The ubiquitous “summer reading” blog post is always fun to write, although this year my summer reading has not consisted of murder mysteries, fantasies or satisfying19^th century novels. I am actually in the mood for those kinds of books, but with limited time I am trying to focus my reading on grad school preparation.

For a couple of months I have been working my way through A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives. It is a series of expansive essays on Medieval viewpoints, but the book is worth buying just for the introduction alone, which is the kind of thing I would assign to a class, if I had to teach one in medieval literature. The author’s main premise is that when we bring our own expectations and post-romantic modern viewpoints to medieval literature, we are disappointed to find our expectations not met—and so the literature seems boring, and we misinterpret it and begin to think that the medievals were crazy to believe all the ideas they seem to posit in their literature. But understanding some of the medieval perspectives that informed the literature when it was written totally reverses, in many cases, the way we read the literature, and we catch the irony, the humor, the moral, the philosophy and the beauty, and find that the medievals were, in fact, not crazy at all.

Reading the book above took me so long because I read it alongside three other works. Two of them were Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. An English professor told me recently he thought Troilus and Criseyde was pretty boring—though one must take into account that he teaches modern and American literature and is looking for different things than medieval lit can provide. But really, I have come to conclude that the reason we don’t typically enjoy medieval lit (or don’t dare try to read it) is largely because of the barrier of language, the same problem that makes Shakespeare tedious the first time you try to read Julius Caesar in high school. When you get stuck in difficult language, the story drags and you get lost in a fog, so of course it seems boring. It never ends and makes no sense! The Canterbury Tales are only the length of a smallish novel, but it took me weeks to comb through them, often rereading passages and stopping to look up words I didn’t understand. Troilus and Criseyda is much the same, but by the time I got to it I had picked up speed in understanding the language. And when you lay aside modern conceptions of “courtly love” (which never really made sense to me the way people tried to explain it), Troilus’s weeping, bedridden, lamenting lovesickness becomes rather funny, and you realize that the author means it to be a trifle amusing—because we see he has gone overboard, and Criseyde is a rather insipid little thing not worth such suffering. That is the whole problem of the story. Troilus must find out the hard way that he has wasted all his sighs.

The other book I tackled (in translation, of course) was Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which I had heard about for years but had not read. It turned out to be quick read and surprisingly interesting. Boethius has been cast in prison over political differences, and Lady Philosophy muse-like finds him weeping in his prison cell and asks him what the matter is. The dialogue between the two makes up the rest of the book. It is sort of a “problem of evil” book, asking “why do good people suffer?” and addresses such questions as the rewards of good and evil, the foreknowledge and foresight of God, and what Fortune is.

Next, I think I will take a break from Middle English and read some works in translation from an anthology I have of medieval sources, with maybe some Old English poetry thrown in. I must pay my respect here to the HBU library book sales, which for $3 afforded me my complete works of Chaucer, A Preface to Chaucer that I mentioned above, and the anthology I am about to read!

If ignorance can be likened darkness, then studying is like setting out candles one at a time in an ever-widening pattern.

I am at the library to use some reference books. It is rather tedious, but I am setting out the candles all over Medieval Europe. Boccaccio? Bernard of Clairvaux? Walter Burley? I've set out my candles from the "B" volume of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages. And Shakespeare's histories, however dubious in detail, have at least put out some far-flung lights in one little cluster on the timeline: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry IV, Richard III. I've never been able to remember the order of the kings before now.

Off to work again. It's still pretty dark in here.