medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Monday, August 4, 2008, at 9:55 pm, George Hoelzeman wrote, in colloquy with Brenda Cook:
> From: Ms B M Cook
> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 22:56:05 +0100
<SNIP>
> >>>I don't think I would use the adjective "fictional" to refer to ANY
> narrative created before the eighteenth century
> (well, Daniel Defoe, perhaps, but certainly not Shakespeare !) Isn't
> our modern distiction between "fact" and "fiction" an
> Enlightenment concept ?
>
> Absolutely. Hence my comment that applying the term to ancient
> writings indicated disparaging bias against the culture or
> writer who created the particular story.
Please explain (preferably with examples) how the recurrent application, by recent (say, post 1970) Classicists and students of Comparative Literature, of the term "fiction" to the Greek-language romances of antiquity is disparaging. I've been reading the work of such scholars on that body of texts for decades as well as interacting with others who use some of these texts when teaching the history of extended fictional literary forms and I've yet to encounter any of them using "fiction" to disparage the objects of their study.
The fairly standard ancient and medieval dichotomy between lying poets and truth-telling others (not always writers in prose) suggests to me that ancients and medievals conceived of a distinction between fact and fiction, even if it may not have always coincided perfectly with any of our modern ones. Cf. the anonymous _Historia Troyana Daretis Frigii_ edited by Jürgen Stohlmann, line 1: _Historiam Troye figmenta poetica turbant_.
Where moderns often (not always) part company with ancient and medievals is in their unease at employing within a single narration what are considered fundamentally different modes of discourse (_vide_ the criticizing of Milton for mixing allegorical and historical narrative).
<SNIP>
> >>>I think I would show my respect for traditional narratives by
> generally not pinning adjectives to them at all, otherwise
> "legendary" for stories attached to an historical character which
> cannot be real (Like Alexander's visit to the bottom of the
> sea) or "myth" where an "impossible" narrative independent of an
> historical figure carries some symbolic or supernatural
> weight.
Would you then abandon "legendary" as a term of art in the study of hagiography? Without descriptive adjectives, how would you express the commonly made distinction between largely factual-seeming narratives and those that quite clearly are not to be taken as a literal rendition of actual events (e.g. the two parts of the Passio of St. Fabius [31. July])?
> >>>I also suspect that many stories which seem to us to be untrue only
> look untrue because we are not appreciating how
> the event is percieved by a mediaeval or ancient mind. Or are the
> result of a mutating oral tradition that existed prior to the
> narrative being fixed as a written account.
>
> Again, I agree. Well said!
Which of course doesn't mean that there aren't ancient or medieval stories that in all likelihood are historically untrue, however true they may be in other respects. E.g., the eleventh- and twelfth-century San Vincenzan and Cassinese stories of St. Martin of Monte Massico having saved his monastery from ninth-century Agarene raiders (these to me seem to be expressions of the enormous power ascribed to the saint, deliberately framed so as to recall the tragedies perpetrated by similar raiders at the monasteries where these stories were written; if Martin's monastery had actually warded off such an attack, we would almost certainly hear of it in earlier writing from the region).
> And so forth and et cetera.
Kai ta loipa to you too.
Best,
John Dillon
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