Fantasist's Scroll

Medieval Lives was a complete dissapointment.

In the words of the author, “I cannot recreate you, medieval people, because I could not define how your personalitiesand desires linked with concrete times and places. You were stick figures, totems on a landscape, lines upon the horizon, temporally and spatially floating away.”
I couldn’t say it better myself. The author could not, in fact, recreate anything like the lives of the people featured in the book. He drew, at best, very modern people who spouted codified, modernized rhetoric based, very loosely, on philosophy that took its root in the Middle Ages. Virtually no attempt was made to make any of these people sound like people from the Middle Ages. Most of the time, it seemed as though the characters were simply talking heads that served no purpose other than espoousing the author’s personal agenda. They spoke in a kind of sociological dissertation language that would not have been found in any setting outside of modern universities.
Save your money!

What am I reading this week?

This week it’s
Medieval Lives: Eight Charismatic Men and Women of the Middle Agesby Norman F. Cantor. I’ve read the first section and so far, it’s pretty good.
Obviously, it’s a study of several people from the Middle Ages. Generally, they’re famous people, but “famous” is a relative term. If one is a scholar of Medieval history, they’re well known. If you are new to the subject, this is a fairly easy introduction to some of the movers and shakers of the Middle Ages Europe. Each chapter focuses on a different personality, showing how they might have acted and what their lives might have been like in a fictionalized way. Some liberties have been taken with the fine details of speech and mannerisms to make the subject more accessible to the modern reader, but I don’t think anything really suffers in the translation.
Again, I haven’t finished this book yet, but, so far, it’s pretty good. Easy to read for a book on such a heavy, and occasionally dusty, subject. I wouldn’t rely on this book for a scholarly study or paper, but it’s a breezy introduction for the lay person.

Today is the birthday of one of the greatest diarists in the English language, Samuel Pepys.

He was, born in London on this day in 1633 to a tailor and a washerwoman. However, thanks to an upper-class cousin who helped him get into good schools and got him government jobs, Pepys managed to work his way up from his humble beginings at a time when it was almost impossible to do so in England.

Pepys began his diary in 1659, a diary he would keep for almost ten years. No one knows what inspired him to start it, though it wasn’t unusual for well-educated men at the time to keep a diary. He was also a well-known collector, collecting such varied things as ship models, scientific instruments, portraits, ballads, money and women.  In fact, some critics see his diary as an attempt to collect his whole experience of the world.

What made him unique, however, was that, as far as we know, Pepys was the first Englishman to fill his diary with descriptions of his most personal and ordinary experiences: his aches and pains, what he liked to eat, going to the bathroom, his marital love life, and his extramarital affairs, graphic details that novelists wouldn’t start incorporating into their work for more than two hundred years.

An on-line version of his diary is available for viewing at PepysDiary.com.