January-March 2024: When the World Was New

To kick off the year, we will go back in time. The Renaissance has a lot of definitions and spans a very long period depending on which country you look at so just to keep things tidy, we will just put a line in the sand somewhere in mid 14th century and keep it there. That makes anything up to Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio (including the 3 of them - we are making the definitions after all) fair game and should provide enough variety for everyone's tastes.

Just to start you thinking:
- Maybe go back to the start of literature and pick up Gilgamesh or Enheduanna's work.
- Or stay with the familiar: The Odyssey or The Argonautica are always a fun
- Or go far East and pick up Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
- Or stay in Europe and pick up some of the Arthurian romances: Chrétien de Troyes or Béroul or Gottfried von Strassburg for example.
- Or pick up a book of myths and legends - from anywhere in the world. They all date from before the printer was invented even if they were collected later which puts them all in scope here.
- Or go at the end of the period and tackle Dante or Boccaccio.

And if this did not give you an idea, here are a few very useful lists:
Ancient literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature
Early medieval literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_medieval_literature
Medieval literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_literature

So what do you plan to read? :)

city of ladies is a book we read part of in HS and for some reason never finished it. Looks like that might be the selection for me

>2 cindydavid4: A modern American novel about old China is not what I had in mind with the topic but if this is how you want to interpret the topic, it is your reading so have fun. :)

oh Im sorry, Illl delete that, my apologies, Still will try city of ladies.

>4 cindydavid4: Nah, don't delete it. As I said - if you think it fits and fits your reading pattern better, go for it :)

No I was just giving an example of a book I liked about that time period. Wasnt thinking of books written at that time. No Prob, plenty to choose from

I planned to read The Odyssey this year and have it on my table.

I’m taking some first tentative steps into this theme by picking up an Omar Khayyam biography. And maybe go on to look at some other Persian classics.

Another possible for later on is a go at the main medieval Dutch classic, Reynard the fox.

Dante is another long-postponed target, but im not committing to that yet!

>1 AnnieMod:

I didn't think I'd be able to participate in this theme read until you mentioned Romance of the Three Kingdoms which is already my classic Chinese read for the year so I'm happy to say I'll be able to contribute!

I spotted this in the library, and it looked like a useful introduction to Persian literature via something I already half knew about. I read a very interesting biography of FitzGerald, With friends possessed, in 2016, and I followed up some traces of his life during a holiday in Suffolk in 2022.

Hazhir Teimourian is an Iranian-born British journalist and former student of Roger Scruton:

Omar Khayyām: Poet, rebel, astronomer (2007) by Hazhir Teimourian (Iran, UK, 1940- )

  

This could be — should be, perhaps — a classic case of bricks without straw. We know only a handful of facts about the subject of this 300-page biography: Omar Khayyām was born in Nishāpur in 1048. He seems to have worked as a mathematician in Samarkand and Bukhara, before being appointed as official astronomer in Isfahan with the task of developing a new and more accurate solar calendar. During the civil wars following the death of Malik Shah he seems to have fallen out of favour and returned to private life in Nishāpur, where he died in 1131. We don't hear anything about his work as a poet until at least a generation later, and the only substantial surviving collections of poems attributed to him were compiled over three hundred years after his death. He was virtually unknown outside Persia until the 1850s, when Edward FitzGerald published a translation of some of the poems in a manuscript from the Bodleian Library, a surprise bestseller still popular to this day.

Surprisingly, Teimourian manages to stretch this index-card narrative into a fascinating and worthwhile book, albeit one that is almost entirely written in the conditional perfect tense when talking about Khayyām. He weaves the known facts about the scientist-poet into the complex political and religious situation of the late eleventh century, and gives us a useful picture of the sort of life he might have had. Obviously, there is an element of projecting the poet onto the biographer's time here: just as FitzGerald turned him into a scientific sceptic of the age of Darwin, Teimourian clearly sees him as a fatwa-dodging secular dissident in an Islamic theocracy not unlike modern Iran. But obviously you have to do something like that if Khayyām is going to be anything more than a bit of quaint orientalism, and there is clearly a basis for it in the verse, even if not necessarily backed up by any actual evidence from the life.

Teimourian concludes the book with his own translations of fifty of Khayyām's quatrains: although sometimes clever and probably truer to the text than FitzGerald, they don't quite have the magic of those lines we've all heard quoted so many times. Teimourian rather shoots himself in the foot by reproducing the FitzGerald translations in full in an appendix.

