#medievel literature

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Fool and the Demon, leaf from a Psalter by the Maître de Jean de Mandeville (France, c 1360), fol. 284

The legend reads: "dixit insipiens in corde suo non est deus" ("the fool says in his heart 'There is no God.'") (Psalm 52) In a miniature prefacing Psalm 52, the illuminator represents the poem's imagery literally. The "fool" of the text appears here as the lunatic figure familiar during the Middle Ages: shoeless, wearing rags, and carrying a club. He holds an unidentifiable object, perhaps a stone, to his mouth; from this he can draw no nourishment, a visual analogy to the denial of God's existence. In the medieval period, lunacy was seen as a punishment inflicted by the devil. In the upper right corner of the miniature, a small demon crouches before the swirling gold decorative patterns, either the cause of the fool's lunacy or, perhaps, the agent inspiring the fool's denial.

J Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California. Ms. 1, v1 (84.MA.40.1) The fools adorn Psalters, Books of Hours, and romances of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. They teem in the initials, miniatures, and illuminated margins of manuscripts. Specific visual features identify the fools as such and describe their nature. With extensive knowledge of ancient, biblical, patristic, and historical sources on madness, dance, and music, with dazing originality, illuminators invested great care in producing these figures of the mundus inversus and in the transmission of the scholar model they personified.

In the medieval literature, madness means nonsense and the insipiens or the fol is consistently defined in relation to wisdom. This madness is twofold, positive and negative, natural and artificial, and concerns both the soul and the body. King David conveys in this literary and iconographic genre visual and moral power to the fool’s figure, who becomes related to music, dance, rhythm, and harmony. Thus the initial letter of Psalm 52 (53) “Dixit insipiens” opposes in new ways the moral virtue of David to the fool’s sin and vice. The madness of religious inversion is also that of the Fête des Fous. This ritual organized by the Church reverses the church hierarchy, parodies the church service thorugh dances, games, banquets, the Office de l'Âne, and the Évêque des Fous. The figure of the fool is ambiguous also in terms of political power: it can both condemn and authorize inversion and staged disorder.

At the end of the Middle Ages the jesters dance farandoles or the moresca in groups. They also participate in danses macabres. Always ambivalent, they are major figures of court festivities and reveal and relieve through laughter and macabre social tensions and the imagined nature of life and death themselves.

[Robert Scott Horton]

* * * *

“The secret of the successful fool is that he's no fool at all.” ― Isaac Asimov

[fedonciadale]

134 😃

Hi there!

I struggled with this ask. How can I unrecommend a book?

I mean if I don't like a book, I just put it away and forget about it. And if I liked it at some point I can usually understand why I liked it, even if I might not like it any longer.

But then I remembered this one book, that I absolutely hate. lol

Carolyne Larrington, Winter is coming.

This is supposed to be a book that introduces into the lore that fed into ASOIAF written by a professor for English.

And it is so bad! It is incredibly bad.

She is a die hard Dany stan, but that in itself I could overlook. I could also overlook that she ignores fairy tales and so on as an inspiration for ASOIAF and just looks at the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon stuff.

What I can never forgive though is the sheer stupidity that makes her claim that ASOIAF must end with a restoration of the Targ dynasty because Medievel Epics usually ended with the restoration of the dynasty.

Newsflash, Carolyne. GRRM doesn't write a medieveal epic, he writes a fantasy series and he began in the 20th century.

This basic mistake in interpreting literature really made me feel intense second hand embarrassment as an academic!

So, 100% unreccommend. For the sake of your brain cells.

Thanks!

[rancim]

Endings with an Asterik

I've gotten snide looks from very bookish people when expressing an admiration for anything besides books, as an example namely anime, specifically slice of life, even more specifically cute girls doing cute things. I find the behavior incredibly pretentious, but because of the way I am, I feel a need to justify why it is I'm watching the thing I'm watching and in general, literature can be a real bummer. There is a staid promise in slice of life that there is little drama, and the small parts of it that are injected into the story are resolved rather quickly, with very little import, in order to expediate the narrative into the next part of the story where the cute girls do the cute things.

