Didn't Say What I Said
Just in case anybody runs across that list of things I said in the Medieval Drama class, which is enjoying a bit of cyberspace at the moment, I want to point out that naturally one should remember that all those things have been taken out of context. Where they made sense. Also where they were expressly being used in the service of higher-order thinking. In case anybody asks.
I was going to deny I said them, but unfortunately I remember having said them all. Except "Lassie! Lassie! The holy innocents have fallen in a well!"
I do NOT remember having said that. Though I will admit it sounds like something I might have said. I just can't imagine why.
However, I can explain the rest. For instance, I did indeed say, "This is what we Medievalists do. We take the baby and put it in the bathwater, and then we find another baby and put it in, and then another, and another. And then...we take all the babies out and go, 'We don't know what happened!' And then we take the babies later and rehabilitate them."
It took me a while to figure that one out, but I now remember that it's my precis of the Critical History of Medieval Drama Over the Course of the Twentieth Century. You know. Where we applied the Darwinian theory to European drama, and it was simple and then it got complex, and it was in the church and then it went outside. And we applied 19th century anthropological theories to things like morris dancing, and discovered that they were the ancient customs of our pagan ancestors, only having fallen on Hard Times. And we fell so deeply in love with The Cycle Plays as performed in York that we figured that everybody, all over England, had a bunch of pageant wagons holed up in the churchwardens' barns, just waiting for the next festival. And then we found out that we made all that stuff up. So we started figuring out new things.
Only the entire rest of the planet just LOVED the stuff we made up at the beginning of the century so much that they would NOT believe us when we said No, the drama didn't leave the church and go out in the market place. No, the morris dance is not connected to pagan rites. No, the pageant wagons were pretty damn scarce on the ground. Sorry.
No, they wouldn't believe us, and they're still printing the stuff we know to be untrue, and so all the medieval dramatists whinge about this every once in a while when we get together at Kalamazoo. We try not to, really we do, but we get started and we can't stop.
Sort of like right now.
Where was I.
OH! Right! Well, I stand by the baby in the bathtub metaphor.
But I would also like to point out that I did not intend "You're cute. Real cute. I mean, cute" to be actual ADVICE on how to seduce a woman. I was just explaining that if you take the Gallant's speech to Mary in the Digby Mary Magdalene, and translate it into Modern English and boil it on down, that's essentially what he says. And it works in that instance. This of course, is due to the fact that Mary is in a highly vulnerable spiritual condition, due to the recent death of her father. And indeed, the patriarchal underpinnings of her world have fallen apart, and she's come into power and money, so she's in grief, rolling in the bucks, and also dislocated from social structures as she knows them. Very vulnerable state.
So that's why the Gallant's method works, I figure.
I'm just saying.
I was going to deny I said them, but unfortunately I remember having said them all. Except "Lassie! Lassie! The holy innocents have fallen in a well!"
I do NOT remember having said that. Though I will admit it sounds like something I might have said. I just can't imagine why.
However, I can explain the rest. For instance, I did indeed say, "This is what we Medievalists do. We take the baby and put it in the bathwater, and then we find another baby and put it in, and then another, and another. And then...we take all the babies out and go, 'We don't know what happened!' And then we take the babies later and rehabilitate them."
It took me a while to figure that one out, but I now remember that it's my precis of the Critical History of Medieval Drama Over the Course of the Twentieth Century. You know. Where we applied the Darwinian theory to European drama, and it was simple and then it got complex, and it was in the church and then it went outside. And we applied 19th century anthropological theories to things like morris dancing, and discovered that they were the ancient customs of our pagan ancestors, only having fallen on Hard Times. And we fell so deeply in love with The Cycle Plays as performed in York that we figured that everybody, all over England, had a bunch of pageant wagons holed up in the churchwardens' barns, just waiting for the next festival. And then we found out that we made all that stuff up. So we started figuring out new things.
Only the entire rest of the planet just LOVED the stuff we made up at the beginning of the century so much that they would NOT believe us when we said No, the drama didn't leave the church and go out in the market place. No, the morris dance is not connected to pagan rites. No, the pageant wagons were pretty damn scarce on the ground. Sorry.
No, they wouldn't believe us, and they're still printing the stuff we know to be untrue, and so all the medieval dramatists whinge about this every once in a while when we get together at Kalamazoo. We try not to, really we do, but we get started and we can't stop.
Sort of like right now.
Where was I.
OH! Right! Well, I stand by the baby in the bathtub metaphor.
But I would also like to point out that I did not intend "You're cute. Real cute. I mean, cute" to be actual ADVICE on how to seduce a woman. I was just explaining that if you take the Gallant's speech to Mary in the Digby Mary Magdalene, and translate it into Modern English and boil it on down, that's essentially what he says. And it works in that instance. This of course, is due to the fact that Mary is in a highly vulnerable spiritual condition, due to the recent death of her father. And indeed, the patriarchal underpinnings of her world have fallen apart, and she's come into power and money, so she's in grief, rolling in the bucks, and also dislocated from social structures as she knows them. Very vulnerable state.
So that's why the Gallant's method works, I figure.
I'm just saying.
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