Peter Giles, an associate of More through Erasmus. The first letter presents the manuscript to Giles, variously claiming that it is a record, separating some of its claims from his own to preserve correctness ("I'd rather be truthful than correct"), implying authority through its other witnesses, and in short urging that all these notes be compared with Hythloday, indicating More's meticulous intentions. It's a quite pleasing frame, with rhetorical touches that would have made an eighteenth-century fabricator (like Walpole or Swift) proud.
Book 1 puts the frame story forward. In the midst of negotiation, More gets permission to go to Antwerp from Bruges to meet Peter Giles. While there, they meet Raphael, who despite appearances as a sailor claims to be a philosopher. He soon details his miraculous circumnavigation of the globe. But when Peter urges that these experiences, and his reasoning faculty, could be used to counsel kings, Raphael refuses. He claims that to do so would be futile, due to the deceptions of courtiers, the emphasis on warmongering instead of peace, the crossover between soldiers and thieves, and other reasons. He also carries into other criticisms, like that against bad schooling (zeal for punishment instead of learning), enclosure, games of chance, and so on (529). The Polylerites stand as a good but flawed counterexample to Europe's corruption. The courtiers reject the account, until the Cardinal approves - then they cling to it. Raphael rejects public service by this example as well. More suggests that he compromise and advise small steps rather than large ones, but Raphael says this is tantamount to supporting disorder. Then he gradually shifts to claiming that the root of disorder is private property and money. The Utopians serve as an example, partly descended from some early European contact, but separate from their present strife.
Book 2 describes Utopia in broad categories. Generally, the island is a crescent island just off the coast, reduced to an island by the work of a king. All people work six hours a day, and have the rest of the time for leisure. Intellectual engagement is highly honored. Only scholars and leaders are exempted from service, and they are only a few. Slavery is quite interesting, since it is a crime mainly for miscreants and immigrants, but there is the choice of mollification, and it is not generational. Population is controlled by colonies and redistribution. Farming is done by two year drafts. The island is well-defended. They trade, mainly for iron, but are sure only to trade their excesses. Gold, silver, and similar adornments are highly scorned - they use them to chain their slaves. All of these little details, and the ways that they negotiate with nearby nations, indicates a highly advanced society in the midst of relative savages. Utopia has some likeness to Europe (not least the Greek names, or the size nearly like England's), but in one passage discussing European nations as those who don't break treaties, it is clear that the New Worlders are just about the same as Europe. Such comparison is only fraught because of Raphael's tendency to make them seem more similar to us to make them comprehensible, legible. It scarcely serves as a surprise that Utopia's general deism provides welcome to Christianity, though it readily takes it into a polyreligious society that features mutual tolerance. Also, depictions of women are interesting, because they are given relatively equal standing for the time, able to go to war with the husband, trained in military combat, required to work equally. It is however still a patriarchal society - the wife second to the husband, the female priest rare, many women standing as wives. Also, its prohibitions against sexual proclivities is severe, with no sex before marriage and slavery for those who commit adultery. It seems like Raphael must make these notions clear, lest people think that the colony is too loose.
Finally, the end letter addresses a criticism that the fiction is indistinguishable to fact. His answer is partly that he wouldn't be so blunt as to use Greek euphemisms for names. He also appeals to Raphael, saying that they should go and view him, since he is alive, as well as the other witnesses. His ardent insistence on its truth makes me want to believe him. Perhaps the key is that it is better to be truthful than correct. In Thomas's account lies the key to any good fiction - its truth lies not in fact, but in what it represents. A little trite for this postmodern time, but still - I insist - correct.
New Introduction
I want to be brief and to the point.
I will be using this blog as one of the cruxes for studying towards this oral exam. In concert with a Word document with similar observations of fact, this will carry the impressions I get of the texts I read. May it be complete, and prove more an aid than a distraction.
I will be using this blog as one of the cruxes for studying towards this oral exam. In concert with a Word document with similar observations of fact, this will carry the impressions I get of the texts I read. May it be complete, and prove more an aid than a distraction.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
A few brief comments on An Apology for Poetry, Philip Sidney
I've read this in conversation with brief excerpts from Gosson, Plato, and more extended readings from Puttenham's The Art of English Poesy.
