The Age of the Cathedrals and three Ngaio Marsh books
I have fallen terribly down on reviewing books but one lesson I have finally learned is that it's better to still do stuff for partial credit than throw one's hands up and totally abandon it, so recent things I have read!
The Age of Cathedrals - Georges Duby
Published in 1981 by Duby, who is a famous French medievalist, the book covers 980-1420, so the period after which the Viking raids began to taper off up until the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy. I read this in translation.
I always find it tough to review non-fiction, since I usually rate fiction just based on enjoyment, but my interest in non-fiction is different. The book definitely reads very different from a book that might be published today, however. Some of the terminology reads very dated; at the beginning of the book Duby calls the society "primitive", which feels like terminology that we've moved away from. It's not wrong, exactly. Thinking about the agricultural infrastructure and technology, the paucity of written sources, etc, it's very different from later medieval periods.
I got quite bogged down in this also - there's an exhausting section in the middle about theology and I confess I have never cared about any theology. Reading about how much effort and medieval scholarship (as in scholarship during the middle ages) went into it just made me frustrated with how inadequately it was grappling with the problems it was trying to solve. It's not that I don't value things that are not rock-solid empirical research. But we're physical beings and many of our problems result from actual physical causes, it's frustrating to see the masters and students attempt to answer questions by trying to square their religious belief with the scraps of translated Classical knowledge - that is, mostly Aristotle. Instead of actually looking at the world around them and testing what they saw. Ahh, I know it's because I've received the legacy of the scientific method and it's much easier to see how valuable feedback can be employed once you can see the system, so I was taught the knowledge that many others had to put together and make coherent, but it's frustrating.
The book is also very French (and Paris) focused. It's hard to judge whether this is justifiable or not. I honestly think a lot of medieval scholarship is very English and French dominated, perhaps because I learned it in an Anglosphere context, or because of the patchiness of data that's available (the English manorial court rolls are especially useful and don't exist elsewhere). Sometimes when Duby kept going on about how Paris or Ile-de-France was so central to Gothic whatever, I wanted to roll my eyes, but OK. I'm sure English books are equally Anglo-centric. And to be fair to Duby, in later eras, as influential artistic things shift to the Italian peninsula, he does acknowledge that.
I did enjoy and find a lot of the book really illuminating though, in drawing conclusions about the way art was made, by whom, in whose interests and how it was guided by those who commissioned it, the way this changed, and so on. I liked that Duby also occasionally said that there were some questions we couldn't answer because there simply wasn't evidence - things like the beliefs of the Cathars/Albigensians are hard to interpret, because their writing was destroyed and of course, the reports of them are all from the orthodox Christianity.
I found this book quite difficult to read in general. I think I'm a very strong reader (lol) and I'm interested in medieval history and this was in English. I honestly think it's the translation from French and some of the dryness of how Duby treated the subject, and finally, some of my unfamiliarity. For example some of his citations were tough to read (I am complaining about French translations but Latin is definitely worse) and/or I had never read them, so the references to Dionysius the Aeropagite I just had to kind of mentally move past, because I've never actually read his writing. I eventually started a strategy of deciding to read X number of pages to make progress, something that I have never done - I usually just like reading, so it's not like an effort is really required.
Death at the Bar, Death in Ecstasy, Surfeit of Lampreys - Ngaio Marsh
Started a Ngaio Marsh kick and this Death at the Bar is my favourite of the three I've read so far. Marsh seems to go for very public murders in her novels - the others like Artists in Crime, Death in Ecstasy, Surfeit of Lampreys - all have their victims perish within actual eyewitness-view or in earshot. The victim in this one is murdered when playing a round of darts as the lights flicker in a storm, and succumbs to cyanide poisoning.
Honestly I'm not into mysteries for the mysteries. I don't really care and I'm usually reading too fast to think about it; I often read these in 1 or 2 sittings. I'm into the characters, the setting, and the prose . I've come to realize my favourite era of English prose is somewhere in the early 20th century. I'm not sure what it is - I enjoy Victorian prose, too, and I've read reams of modern stuff, of course, and liked a ton of that. But somehow the stylings of the 20th century really hit that sweet spot. This is a long way of just saying I really enjoy reading about Alleyn and Fox and the inter-war setting and all that. Death at the Bar has an amazing scene near the end where Fox is poisoned and Alleyn flips out and orders the roomful of suspects downstairs to stay there or be arrested for murder, and drags the pubmaster (where they're staying) upstairs to help save Fox. Look, I'm just very into competence, OK. Also Alleyn keeps calling Fox nicknames like Foxkin, and it's adorable. I enjoy the recurring characters very much.
