Medieval Things
Jul. 5th, 2011 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI seek out medieval things. It makes me happy to know they're still around. Medieval things are survivors of a vanished civilisation.
I was trying to work out last night exactly when this older civilisation came to an end- and the answer has to be different for different countries. In Southern Europe, according to Burkhart, things changed for ever in 1336 when the poet Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux for fun. In England there are two events that serve as possible markers: the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485- which brought our first renaissance monarch to the throne, and the dissolution of the monasteries- which got under way in 1536. I incline towards the earlier date.
I love Tudor things and Jacobean things and 17th and 18th century things- but they don't have the otherness and strangeness of medieval things. They belong to our current civilisation. They are modern.
I was trying to work out last night exactly when this older civilisation came to an end- and the answer has to be different for different countries. In Southern Europe, according to Burkhart, things changed for ever in 1336 when the poet Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux for fun. In England there are two events that serve as possible markers: the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485- which brought our first renaissance monarch to the throne, and the dissolution of the monasteries- which got under way in 1536. I incline towards the earlier date.
I love Tudor things and Jacobean things and 17th and 18th century things- but they don't have the otherness and strangeness of medieval things. They belong to our current civilisation. They are modern.
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Date: 2011-07-12 08:05 pm (UTC)I'm happy with Henry VII as a Renaissance Monarch - I reckon that his reign marks the beginning of an interest in matters Classical and humanist, as opposed to locked firmly in the medieval mindset.
I'm also quite happy to see James III as our first Scots Renaissance King, though James IV is more obviously 'Renaissance' in his outlook, and the 'official' version is that the Renaissance in Scotland doesn't begin until the reign of James V... James III was sufficiently Renaissance to have two of his poncy, well-dressed, intellectual advisers (one of whom was an architect) hanged by his hairy-assed nobles because they couldn't stand playing second fiddle to a bunch of intellectuals.