In week 21 of the humanities crash course, I visited Middle Ages England. In particular, I read small sections of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I was glad to only have read sections; these texts were hard. I also watched an uneven movie that brought the Malory text to life.

Readings

Let’s start with The Canterbury Tales. Written between 1387–1400, it’s a collection of 24 stories detailing everyday English life. The framing device: a group of strangers sets off on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Their innkeeper proposes a storytelling contest to pass the time — a sort of early rap battle.

The book is written in Middle English, which I found both difficult and unpleasant. (More on this below — and how I overcame the language’s challenges.) Still, I read the preface, which frames the book, and three tales recommended by Gioia:

  • The Knight’s Tale: a classic chivalric romance about two cousins smitten with the same woman. They end up jousting over her, and the victor dies. O, Fortuna!
  • The Miller’s Tale: offered by a vulgar member of the party, it’s an obscene rejoinder to the Knight’s Tale. As with so many other stories of this time (including the Malory book), it deals with adultery.
  • The Take of the Wife of Bath: a proto-feminist parable told by a female member of the party who’d had five husbands. It offers a definitive answer to the question, “What do women want?”

Now on to Malory. Le Morte D’Arthur is the source text for most of the stories about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. These stories have been told and re-told countless times — most recycle Malory.

The work consists of 21 prose books. It was first published 85 years after The Canterbury Tales, but the language here was more like modern English. That’s not to say that the story felt cohesive. I read books 13—15 and quickly lost track of the characters, who felt like interchangeable knights on a pointless quest.

What kept me going was my relatively recent viewing of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. I’d always attributed that movie’s episodic and absurdist humor to the nature of the Python crew — but those characteristics also turn out to be (unwittingly) present in the Malory original.

As you may have guessed, I didn’t enjoy either of these texts. I’m glad to be done with them.

Audiovisual

Music: Beethoven’s late string quartets. Because of time constraints, I only heard 12—14. I’ll listen to the other two in time; I enjoyed how “modern” these felt.

Arts: Pre-Raphaelite painters. As with the Beethoven string quartets, I hadn’t seen these before. The paintings are beautiful, but I didn’t fully grok what this school was up to — was this a reactionary movement?

A richly colored Pre-Raphaelite painting showing a dramatic, emotional scene by the seashore: the dying King Arthur lies on the grass beneath a tree, surrounded by four sorrowful women, one of whom reads from a book. In the background, two figures stand at the water’s edge while a small boat approaches from the sea, evoking the mystical ending of the Arthurian legend. James Archer, _The Death of King Arthur_ via [Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Death_of_King_Arthur_by_James_Archer_(1860).jpg#mw-jump-to-license)

James Archer, The Death of King Arthur via Wikimedia

Cinema: John Boorman’s EXCALIBUR, a stylized retelling of the King Arthur legends. The movie is a mess: dozens of sweaty, muddy, bearded knights in identical armor hack about doing arbitrary things for arbitrary reasons. Which, in retrospect, makes it an accurate reflection of the source text.

Reflections

After the time I’ve spent in this course with Plato, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, and even Petronius, this week’s texts felt like a downgrade. The Canterbury Tales’s vignettes of “common” people felt gossipy and petty. Malory’s high-minded stories of nobility weren’t much better; they felt trivial and episodic.

This isn’t fair, of course. Part of the challenge here is that for the first time in the course, I’m reading texts written in their original language. I can’t read Latin, Greek, or Ancient Egyptian, so I’ve experienced other texts in the course through translations that made them more relatable. This week, the excitement was in experiencing the early days of the English language I love — even if I found it hard-going.

Notes on Note-taking

As I mentioned above, the stories in The Canterbury Tale are told in Middle English verse. The word “Middle” in that phrase is misleading: this is really a different language. Here’s a sample:

The heralds left their pricking756 up and down.
Now ring the trumpet loud and clarioun.
There is no more to say, but east and west
In go the spearës sadly757 in the rest;
In go the sharpë spurs into the side.
There see me who can joust, and who can ride.
There shiver shaftës upon shieldës thick;
He feeleth through the heartë-spoon758 the prick.
Up spring the spearës twenty foot on height;
Out go the swordës as the silver bright.
The helmës they to-hewen, and to-shred;759
Out burst the blood, with sternë streamës red.
With mighty maces the bones they to-brest.760
He through the thickest of the throng gan threst.761
There stumble steedës strong, and down go all.
He rolleth under foot as doth a ball.
He foineth762 on his foe with a trunchoun,
And he him hurtleth with his horse adown.
He through the body hurt is, and sith take,763
Maugré his head, and brought unto the stake,
As forword764 was, right there he must abide.
Another led is on that other side.
And sometime doth765 them Theseus to rest,
Them to refresh, and drinken if them lest.766

In the book, those numbers are links to notes. I’ve left them in to give you a sense of what it’s like to read this book: constant lookups for unfamiliar words and concepts. Eventually, I gave up on the notes and tried to just let the words flow. But many of them were unfamiliar and I didn’t know how to pronounce them.

The experience unlocked when I had an idea: What if I got an audiobook of the text to have somebody else read the text to me out loud? This worked: the audiobook freed me from making up pronunciations so I could focus instead on the story and notes.

I also made extensive use of both books’ Wikipedia pages. I read Wikipedia’s summaries of the relevant stories before reading the actual books. This gave me a grounding on what the text was about before I tried cutting my way through this thorny language.

Up Next

We’re heading to Africa! Gioia recommends reading The Mwindo Epic and Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. I’d never heard of these, so I’m excited. I have heard lots of Fela Kuti, Gioa’s music recommendation, so I might spend a bit more time with Beethoven instead.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!