Tea at Trianon: Medieval Reads: Creating Stories with Mary Stewart and Geoffrey of Monmouth

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 13, 2020

Medieval Reads: Creating Stories with Mary Stewart and Geoffrey of Monmouth

From Medievalists:

The strange inventions of Geoffrey of Monmouth become very firmly attached to an early period in the popular imagination. The more complex historical understanding of Arthur and Merlin and where their stories grew and how they merged gets lost in the transition. I can’t count the number of arguments I’ve had with readers who are certain that Arthur was the Last of the Romans and that Excalibur was an ancient legend refurbished in the Middle Ages. The path these two brilliant writers have led many readers to pays homage to an emotional cultural validation that Stewart has created using the work of Geoffrey.

The emotional validation doesn’t, to be honest, bear much relationship to historical truth. Stewart’s historical truths are from her reinterpretation of an earlier period and she used Merlin as her conduit into that place and time. It’s an extraordinary creation, but very difficult to explain using the development of Arthurian stories as we know them. The best way, in fact, of explaining them is the same way Geoffrey of Monmouth’s peers saw Geoffrey’s work: as fiction. Good fiction. Outstanding fiction. (Read more.)