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Lecture notes European literary history
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Notes from lectures (based on the powerpoint)Week 1 heroes and heroines
Lecture 1: Adventure
World literature, weltliteratur – Goethe (1827): ‘I am more and more convinced that poetry is
the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds
and hundreds of men… I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise
everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of
world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.’ literature
should be universal
Too much emphasis on chronology suggests an organic development
The literary (or cultural) text (with their own ‘time mechanism’, such as repetition of older
texts) enables us to both look forward and back from a given point in time.
Literature: a memory machine – it remembers itself, and also provides a unique insight in how
each age constructs its own image and that of others
The hero as demi-god, superhuman: For example in ancient epics: Illiad – Odyssey
‘tell me, muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide, after he had sacked
the sacred citadel of Troy…’
Theme: wrath, anger, rage, being wronged
Pre-courtly culture:
Archaic: society of warriors (tribal)
- Honor and privilege
- Mutual rivalry
- Warrior’s virtue: undaunted, lack of fear ‘pre-courtly’ examples: Illiad, Beowulf,
Nibelungenlied, Icelandic sagas, Chanson de Rolan
- ‘pre-courtly’ barbarism increasingly located outside Europe in the 19th and 20th
century, often justified as civilizational mission: a critique of this in Herzog’s Aguirre,
the Wrath of God (1972)
Return, as od the 1980s, of the pre-courtly hero
,The anti-hero
Middle ages
- Transition from pre-courtly (Charlemagne and his principal Roland: central plot –
religious war, heroism, courage, sacrifice for the king and Christianity) to courtly
(King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, with Lancelot: central plot –
forbidden love)
6th century: Regula Benedicti Saint Benedict (480-547)
9th century: Carolingian renaissance
12th: crusades
Religious orders: orders of knights
Courtly ethos and chivalric ideals: self-restraint, ceremonial, virtue instead of honor, defense
of the weak
Inner vs outer world
Lecture 2: cult of the Holy Virgin Mary and Courtly Love
In medieval times the focus lays on the female heroine
Greek and Roman antiquity: a wide variety of female characters, visible in the genre of the
Catalogue of Women (Hesiod, 700-650 BC)
Also: Medea and Electra
1054: the Great Schism, as of the increasing importance of the annunciation in Western
iconography (as opposed to Eastern Orthodoxy) = stern woman, intimate relationship with
god
- Eastern Christianity: Greek
- Western Christianity: Latin, gradual shift of spiritual life from convents to universities
At about 1100: the chivalric attitude is redefined
- Simultaneously: a new position for women as literary characters – and to a very
narrow extend also as authors while women had more time to read
- For example: Hadewych, Hildegard and Bingen
- As of 1100: ongoing, age-long debate on the status of Mary in the western sphere
Before 1000:
- Mary as the supreme saint and the queen of heaven (more important than god?)
- However: doulia (veneration, allowed for saints) or latria (adoration only for God)?
- The cult of Mary became one of hyper-doulia
- Compare: ascension (self-propelled rise to heaven of Jesus) assumption (the bodily
taking up of Mary by heavenly forces)
- Panagia = the orthodox-Christian title of Mary (Hagia Sophia, Istanbul)
, Middle Ages: deductive reasoning. From a grand truth (dogma) one deduces a series of
smaller truths
- Afterwards: inductive reasoning, one establishes laws (of nature for instance) on the
basis of observation
- In between: Copernican revolution, eppur si muove (inventing explanations for
everything that meets the eye: in order to explain one phenomenon, you have to invent
another)
13th-14th century: debate about Mary’s immaculate conception, we see a change in depiction
of Mary: was Mary exempt from grace or sin?
- Franciscan (yes, grace) Dominican (no, sin)
15th- 16th century: Mary paintings ever more human, graceful, down to earth…
17th century: renewed popularity immaculate conception in Spain, under the influence of the
Franciscans Zurbaran: a Spanish Baroque painter of the 17th century, renowned fro his
masterful use of light and shadow to create dramatic and emotionally charged religious
paintings.
The cult of courtly love spreads from the court of Alfonso El Sabio over Europe (1221-1284):
multilingual court culture, Jewish, Arabic, Christian scholars and poets.
- The mixed origins of the troubadour/ troibaritz poetry; the Mozarabic language, a
romance langue spoken by Arabized Christians
- Two sources:
Al-Andalus for the troubadours from the Provence (see for instance the kharja, an Arabic
poetic form which has elements in common with the canzone)
Sicily for the scuola siciliana (See Maria Rosa Menocal – a forgotten history 1987)
Dante Alighieri (1265- 1321)
Begins to write in the Italian vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia, ca. 1304) and in dolce stil
nuovo, the courtly style, according to Dante this originates in the Provence
Beatrice, his adolescent love, at the center of Vita Nuova in the 3rd part of Divina Commedia
(Paradiso) Dante’s poetic gesture was continued by Petrarca (1304-1374) and his poems to
Laura (Canzoniere, ca. 1350)
- Dante – Divina Commedia (1308-1321): epic poem (modelled after Virgil; an epic
quest for the meaning of life: ‘half way along the road we have to go/ I found myself
obscured in a great forest)
- Courtly lyricism
- Merging of worldly and religious love (Beatrice and Mary)
1870: papal infallibility (Pius IX): The Pope is preserved from the possibility of error.
Lecture 3: Rediscovering cultural heritage
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