The main note I want to make here is that there is a lot of fluff thrown up by the author about the contradictory arguments that Sidney makes between the first three quarters of his piece and the last fifteen pages or so. After a vituperate defense of poetry against philosophers, historians, and other detractors, the bear turns in on itself and starts speaking against bad poetry, in a few cases going against the very forms that earlier had sounded so wonderful. It also includes a vicious backlash against the contemporary English drama, and especially "the mongrel tragicomedy." The inturning is true.
But I think that, having read the other materials, there is more to say about it. Sidney is apprehensive like Puttenham that poetry should appear to be good, fair, and decorous, out of fear that they should not be well-governed. Hence Puttenham's long tracts on decorum, and Sidney's railing against poetic forms that do not keep to the rules of their elders. The adherence to rules is the central point, though there are other sticks of contention. For Gosson and Plato, poetry is inherently unruly, a clarion call against authority. They would let it in, they both argue, except that it deceives, it is magical, and it cannot be controlled. It is a rival to the state.
Puttenham alleviates the tension by showing how poetry is so often subordinated to the state, and teaching subordination to the state (decorum) as a necessary precondition of poetry. Sidney alleviates the tension between authority and poetry by demonstrating how poetry is self-governed in ways not incompatible with authority. He defends the form of poetry as having many good uses, the language as being conducive to good poetry, but must go after the individual practitioner for then not governing himself under Sidney's classical rubric for good poetry and drama. Comedy should incite delight, while laughter, uncontrolled, turns against the images of virtue he earlier espoused. I'd say that, if one pays attention to how Sidney works with poetry earlier, on the main it's not surprising that he ends with his attacks. He cannot yet assert the freedom of poets, so instead he must assert another monarchy, a monarchy of style.
The main note I want to make here is that there is a lot of fluff thrown up by the author about the contradictory arguments that Sidney makes between the first three quarters of his piece and the last fifteen pages or so. After a vituperate defense of poetry against philosophers, historians, and other detractors, the bear turns in on itself and starts speaking against bad poetry, in a few cases going against the very forms that earlier had sounded so wonderful. It also includes a vicious backlash against the contemporary English drama, and especially "the mongrel tragicomedy." The inturning is true.
But I think that, having read the other materials, there is more to say about it. Sidney is apprehensive like Puttenham that poetry should appear to be good, fair, and decorous, out of fear that they should not be well-governed. Hence Puttenham's long tracts on decorum, and Sidney's railing against poetic forms that do not keep to the rules of their elders. The adherence to rules is the central point, though there are other sticks of contention. For Gosson and Plato, poetry is inherently unruly, a clarion call against authority. They would let it in, they both argue, except that it deceives, it is magical, and it cannot be controlled. It is a rival to the state.
Puttenham alleviates the tension by showing how poetry is so often subordinated to the state, and teaching subordination to the state (decorum) as a necessary precondition of poetry. Sidney alleviates the tension between authority and poetry by demonstrating how poetry is self-governed in ways not incompatible with authority. He defends the form of poetry as having many good uses, the language as being conducive to good poetry, but must go after the individual practitioner for then not governing himself under Sidney's classical rubric for good poetry and drama. Comedy should incite delight, while laughter, uncontrolled, turns against the images of virtue he earlier espoused. I'd say that, if one pays attention to how Sidney works with poetry earlier, on the main it's not surprising that he ends with his attacks. He cannot yet assert the freedom of poets, so instead he must assert another monarchy, a monarchy of style.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Secondary Reading on Mechthild of Madgeburg
I keep wanting to write Badgerburg. Or Fudgeburg. Mmm. I have to read secondary material for the class that I pick out myself. I struck gold on one, and only got glancing references in the other. I'll let you guess which is which.
Rosalynn Voaden. "All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta." Medieval Women in their Communities. Ed. Diane Wyatt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997: 72-91.
Pretty basic. Helfta is a community of (practicing Cistercian) nuns in the thirteenth and fourteenth century who were a focal point for a few strong mystics, among them Gertrude, Mechthild of Madgeburg, and Mechthild of Hackeborn. Mechthild of Madgeburg features in this historical narrative as the figure that comes to the community late in life (she was a Beguine before), briefly discovers the virtue of community (she was isolated before and more bound to her church fathers), and then dies. Before doing so, however, she does write one book and impart onto Gertrude and Mechthild of Hackeborn the mystic tradition, in which they bind up community and womanness. (The Sacred Heart, the resulting cult, articulated divine authority with an awareness and attention to feminine experience, which is then explored and expanded upon in the repeated feminine and communal images.)