Recently I've been rewatching bits and pieces of Little Witch Academia when I get bored, and when I enthusiastically recommend the series to people, I emphasize the clarity and precision of its narrative, its knowing what it is and what it wants to be, and the strength in its story-telling to keep it simple, stupid. It's not strictly slice of life per se, but the episodic nature of the series means that per an episode by episode basis, most of what occurs is self-contained, with bits and pieces of world building that coming together at the end, an energized sequence of teen witches attempting to stop a rocketing warhead from landing and inciting a war.

I know it sounds dumb, but LWA revels in the sheer absurdity of it's premise to the point where I found myself gleeful, hyped to the point where I counted myself as one of the many characters channeling their energy to the protagonist in-show, a feeling reminiscent of watching Sa turday morning cartoons: free of cynicism, free of a need to predicate criticism, enjoying the thing for what it is while smiling ear to ear. It is an achievement that LWA manages by the sheer force of strength of its characters, eg. Akko, our protagonist, an underachiving girl enrolled at a magic school who despite all of her outright incompetence that suggests otherwise, still tries her hardest to become a witch. A girl who has a lack of doubt and cynicism bordering on idiocy, who manages to accept and empathize with people but still acts on impulse against acts of evil. The sheer simplemindedness of the character keeps the pace of the anime moving confidently, and I would express this point to the aforementioned pretentious people that turn their nose up at me if they would listen, but I always manage to shut down the conversation after saying "oh it's like Harry Potter but all the characters are fluffball anime girls."

I love LWA and things in the vein of LWA because I appreciate happy things that I am unable to write. It's not like I have a thing against happy endings, I like them more than anything. But I also understand that life is not the kind of thing that neatly resolves itself, and in my view, literature is always a thing that ends on a bittersweet note, a note of ambiguity, a note that although things are ok now, there is no promise of it being ok tomorrow. People don't magically outgrow their character flaws. Like you can try your hardest and not achieve your dreams, or sacrifice every fiber of your being to try to help someone that ends up being moot in the end, or vote out a despot only for them to be replaced by a person that continues to cripple the middle class, or whatever. It's very hard to be hopeful in literature, in so much as no matter how outlandish or ridiculous the premise, its characters always attempt to react/carry themselves in ways a near simulcrum of how humanity operates: flawed, consequentially, ambiguously, selfishly, narrowly, well-intentioned but mostly pockmarked with errors. In a word, very far away from the promise and finality of a good ending.

Still though, I deeply appreciate the attempt authors of a work attempt to do by working against our innnate flaws, that don't shy away from the banality of our inherently flawed, awful natures and spotlight the hope of being better than we are in spite of that. I recently had that experience while reading Anthony Doerr's short story "The Master's Castle," concerning an ophthalmologist named Basil Bebbington who has to look the plain, everyday horrors of his life after seeing a former flame's remarkable success in the news: his dead end job, the deeply troubling alcohlism of his wife, the strange insistence his son has to keep a superhero cape on his person at all times, despite being far too old for it. The story follows an attempt to try to be better, to try to be ideal, but failing in the face of it, a burnt casserole, a crying kid in the room, a wife passed out in the kitchen after failing an attempt at a long talked about sobriety on her first day.

We look through a pinhole of an everyday kind of sadness that refuses to budge despite best efforts, and so I was taken aback from the story's last part, its ability to wrest meaning and hopefulness out of its own situation. Basil and his kid receive a key to the still in construction Master's Castle across the street of their home, the owner noting that they could all use a break in his letter to Basil. Basil is taken aback upon entering the Master's Castle to see that it wasn't the sex dungeon he assumed it would be, but rather an ornate, medievel-themed indoor minigolf course. So father and son enjoy themselves on the course, and concerning the cape, share a small, heartwarming exchange:

"I'm not ready to give up my cape."

"I know, kid."

"I just need it a little longer."

"You take your time."

And that's how the story ends, and despite the lack of growth in its inhabitants, the promise of a messy divorce looming in its paragraph, the sadness present in the kid embodied in the cape, the lack of a significant jump to happiness, the narrative crystallizes itself as hopeful in spite of all that in that little exchange, in the lyrics of Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" playing in the back of Basil's head, that this slight, frail happiness can bloom and signify itself as a substantial reprieve away from our everyday sadness, appearing unbudging to shows of forces but chipped away by the very small bits of happiness we encounter in our day, little moments, something like petting the head of a dog that loves you and feeling ok in an ocean of uncertainty. That we'll never have a truly happy ending, but we can be happy enough, in spite of it.