This Circle in which we ebb and we flow,
Neither beginning, nor an end does know.
The Riddle stands as posed long ago:
Where do we come from? Where do we go?
(Teimourian)

Anyone who is considering the Iliad (and you certainly should) I strongly urge to get hold of Eric Trevor Owen's The story of the Iliad, as told in the Iliad. Reading Homer in tandem with Owen's book-by-book analysis opens up the subtle brilliance of Homer and reveals just why the Iliad probably is the greatest work of literature the West has produced.

Owen's book is often available from Betterworld Books.

Growing up in a conservative synagogue, I remember learning about the pirkei avot or the ethics of the fathers It contains sayings attributed to sages from Simon the Just (200 BCE) to shortly after Judah haNasi (200 CE), redactor of the Mishnah. These aphorisms concern proper ethical and social conduct, as well as the importance of Torah study. Perhaps my favorite, and one that is most meaningful to me is this:

"It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it" (2:21), attributed to Rabbi Tarfon

Ive always heard these, but actually never read the total work. thinking about finding a translation perhaps with some commetary, for this theme. thats my idea anyway as always subject to changeIll see what I come up with.

Finally settled on a book for this quarter: The Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney written somewhere around 1200 CE. It deals with the Viking conquests of the Northern Isles, and was written in Icelandic.

I'm thinking of reading Gilgamesh, which I've never read before. It's a source (or a least a link) to so many stories -- and possibly the first science fiction (that we know of) -- that I've been meaning to read it for years.

well it turns out that a local rabbi wrote just the book I was looking for pirkei avot: a social commentary looking forward to this

I just finished a reread of The Song of Achilles for my book club, and it makes me want to jump into Homer again!

>13 SassyLassy: i read some of the sagas in m y scandinavian lit class. I took the class coz the one I wanted was full and surprised my self by how much I enjoyed them and how much i learned. that one looks very interesting

On to a book I should have read years ago, something Dutch people have to read at school...

Reynaert de Vos (13th century, 2020; Reynard the Fox) by Willem (Flanders, C13), translated to modern Dutch by Ard Posthuma (Netherlands, 1942- )

  

Reynaert de Vos is probably the best-known piece of medieval Dutch writing. In fact, it's one of the few bits of Dutch literature which has had a big influence outside the Netherlands, which puts it on a par with things like Max Havelaar and the Diary of Anne Frank. Bits of the Reynaert story have appeared everywhere from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, and a translation of the story was one of the first books Caxton printed.

And of course it taps into a rich thread of fox stories within the even larger worldwide genre of animal fables. However, it's not really an animal fable in the nice Disney sense we tend to think of: The author of Reynaert de Vos seems to be more Quentin Tarantino than Disney. The story is full of extremely graphic violence, the sort of thing you might remember from Watership Down or Shardik. It's also pretty bawdy in the Chaucerian kind of way.

The whole thing is framed as a 3,500 line (mock-)heroic epic in rhyming tetrameters. The basis of the story is that Reynaert is being tried in the court of the lion king, Nobel, for his serious crimes — murder, theft, rape, etc. Of course, by a mixture of guile and straightforward treachery, Reynaert manages to stitch up all the animals that are sent to arrest him and bring him to justice. He eventually manages to trick the King himself into pardoning him and setting him free to go off on a bogus pilgrimage to Rome, whilst the king goes to collect Reynaert's (non-existent) treasure.

We don't know much about the author. In the opening line of the poem he calls himself "Willem, the author of Madoc". But we've never found any trace of Madoc, if that book ever existed. From the internal evidence, it seems likely that Willem lived somewhere in East Flanders in the second half of the 13th century. There are one or two candidates who might be identifiable as the author but nobody has ever found any conclusive evidence one way or the other.

Middle Dutch isn't impossible to read if you understand modern Dutch — on the whole it's probably a bit easier to read than Chaucer's English — but it is quite difficult, so it's nice having a side-by-side translation. I read the poem in a modern-Dutch translation by the poet and translator Ard Posthuma, which turned out to be quite jolly and very readable. Posthuma copies the verse form and rhyme of the original and seems to manage to stick fairly close to the original flow of the text as well.

Anyway, it turned out to be quite an entertaining read with a lot of enjoyable satire of human foibles, and it didn't take me long to read it, but it is pretty gruesome in parts. If you're somebody who cares about the bit at the end of the film where it says no animals were harmed then you might find this a little bit disconcerting. Numerous animals were clearly harmed in the making of this poem...

>18 thorold: It's a post WWII book but I'd note that the Belgian writer Louis Paul Boon incorporated bits and pieces of the story of Reynard the Fox into his fantastic novel Chapel Road.