David Neville. "The Bodies of the Bride: The Language of Incarnation, Transcendence, and Time in the Poetic Theology of Mechthild of Madgeburg." Mystics Quarterly 34.1-2: 2008, 1-34.
Daaaamn. I was fairly impressed here.
First there's a brief, polemical, but useful survey of materials that previous scholars have brought to the study of body and sexuality in Mechthild. Neville makes his eventual point clear here, that there is not a simple division of body/low and spirit/high. While those registers are true, there is also a way in which Mechthild appropriates an idea of a more divine body, unified with the spirit, which is at once furthest away from God and closest to God. From the start, the bodily pain is the point of greatest distance (because it reminds one of the immediacy of the body) and of greatest closeness with God (in the metaphor of longing, the intermediary longing that communicates between the spirit and the Trinity) (2).
A lot of medieval authors avoided the association of the sexual and this relation with God, though they did use metaphors of marriage (10-11). Mechthild does not avoid the subject, marking desire - even erotic desire - as a divine characteristic (8). However, this desire must be divine, that is, associated with a renunciation of earthly sexual desire and the strictly earthly postlapsarian body. Instead, through such renunciation, she must attain, not only the prelapsarian body of perfect intactness, but the body of Mary through which all things can pass through without being impurified.
Finally, to justify her point, she distinguishes the appearance of wholeness, which many corrupt people in the church have, from the actual wholeness which she gains through the figure of the bride of Christ.
I would've preferred Neville write more about how Mechthild's desire is not only precipitated on immediate satisfaction, but is also tied to a denial of that satisfaction. That is, in a way, her earthly body also matters, because it is the crude material which must behurt to be healed. Her fallen nature is the very thing that allows God to reconcile her desire, a drink that would not be as sweet if she did not also have the distance from which she would reconcile.
Rosalynn Voaden. "All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta." Medieval Women in their Communities. Ed. Diane Wyatt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997: 72-91.
Pretty basic. Helfta is a community of (practicing Cistercian) nuns in the thirteenth and fourteenth century who were a focal point for a few strong mystics, among them Gertrude, Mechthild of Madgeburg, and Mechthild of Hackeborn. Mechthild of Madgeburg features in this historical narrative as the figure that comes to the community late in life (she was a Beguine before), briefly discovers the virtue of community (she was isolated before and more bound to her church fathers), and then dies. Before doing so, however, she does write one book and impart onto Gertrude and Mechthild of Hackeborn the mystic tradition, in which they bind up community and womanness. (The Sacred Heart, the resulting cult, articulated divine authority with an awareness and attention to feminine experience, which is then explored and expanded upon in the repeated feminine and communal images.)
David Neville. "The Bodies of the Bride: The Language of Incarnation, Transcendence, and Time in the Poetic Theology of Mechthild of Madgeburg." Mystics Quarterly 34.1-2: 2008, 1-34.
Daaaamn. I was fairly impressed here.
First there's a brief, polemical, but useful survey of materials that previous scholars have brought to the study of body and sexuality in Mechthild. Neville makes his eventual point clear here, that there is not a simple division of body/low and spirit/high. While those registers are true, there is also a way in which Mechthild appropriates an idea of a more divine body, unified with the spirit, which is at once furthest away from God and closest to God. From the start, the bodily pain is the point of greatest distance (because it reminds one of the immediacy of the body) and of greatest closeness with God (in the metaphor of longing, the intermediary longing that communicates between the spirit and the Trinity) (2).
A lot of medieval authors avoided the association of the sexual and this relation with God, though they did use metaphors of marriage (10-11). Mechthild does not avoid the subject, marking desire - even erotic desire - as a divine characteristic (8). However, this desire must be divine, that is, associated with a renunciation of earthly sexual desire and the strictly earthly postlapsarian body. Instead, through such renunciation, she must attain, not only the prelapsarian body of perfect intactness, but the body of Mary through which all things can pass through without being impurified.
Finally, to justify her point, she distinguishes the appearance of wholeness, which many corrupt people in the church have, from the actual wholeness which she gains through the figure of the bride of Christ.
