Tea at Trianon: Italian Fairy Tales

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

Monday, April 26, 2021

Italian Fairy Tales

From Beyond Foreignness:

The theory of a purely written tradition is unlikely. Storytelling is undoubtedly much older than the invention of writing. The relationship between the oral “stories of the people” and written works (and their influence on each other) is much debated.

Dante understood the importance of the common tongue. When we read the works of Dante, it is easy to forget that they too are linked to the oral tradition. Dante’s Inferno was in part inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid, which in turn was inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. It was hundreds of years before anyone wrote it down. In other words, the Inferno is only one degree of separation from the older oral tradition.

Further, in Dante’s time, his works were primarily sung and heard on street corners rather than read. This was particularly so because of the cost of handwritten manuscripts. Only after the invention of the printing press did books become widely available.

Despite Dante’s views, formal written Italian after Pietro Bembo applied his strictures to it, became for centuries a language distant from the people. It was a special preserve of a small minority who treated it like a new Latin. A gulf opened between the written and the oral. The latter was the domain of Italy’s many spoken dialects. Italian almost exclusively read, rather than spoken. (Read more.)