Seraphs, Cherubs, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

[matociquala]

I'm reading E. M. W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture, which isn't so much teaching me anything I didn't already know, as illuminating some things I did know in new and useful ways. For example, I've just finally come to understand that my intellectual appreciations of Tyge Brahe and of Kit Marlowe are linked. Not y their accomplishments,

Comments

[tiferet]

Oh good lord, you break my brain in the best ways.

Modern fantasy is often regressive, though. So many authors aren't willing to let their characters be worthy just 'cause--the hidden prince is alive and well. (I've written one myself but she's a girl.)

[skeetermonkey]

As I understand it, shouldn't that be, "Tycho Brahe (and his sister, Sophie) proved Aristotle and Ptolomy wrong"? [Damn that Ptolomy. Who can pronounce a name with a "pt" at the beginning? It's like he deliberately set out to frustrate the rest of us. Why couldn't he have a nice name like "Punjab"?) I don't think God ever really was a big supporter of Aristotle, though the Roman Catholic Church and everyone else bought into that stuff for a while. Otherwise, wouldn't He have made the universe non-heliocentric? Not that I can speak for God. Or Tycho. Or Aristotle. (Hey Aristotle, you've just influenced Western civilization for the next 2500 years, what are you going to do? "I'm goin' to Disneyland!... No. Wait. It doesn't exist. Damn.")

[matociquala]

One of the greeks had a heliocentric universe. Damned if I can remember which one.

But yes, you're right--which is why I made the comment somewhere upstream about the 2000 years of church and classical philosophy.

[pecunium]

I can pronounce Ptolomy.

I can, of course, also pronounce such things as, книга (kniga), многа(mnoga), где(gde) and лёд(lyod), so perhaps my protestation on the ease of such things isn't to be taken as definitive.

TK

[skeetermonkey]

Thank you, my specialized subset of languages friend.

You are not normal. PT isn't beginning of the word vocal subset normal for Amer. standard. It just isn't. We have kept, and apt. Ptolomy, pteradactyl, those aren't normal. Pteradactyl you don't even vocalize the "p", it's a soft plosive before the word if that.

Actually, if I use the "kept" set, where the lips close on the "p" and then open for the dentalized "t", I can put it at the begining of Ptolomy. Yay!

[angevin2]

People keep saying things I want to comment on in great and voluminous detail when I don't have time to do it. Grah.

I don't think, though, that the Elizabethans generally were quite so unquestioningly hierarchy-driven as Tillyard says they are. The whole Great Chain of Being business that everybody who studies Elizabethan literature has beaten into their heads at a certain level -- at least, they used to, not so much anymore unless they have the wrong profs. I think rather that it's...well. It gets reiterated so often because it's sort of...an ideal worldview, I guess. But I don't think it's representative really. It's how the Elizabethan powers-that-be wanted people to think more than how the average Elizabethan actually thought.

(I think the same, btw, about divine-right kingship, which is something you lean on in this post and something that Tillyard talks about a lot, but it's a concept to which England has always had an uneasy relationship. [Since I can't stop talking about this topic, I'll point out that, for instance,

Tudors were intensely concerned with legitimizing themselves

[bellatrys]

and pretending that This Was How It Always Had Been, given that the bloody Marhanens the Tudors were only illegitmately royal in any degree, rather less so than even William the Bastard, except as foreign lords descended from the rulers an enemy nation, and that Henry VII won his crown at the point of a sword after a lengthy series of coup attempts, not unlike William in that regard.

--Which makes all the subsequent claims by Tudor and Jacobite governments of Heaven smiling eternal on eternal dynasties rather ironic, and along the lines of Egyptians doing the same, when dynasties rose and fell and were overthrown and the next sword-raised nomarch or Nubian prince or warlord of Magna Graeca stood in the place of the god-kings of Kemet...

Re: Tudors were intensely concerned with legitimizing themselves

[ex_truepenn]

Just out of curiosity, what counts as legitimately royal?

[matociquala]

I tend to wind up reading him as very supportive of the conventional, though I am coming at it on my own, rather than through an academic program. And yeah, we're definitely talking about an idealized worldview--the stuff that gets taken as a given in Art is *always* tidier than what goes on in the real world, through the simple process of discourse simplifying reality.

The point being, I don't in general read Shakespeare as questioning the authority of authority, if that makes any sense.

except...

[bellatrys]

"When Adam dalf, and Eve span,
Who was thanne a gentilman?"

As heresy, it was an *extremely* popular and long-lasting heresy, so much so that a massive civil war had to be waged against it in France, and other international campaigns of propaganda and violence backed by the extant superpower against other manifestations of it.

The example of the Roman Republic and the Athenians was always there before the eyes of the medieval and Renaisance Europeans: this made it impossible that the arguments and debates of antiquity concerning equality of souls be ever very far away - before and after John Ball, Wat Tyler et al took it upon themselves to rectify matters, perceiving the Mandate of Heaven lost--

Beyond that, the fact of sword-raised self-made second sons of tanners (or tailors), of gold-raised bankers' and burghers's sons ending up dukes and chancellors and archbishops, all that sort of thing tends to provide the real-life version of the "miller's youngest son" and "Mastermaid" contradiction that, while not overriding the "

Re: except...

[matociquala]

The Chirch has been trying to stamp out anything that smacked of republicanism since they kicked the Gnostics to the curb.

[fidelioscabinet]

*swoons in delight*

*pouts because no time for intelligent comment*

*makes note to re-read Tillyard*