I would've preferred Neville write more about how Mechthild's desire is not only precipitated on immediate satisfaction, but is also tied to a denial of that satisfaction. That is, in a way, her earthly body also matters, because it is the crude material which must behurt to be healed. Her fallen nature is the very thing that allows God to reconcile her desire, a drink that would not be as sweet if she did not also have the distance from which she would reconcile.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Mechthild of Madeberg, Part 3
This sounds like a serial.
I wasn't able to take as good of notes on this part, due to riding the bus, so I'm really dredging the memory here.
There is more description here than before. We get descriptions of the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell. She emphasizes order a lot, that the angels and seraphim are below the levels of the honored humans, the apostles, the saints, the Lady, and so on. The Kingdom of Heaven has an end to its statutes as Hell has an end to its order, but there is no end to its being. There is an ordering of the procession into heaven - first maidens, then widows, then the married couples who dare not take away spiritual grace with bodily indulgence. There is even an ordering to the virtues of the choirs that sing, mercy given to the unbaptized children, and so on.
Also, there are more visions of Hell, like 3.15 and 3.21. It is upside down, and the punishments of the sinful are ordered based on what Lucifer does with them, normally some variation of being ground, gnawed, eaten, or kissed foully. The Jews are lower than the mere ignorant.
There are also a couple of interesting narrative moments. Mary's life story is told, and flowers emphasized again as giving birth to Jesus was like dew through the flowers "so that thy purity was never touched" (3.4). Then in 3.9, she describes the beginning, when the Trinity differentiates, when the Bride is created, when she sins and brings God sorrow, and how Jesus chooses to love her anyhow. Then, as in part 1, the passion of Christ is told again, except this time in terms of what the loving soul would experience, in third person feminine. His suffering is hers, and must be, when a soul is penetrated by the love of God (3.11).
There is more going on here than I can know. More on the Harrowing of Hell by the prophets (3.21)... What love is good to God. The only other thing I recall is how, when describing the loves in this part, they seem a (hah) mirror image of the ones in part one. Now at one point she has a hot desire that God cools, rather than vice versa. Is the switch intentional, a necessary part of union being this sharing of sensation? I'm not sure.
I wasn't able to take as good of notes on this part, due to riding the bus, so I'm really dredging the memory here.
There is more description here than before. We get descriptions of the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell. She emphasizes order a lot, that the angels and seraphim are below the levels of the honored humans, the apostles, the saints, the Lady, and so on. The Kingdom of Heaven has an end to its statutes as Hell has an end to its order, but there is no end to its being. There is an ordering of the procession into heaven - first maidens, then widows, then the married couples who dare not take away spiritual grace with bodily indulgence. There is even an ordering to the virtues of the choirs that sing, mercy given to the unbaptized children, and so on.
Also, there are more visions of Hell, like 3.15 and 3.21. It is upside down, and the punishments of the sinful are ordered based on what Lucifer does with them, normally some variation of being ground, gnawed, eaten, or kissed foully. The Jews are lower than the mere ignorant.
There are also a couple of interesting narrative moments. Mary's life story is told, and flowers emphasized again as giving birth to Jesus was like dew through the flowers "so that thy purity was never touched" (3.4). Then in 3.9, she describes the beginning, when the Trinity differentiates, when the Bride is created, when she sins and brings God sorrow, and how Jesus chooses to love her anyhow. Then, as in part 1, the passion of Christ is told again, except this time in terms of what the loving soul would experience, in third person feminine. His suffering is hers, and must be, when a soul is penetrated by the love of God (3.11).
There is more going on here than I can know. More on the Harrowing of Hell by the prophets (3.21)... What love is good to God. The only other thing I recall is how, when describing the loves in this part, they seem a (hah) mirror image of the ones in part one. Now at one point she has a hot desire that God cools, rather than vice versa. Is the switch intentional, a necessary part of union being this sharing of sensation? I'm not sure.
A couple more for medievalism!
Well, all those times I called myself a medievalist, I didn't know what a funny thing I was doing. A medieval scholar is someone who studies medieval history, literature, art, or so on. A medievalist is one who adapts medieval themes into present culture, such as an architect or a social activist or a Sir Walter Scott. These articles abundantly pointed out the difference, and then broke it down, showing why the distinction is not one of privilege, and in many ways isn't a distinction at all. Thus, in a single sitting I've been both castigated and vindicated for my writing! Woo!
