CT insight from Daniel (Prioress)

Today we ended discussion with Dr . Comber asking us to further elaborate on the contradictions The Prioress's Tale offers readers in today's world and in the Middle Ages. Emma further explained to me quickly after class (sorry if I steal what you were going to write about Emma) that by contradictions with the Christian faith that become prevalent in this excerpt, its how this idea that Jews were horrible persecutors of Christians (monsters really, like Dr. Comber's PP pointed out) that murdered innocent Christians, that likewise, like we have seen throughout history today, Christians have just as equally been monstrous in their acts against Jews (Holocaust). In fact, I personally am going to say that if we replace the roles of the characters from the Jews and their ideas being put into the slots of the Christians in The Prioress's Tale I'll bet there was this actual scenario that happened probably quite a few times somewhere in Western Europe, specifically in the first half of the 20th century. Now I understand that there is no way that Chaucer was referring to it, but for analyzing this story right now I think it's fairly interesting how interchangeable the roles of Christians and Jews could be and were, specifically during the Holocaust.

One other thing we pointed out in class that I'm not sure we fully discussed, is the fact that in the Prioress's prologue she is depicted as this prim and proper lady who cries if she sees a mouse in a mouse trap, but her story is so not ladylike or more of a story that would better fit someone that is not her. I can't really put it together to make sense in my head right now, but I just feel like maybe Chaucer is trying to say something by making this woman seem so delicate, but then give her a story to tell like this. I feel like it may be able to go along with the fact that he describes her more womanlike than a nun and the fact that this was her story to tell may just emphasize Chaucer's desire to lead her portrayal away from that of a proper nun. Along with taking a few cuts at the prioress herself and well, obviously the Jews, he also takes a few cuts in at monks to, specifically the abbot I believe, its very subtle but I'm pretty sure I remember him saying something about monks and their duties or how they act and then he corrects himself and specifically says how they should act. This just further reiterates the message of disapproval that Chaucer has for most of the characters and the roles they played in his society.

Norse Influence (ish)

For this week we all got assigned an aspect of information that we would need to use for context of CT. We were to try and incorporate or show our knowledge of our specialty areas throughout these presentations. As for me, my specialty area is Norse (Viking) influence on the Middle Ages. Awesome right, I picked an area that we can easily see and relate to throughout the semester. I touched on this briefly in my presentation today (Thurs), that the fact that we don't have many religious artifacts, manuscripts, etc. is due to the Vikings. When they started invading the northern British Isles sometime around 800 AD (date is debatable) like I mentioned in my presentation, they took for themselves things of value (religious and otherwise) and destroyed manuscripts.

For now, I will make light connections between Norse culture and the culture of the people in the Age that we have been studying. To start off, I would like to talk about the way Vikings were raised. Unlike many world cultures we have learned about through our basic history courses, Vikings were raises to be physically strong and self-reliant. They had no use for educating themselves through math, literature, or philosophy. Running, jumping and wrestling were substituted for the education they may have received in another culture. As soon as a child could carry a weapon, his training for battle began. In the war aspect,the Vikings are very similar to the culture of warriors we studied during our Beowulf unit. The greatest honor a Viking could have was to die in battle, and therefore enter Valhalla ( Norsemen heaven). Another incentive for battle (outside the honor of dying in it) was that a great voyage that brought fame or fortune to a group of Norsemen might earn all who took part the rank of a noble.

The social class system is another similarity that Norsemen share with people of the Middle Ages. The Norsemen had kings ( king definition for them was more similar to the way a Lord of a castle would act) that would govern a small group of people and an area of land about the size of a county. The majority of Norsemen were free farmers that payed taxes and pledged their loyalties to their local leader or noble. There were really only two classes to put it simply, if you were a farmer or "peasant" if you will, you grew up surrounded with the idea of battle and war, so if your king ever called upon you to fight you would. In this way I guess you could say peasants were knights as well. And through war and battle one could move up into the ranks of the nobles. Another connection I found between the way of life of the Norsemen and those of which we studied during the Beowulf unit is blood feuds between tribes and marriages for diplomatic reasons. They used marriage to settle disputes between two conflicting tribes.

Religion was an area that Norsemen differed in from that of Middle Age society in that they were polytheistic and believed in their own gods. Gods that we hear of in their myths and legends like Thor the god of thunder. Norse mythology is very similar to that of Greek mythology, which like Dr. comber expressed when Trevor said something about Norse mythology, brings about the question of how all these ancient mythologies were so similar between peoples spread about across the globe who apparently had no form of contact with these other civilizations.

I chose for my specialization to be Norse influence on this time period because in the opening weeks of this class I heard that the Vikings come up and I simply thought that in all the years of history that I've taken I always hear about the Vikings, but never actually learn about them so hear would be my chance to take what I learn about a subject I'm interested in and incorporate it with the topics of discussion in class. 

Citations

International World History Project. World History Center. Web. 9 September 2008.

Cohen's Monster Theory and The Rule of St. Benedict

I found this week particularly interesting, the texts we read, "The Rule of St. Benedict" and "Cohen's Monster Theory", were by far (in my opinion) the most interesting texts we've read so far. At first, "The Rule of St. Benedict" seemed very monotonic, straightforward and simplistic, everything I knew about monks from my  little bit of exposure simply seemed to be outlined in this text. I remember that for most of the time I spent reading "The Rule of St. Benedict" I was thinking, "Why is Dr. Comber having us read this? I don't even think there is anything worth discussing here." But sure enough when we came together and with some guidance from Dr. Comber, I found that the topics of discussion were actually quite interesting. I'm not sure if I've heard it elsewhere or just recently when we discussed how the monks were to live in their community, but it really was astonishing how much you could learn about a culture or community by examining the rules made for it's members. I would just like to point out how easily anyone could see the difference in "culture" from Burris to Muncie Central, simply given by the rules that teachers and staff have placed over their students. At Burris I think it's obvious that our rules are much more laid back than say any other normal public school, but why is that? I felt that when I went to Central it was hard to be bitter against teachers who had stupid, remedial rules because I quickly learned that they were necessary. The majority of students at Central could not be trusted to be responsible with the amount of freedom that Burris students have (I won't go into specifics because I don't want to waste your time with examples about rules at a school that most don't care for) .

I thought "Cohen's Monster Theory" was very tedious and hard to read, 23 pages with lots of references that I didn't understand and background knowledge that I didn't have. I had really high hopes for "Cohen's Monster Theory" because of what my sister said about it and she had begged me to take your Contemporary Lit class so that I could get exposed to the ideas in this theory. The most that I took away from reading Cohen's work is in Thesis V, the idea of how we as people turn anything that is different or outside the social norm or that threatens our personal beliefs into a monstrous figure could not be more true. From large scale transformations like the Jews during the reign of Hitler, or even small scale transformations like the freshmen that just reek of BO after gym class and then even they are "exiled" or more like shunned for being different (or smelling different) from the rest of us.

I thought it was really different to learn about how much was revealed about a culture/society through the rules and ideas that are placed over it's people.

Works Consulted

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)." Monster Theory; reading culture. (1996) :                      3-26.  Print.

St. Benedict of Nursia. "The Rule of St. Benedict". Dr. Comber. Medieval Links. n. pag. Web. 4         September 2013.