>19 lriley: Yes, there seem to be quite a few modern spin-offs — something else I want to investigate “when I have time…”

another book that might fit the bill here is a new bio of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who among other things wrote blazing worlds which is considered in some corners the first sci fi novel ( pub 1666) The bio is called pure witShe wrote many books and essays on phlosophy, science, as well as poetry,

>21 cindydavid4: Margaret Cavendish is a very interesting figure, and we should certainly read more about her (I loved Siri Hustvedt’s take in her novel The blazing world, for instance) … but she’s English and definitely post-renaissance, so I don’t see how she would fit in to this particular theme.

oh, ok. Ive always had a rather loose designation re medival times and ren times a lot. just carried away with enthusiasm... so yeah - should I delete that post?

>18 thorold: ... (or anyone else) have you a suggestion as to an English translation of Reynard the Fox? The most popular on LT is Goethe's version but there are many options.

Through the Catherine Project, I am one of a group reading Phaedo and Phaedrus as background for a close reading of Aristotle's On the Soul. My willingness to play hide and seek with Plato varies widely from day to day. Aristotle is dense, but he's less prone to concealing his meaning beneath layers of irony.

I read a book for last years theme of revolution mixed harvest : stories from the Human Past. fascinatng exploration of the first agricultural revolution after the ice age. He writes this as stories about the people who over time developed villages, cities, and civilizations. What I loved is that each story is based on evidence from the archaolgical record (in fact I ofter stopped reading so I could find out more about the evidence on google and Wiki

From the introduction: In the space of a few thousand years agriculture dominated the earth. We live with it all around us. History began, cities soared, the landscape was crisscrossed with roads ? Each story is prefaced by a short introduction and followed by some context in order to stitch the narrative together. Some stories are linked, but most are independent. The stories are gathered into three chapters: Shelter, House, and Home. These represent a progression in where we lived, a series of transformations in technology and consciousness.

a perfect book for this theme i think

>18 thorold: Moderately adjacent to Reynard de Vos (I think!) is The Fables of La Fontaine by Jean de La Fontaine with illustrations by Marc Chagall. Here's my short review from back in 2009 when I read and enjoyed the book:

In the mid-1920s, prominent Parisian art dealer and exhibitioner Ambrose Vollard commissioned Marc Chagall to create a series of illustrations of the beloved 12-century fables of Jean de Fontaine. There was quite a bit of controversy in this commission, as Fontaine's work is considered a cornerstone of early French literature and a French cultural treasure and Chagall was not only not French but was a Jew into the bargain! At any rate, Vollard persevered with his commission and Chagall completed the work.

This volume contains beautiful print reproductions of many of Chagall's illustrations, each alongside an English translation of its appropriate fable, which were written in verse form. Many of the tales told are universal, like the fox and the grapes, for example. Anyway, I had fun reading through the poems and enjoying Chagall's whimsical yet somehow dead on artistic takes on the stories.

And a late entry from Japan — I didn’t know anything about this book when I picked it up, but I had fun discovering it:

Essays in Idleness (1332) by Kenkō (Japan, 1283-1352), translated by Donald Keene (US, 1922-2019)

  

Kenkō was a Kyoto courtier-poet who took Buddhist orders in 1324. He wrote these 243 short essays when he was in his early fifties, apparently mostly for his own amusement. They didn‘t become widely known until about two hundred years later, but once the book did start circulating, it became established as a minor Japanese classic, treasured for the way it sets out some core elements of the Japanese view of aesthetics, etiquette and religious life.

That aspect of the essays is very interesting to us, of course, a door right into the court world of 14th century Kyoto, but they are also a treasure for their sheer randomness. We get thoughts on the uncouthness of the younger generation, rants against the import of useless stuff from China, careful analysis of exactly how we should enjoy the beauty of moonlight or cherry blossom, anecdotes about priests who get their heads stuck in cauldrons or ox-drivers who get the better of fine gentlemen, as well as some very precise laying down the law about which kinds of fish may be carved in the presence of the emperor.

Kenkō can be delightfully inconsistent on occasion, too — there’s a piece where he goes on about the evils of alcohol for a couple of pages, violently attacking irresponsible people who force booze on their friends and reminding us how boring other people become when they are drunk — and then, mysteriously, he seems to have overcome his hangover and goes on to tell us how wonderful a social stimulant alcohol can be, and what fun it is to see a friend getting tipsy… Kenkō does sometimes come over as a bit of a Polonius, but most of the time he is endearing, witty (although even after 700 years of research, some of his jokes are apparently still quite opaque to Japanese scholars), and very enjoyable to read.

The late Donald Keene was, of course, second to none in the art of making Japanese culture accessible to Westerners: here he gives us a short, helpful introduction, a wonderfully lucid translation of what seems to be a rather difficult and often ambiguous text, and enough notes to give us a good sense of all the deep cultural allusions buried in Kenkō‘s writing.

that looks very interesting!

Sounds really amazing!