John Simons, "Medievalism as Cultural Process in Pre-Industrial Popular Literature"
Medievalism is only recognized by Victorian England because it is at that point that the refined high-culture readers and authors finally give it any attention. However, that is not to say that it wasn't there before. Continuously from the sixteenth century there have been genres of what has been typically considered "low" literature that have dabbled with the medieval to comment upon contemporary beliefs, contest social injustices, and entertain the public. Simons thus studies first the continuing manuscript romance tradition (in urban, nonaristocratic readership) and then, more briefly, the brief chapbook romances in the eighteenth century, read by agricultural laborers (farmers) and gentry children (well-off kids). By this, less well-off readers gain access to aesthetic pleasures where they couldn't have access to, say, belles lettres.
Clare A. Simmons. "Medievalism and the Quest for the "Real" Middle Ages: Introduction."
This is the essay that contested the division between medievalism and medieval studies. For a while the two were relatively unified, including in Furnivall's work with the Early English Text Society and earlier with various authors and philological groups. It was in the late 19th century, as English became a department in the University, that medieval studies sought to distance itself from the medievalists who used medieval themes for social, political, or aesthetic ends rather than historical authenticity or (what amounts to the same thing) literary purity. Lots of good medievalist background, like Chartism, quixotic fears, Burke, and so on. Finally, the division is negated, since scholars always approach their work with something they bring in... the enthusiast medievalist cannot be stopped.
Dellheim, "The Face of the Past: Preface, Ch. 1 (The Paradoxes of Progress)"
The medieval images and simulacra that adorn train stations and hotels, the most modern of the 19th century being simultaneously the most medieval in appearance. The English Parliament being rebuilt in a medieval mode that was "unpopular" as soon as it was built, and a London that looked more medieval in 1900 than it ever had since the Middle Ages. The look back is also a look forward, a necessary part of the discourses of progress as well as the longing backwards. Medievalism was all-consuming, used by progressives and conservatives to urge balanced progress and continuity.
Loretta M. Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren, "Introduction."
By now, so much of it has been said before. Permeation as a theme for medieval themes in 19th century England. Interesting because they show how even anti-medievalist backlashes couldn't avoid using medieval themes.
John Simons, "Medievalism as Cultural Process in Pre-Industrial Popular Literature"
Medievalism is only recognized by Victorian England because it is at that point that the refined high-culture readers and authors finally give it any attention. However, that is not to say that it wasn't there before. Continuously from the sixteenth century there have been genres of what has been typically considered "low" literature that have dabbled with the medieval to comment upon contemporary beliefs, contest social injustices, and entertain the public. Simons thus studies first the continuing manuscript romance tradition (in urban, nonaristocratic readership) and then, more briefly, the brief chapbook romances in the eighteenth century, read by agricultural laborers (farmers) and gentry children (well-off kids). By this, less well-off readers gain access to aesthetic pleasures where they couldn't have access to, say, belles lettres.
Clare A. Simmons. "Medievalism and the Quest for the "Real" Middle Ages: Introduction."
This is the essay that contested the division between medievalism and medieval studies. For a while the two were relatively unified, including in Furnivall's work with the Early English Text Society and earlier with various authors and philological groups. It was in the late 19th century, as English became a department in the University, that medieval studies sought to distance itself from the medievalists who used medieval themes for social, political, or aesthetic ends rather than historical authenticity or (what amounts to the same thing) literary purity. Lots of good medievalist background, like Chartism, quixotic fears, Burke, and so on. Finally, the division is negated, since scholars always approach their work with something they bring in... the enthusiast medievalist cannot be stopped.
Dellheim, "The Face of the Past: Preface, Ch. 1 (The Paradoxes of Progress)"
The medieval images and simulacra that adorn train stations and hotels, the most modern of the 19th century being simultaneously the most medieval in appearance. The English Parliament being rebuilt in a medieval mode that was "unpopular" as soon as it was built, and a London that looked more medieval in 1900 than it ever had since the Middle Ages. The look back is also a look forward, a necessary part of the discourses of progress as well as the longing backwards. Medievalism was all-consuming, used by progressives and conservatives to urge balanced progress and continuity.
Loretta M. Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren, "Introduction."
By now, so much of it has been said before. Permeation as a theme for medieval themes in 19th century England. Interesting because they show how even anti-medievalist backlashes couldn't avoid using medieval themes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
