Arthurian Tradition and Chretien De Troyes

Loomis, Roger Sherman

doi:10.7312/loom90420

Cited by 25 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…118 Meanwhile, the characters of the Arthurian legend spread throughout Europe. 119 In the early twelfth century, the story of Queen Guinevere featured on the tympanum of the Cathedral of Modena. 120 It is a question whether these sculptures would have been seized and destroyed had Warner Bros. owned the rights in Geoffrey or Wace's work.…”

Section: E Chrétien De Troyes' Testimony: Romance Literature and Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Rediscovering Cumulative Creativity from the Oral-Formulaic Tradition to Digital Remix: Can I Get a Witness?

Frosio¹

2017

Preprint

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For most of human history, the essential nature of creativity was understood to be cumulative and collective. This notion has been largely forgotten by modern policies that regulate creativity and speech. As hard as it may be to believe, the most valuable components of our immortal culture were created under a fully open regime with regard to access to pre-existing expressions and reuse. From the Platonic mimesis to Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” the largest part of our culture has been produced under a paradigm in which imitation—even plagiarism—and social authorship formed constitutive elements of the creative moment. Pre-modern creativity spread from a continuous line of re-use and juxtaposition of pre-existing expressive content, transitioning from orality to textuality and then melding the two traditions. The cumulative and collaborative character of the oral formulaic tradition dominated the development of epic literature. The literary pillars of Western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were fully forged in the furnace of that tradition. Later, under the aegis of Macrobius’ art of rewriting and the Latin principles of imitatio, medieval epics grew out of similar dynamics of sharing and recombination of formulas and traditional patterns. Continuations, free re-use, and the re-modeling of iconic figures and characters, such as King Arthur and Roland, made chansons de geste and romance literature powerful vehicles in propelling cross-country circulation of culture.The parallelism between past and present highlights the incapacity of the present copyright system to recreate the cumulative and collaborative creative process that proved so fruitful in the past. In particular, the constant development and recursive use of iconic characters, which served as an engine for creativity in epic literature, is but a fading memory. This is because our policies for creativity are engineered in a fashion that stymies the re-use of information and knowledge, rather than facilitating it. Under the current regime, intellectual works are supposedly created as perfect, self-sustaining artifacts from the moment of their creation. Any modifications, derivations, and cumulative additions must secure preventive approval and must be paid off, as if they were nuisances to society.Rereading the history of aesthetics is particularly inspiring at the dawn of the networked age. The dynamics of sharing of pre-modern creativity parallel the features of digital networked creativity. As in the oral-formulaic tradition, digital creativity reconnects its exponential generative capacity to the ubiquity of participatory contributions. Additionally, the formula—the single unit to be used and reused, worked and re-worked—is the building block of the remix culture as well as the oral formulaic tradition. Today, in an era of networked mass collaboration, ubiquitous online fan communities, user-based creativity, digital memes, and remix culture, the enclosure of knowledge brought about by an ever-expanding copyright paradigm is felt with renewed intensity. Therefore, I suggest that the communal, cumulative, social and collaborative nature of creativity and authorship should be rediscovered and should drive our policies. In order to plead my case, I have asked for the support of the most unexpected witnesses.

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Section: E Chrétien De Troyes' Testimony: Romance Literature and Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Rediscovering Cumulative Creativity from the Oral-Formulaic Tradition to Digital Remix: Can I Get a Witness?

Frosio¹

2017

Preprint

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“…In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries French romances re-worked cycles of King Arthur (Loomis, 1949;1956), Lancelot (Troyes, 1987;Zatzikhoven, 1951;Cross & Nitze, 1970;Troyes, 1997) and Tristan (Thomas, 1923). The romances of Chr&ien de Troyes were dedicated to Marie, countess of Champagne (Troyes, 1987;1997) The writers of these chivalric sophisticated stories placed the gallant knight, such as Lancelot, as a humble, submissive lover to his queenly mistress (such as Queen Guinevere).…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Spare the rod: The figure of the dominatrix in the literary canon

Baron

2006

Sex Cult

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The commonly cited maxim, "Spare the rod and spoil the child" is often traced incorrectly back to the biblical book of Proverbs when its point of origin lies instead first in Langland's Piers Plowman and then, in the highly satirical and sexualized text of Samuel Butler's Hudibras. Thus, from a religious origin, it has metamorphosed into a woman-man relationship. Indeed to follow the evolution of this phrase is to uncover the extent to which the disciplining impulses of religious rhetoric are eroticized in one Western European literary theme, that of feminine dominance, from the tenth century when the word Dominatrix appeared in the writings of Hroswitha of Gandersheim. The period leading up to the 1650s, when Butler turned the phrase into one line of a heroic iambic couplet in the middle of a stanza on an amorous jaileress, was also a time when medical research on human and animal anatomy and physiology had unravelled the pathways of libido-lifting buttock-beating. Far from demonizing woman the literary image of the whip-wielding mistress did not degrade the female sex but instead apotheosized the dominatrix as a major erotic image of the twentieth century. Feminine Domination in the Middle AgesCanoness Hroswitha lived from 935 to 975 in Gar, dersheim, Saxony. In a late tenth-century manuscript of her first legend, Maria, she used the Latin word Dominatrix, and claimed in the

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“…It is a tribute to her archetypal nature that no 'composed' romance bears her name as its central figure; and while Loomis has demonstrated that half a dozen or so courtly ladies derive from her tradition, 28 she is too 'unmanageable' to convert into a heroine in her own right. She moves in and out of the stories of other persons, conducting her machinations and almost always carrying with her that aura of 'shadow,' that darker side of self.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…By tracing the transmission of the name, Loomis has established that 'Orva la fee' of Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie is none other than Morgan; she gives Hector the fabulous horse, Galatea, even though he has rejected her love, 'Mais ne la voust o sei couchier.' 41 In Floriant et Florete Morgan calls herself love and mistress, 'amie et drue,' of the foster son, Floriant, whom she had borne away to her palace as a new-born child; but her maternal generosity prevails when he determines to return to the real world:…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…He recognizes correctly that in the process of recreation authors tend to rationalize supernatural elements to suit their own tastes and those of their time. 60 This is, in fact, an essential aspect of the adaptation of myths to changing levels of consciousness. But while he is the first to insist that Morgan is 'manifestly a creature of tradition rather than invention,' 61 he minimizes a certain autonomy which the archetypal figure retains, and he is almost belligerent in his denial that the theories of Jung and Freud about the unconscious have any validity for interpreting authors 'about whose conscious aims we know a great deal.'…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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