Download - ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque Medieval to Renaissance

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

Medieval to Renaissance

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The GrotesqueMedieval to Renaissance

“We need to hurry up because soon it will be the Renaissance and we will all be painting.”

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

Medieval to Renaissance

The outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to

us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between

adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All

experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and

absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life. . . .

Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at

present; it was more difficult to guard against them and to

find solace. Illness and health presented a more striking

contrast; the cold and the darkness of winter were more real

evils. Honors and riches were relished with greater avidity

and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery. We, at

the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with

which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass

of wine, were formerly enjoyed. . . .

Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages


The characteristic of the world we men inhabit is incessant change

by birth, growth, procreation, death, and decay. And within that world

such experimental methods as had been achieved in his time could

discover only an imperfect uniformity. Things happen in the same

way not perfectly nor invariably but 'on the whole' or 'for the most

part'. But the world studied by astronomy seemed quite different.

No Nova had yet been observed. So far as he could find out, the

celestial bodies were permanent; they neither came into existence

nor passed away. And the more you studied them, the more

perfectly regular their movements seemed to be.


Apparently, then, the universe was divided into two regions. The

lower region of change and irregularity he called Nature. The upper

he called Sky. Thus he can speak of 'Nature and Sky' as two things.

But that very changeable phenomenon, the weather, made it clear

that the realm of inconstant Nature extended some way above the

surface of the Earth. 'Sky' must begin higher up. It seemed

reasonable to suppose that regions which differed in every

observable respect were also made of different stuff. Nature was

made of the four elements, earth, water, fire, and air. Air, then (and

with air Nature; and with Nature inconstancy) must end before Sky

began. Above the air, in true Sky, was a different substance, which

he called aether. Thus 'the aether encompasses the divine bodies,


but immediately below the aethereal and divine nature comes that

which is passible, mutable, perishable, and subject to death'. By the

word divine Aristotle introduces a religious element; and the placing

of the important frontier (between Sky and Nature, Aether and Air) at

the Moon's orbit is a minor detail. But the concept of such a frontier

seems to arise far more in response to a scientific than to a religious

need.

~C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Chapter 1: The Medieval

Situation (1964)


If, with the help of some time-machine working

in reverse, a man of the Middle Ages could be

suddenly transported into the skin of a man of

the twentieth century, seeing through our eyes

and with our "figuration" the objects we see, I

think he would feel like a child who looks for

the first time through the ingenious magic of a

stereoscope. "Oh!" he would say, "look how

they stand out!" (Owen Barfield, Saving the

Appearances 94)

The Legacy of Plato (428-347)

The Allegory of the Cave

The Legacy of Aristotle (384-322)


The Ptolemaic Universe


The Ptolemaic Universe

The Creation of the World (from The

Garden of Earthly Delights)


The Allegorical

Everyman

Medieval-to-Renaissance


Everyman

Main character: Everyman



Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: Life



Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: LifeEveryman’s Destination: Death

Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: LifeEveryman’s Destination: DeathEveryman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions . . .

Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: LifeEveryman’s Destination: DeathEveryman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions, Good Deeds

Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: LifeEveryman’s Destination: DeathEveryman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions, Good DeedsWho can complete the journey of Everyman?


Gnosticism

“gnosticism” derives from a Greek root meaning “to know”—the stem in the word “agnostic”


Gnosticism

While mainstream Christianity enshrined the Incarnation—both Christ's and

our own—as the central mystery of its faith, the cross that must be both born

and transcended, Gnosticism found repugnant everything bodily, everything

concerned with matter. The fall into matter was for them unbearable and

unacceptable. "Just as the semen of man, the minute, invisible, seed

possessing a scarcely measurable weight, acquires size and weight as it

develops," so for the Gnostics, Lacarriere explains, "do the primordial seeds,

the potentialities of a hyper-cosmic world, acquire weight by falling into the

lower world, becoming more and more dense in substance" (18). The

Gnostics sought to reverse the process, to break the chain of being.


Gnosticism

Gnosticism was convinced that (in the words of Jacques Lacarriere) "our

thinking being is tied to evil as ineluctably as our physical being is tied to the

carbon in our body cells" (24; my emphasis). "Why did ye carry me away from

my abode into captivity and cast me into the stinking body?" one Gnostic text

beseeches. "To surrender oneself to weight, to increase it in all senses of the

term (by absorbing food, or by procreating, weighing the world down with

successive births)," the Gnostics believed, "is to collaborate in this unhappy

destiny. . . . To discard or lighten all the matter of this world, that is the

strange end the Gnostics pursued" (Lacarriere 19). Even the most elemental


Gnosticism

phenomenon—nutrition—was thought to be a "maleficent interaction," part of

"a never-ending circle, as vertiginous as the whirpool of the stars or the cycle

of time" (Lacarriere 24). And so in the Gnostic mythology, Christ, for example,

was idealized as a being who "ate and drank but did not defecate. Such was

the strength of his continence that foods did not corrupt in him, for him there

was no corruption" (Lacarriere 37).

For the Gnostics, "The simple fact of living, of breathing, feeding, sleeping,

and waking," implied "the existence and the growth of evil" (Lacarriere 24).


Gnosticism

Only the eye, the Gnostics believed, is immune from worldly corruption; unlike

the mouth, the anus, the navel, the eye lives on light instead of matter, on

spirit instead of filth. Vision alone allows escape from the "noise" of this world

to pursue the truly real.

"The Gnostic," Zweig notes, "felt that he had been thrown into a desert" when

born into the mundane world. "But he was not entirely lost, for he could

retreat into his mind, to a point he called the 'apex' of his soul. . . . Persecuted

by the world, the Gnostic found refuge in his 'spirit.'"


Microcosm/Macrocosm

Macrocosm and microcosm is an

ancient Greek Neo-Platonic schema of seeing

the same patterns reproduced in all levels of

the cosmos, from the largest scale

(macrocosm or universe-level) all the way

down to the smallest scale (microcosm or sub-

sub-atomic or even metaphysical-level). In the

system the mid-point is Man, who summarizes

the cosmos.--Wikipedia

The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of the World

Observational Science

Galileo (1564-1642)

William Harvey (1578-1657)

The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of

the World


Painting (Invention of Perspective)

Giotto, The Presentation of the Virgin

The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of

the World


Painting (Invention of Perspective)

Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa

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