I found Lampreys to be the weakest of the three, even though it's her tenth, and she definitely improved as she went along. I think it's maybe because I never quite liked any of the Lampreys, despite the POV character in the beginning being Roberta, who is enamoured of them. Also, I did say I don't care that much about the mystery, but I do feel it often chickens out if the murderer in a sea of gentry turns out to be a servant.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/198893.html.
The Age of Cathedrals - Georges Duby
Published in 1981 by Duby, who is a famous French medievalist, the book covers 980-1420, so the period after which the Viking raids began to taper off up until the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy. I read this in translation.
I always find it tough to review non-fiction, since I usually rate fiction just based on enjoyment, but my interest in non-fiction is different. The book definitely reads very different from a book that might be published today, however. Some of the terminology reads very dated; at the beginning of the book Duby calls the society "primitive", which feels like terminology that we've moved away from. It's not wrong, exactly. Thinking about the agricultural infrastructure and technology, the paucity of written sources, etc, it's very different from later medieval periods.
I got quite bogged down in this also - there's an exhausting section in the middle about theology and I confess I have never cared about any theology. Reading about how much effort and medieval scholarship (as in scholarship during the middle ages) went into it just made me frustrated with how inadequately it was grappling with the problems it was trying to solve. It's not that I don't value things that are not rock-solid empirical research. But we're physical beings and many of our problems result from actual physical causes, it's frustrating to see the masters and students attempt to answer questions by trying to square their religious belief with the scraps of translated Classical knowledge - that is, mostly Aristotle. Instead of actually looking at the world around them and testing what they saw. Ahh, I know it's because I've received the legacy of the scientific method and it's much easier to see how valuable feedback can be employed once you can see the system, so I was taught the knowledge that many others had to put together and make coherent, but it's frustrating.
The book is also very French (and Paris) focused. It's hard to judge whether this is justifiable or not. I honestly think a lot of medieval scholarship is very English and French dominated, perhaps because I learned it in an Anglosphere context, or because of the patchiness of data that's available (the English manorial court rolls are especially useful and don't exist elsewhere). Sometimes when Duby kept going on about how Paris or Ile-de-France was so central to Gothic whatever, I wanted to roll my eyes, but OK. I'm sure English books are equally Anglo-centric. And to be fair to Duby, in later eras, as influential artistic things shift to the Italian peninsula, he does acknowledge that.
I did enjoy and find a lot of the book really illuminating though, in drawing conclusions about the way art was made, by whom, in whose interests and how it was guided by those who commissioned it, the way this changed, and so on. I liked that Duby also occasionally said that there were some questions we couldn't answer because there simply wasn't evidence - things like the beliefs of the Cathars/Albigensians are hard to interpret, because their writing was destroyed and of course, the reports of them are all from the orthodox Christianity.
I found this book quite difficult to read in general. I think I'm a very strong reader (lol) and I'm interested in medieval history and this was in English. I honestly think it's the translation from French and some of the dryness of how Duby treated the subject, and finally, some of my unfamiliarity. For example some of his citations were tough to read (I am complaining about French translations but Latin is definitely worse) and/or I had never read them, so the references to Dionysius the Aeropagite I just had to kind of mentally move past, because I've never actually read his writing. I eventually started a strategy of deciding to read X number of pages to make progress, something that I have never done - I usually just like reading, so it's not like an effort is really required.
Death at the Bar, Death in Ecstasy, Surfeit of Lampreys - Ngaio Marsh
Started a Ngaio Marsh kick and this Death at the Bar is my favourite of the three I've read so far. Marsh seems to go for very public murders in her novels - the others like Artists in Crime, Death in Ecstasy, Surfeit of Lampreys - all have their victims perish within actual eyewitness-view or in earshot. The victim in this one is murdered when playing a round of darts as the lights flicker in a storm, and succumbs to cyanide poisoning.
Honestly I'm not into mysteries for the mysteries. I don't really care and I'm usually reading too fast to think about it; I often read these in 1 or 2 sittings. I'm into the characters, the setting, and the prose . I've come to realize my favourite era of English prose is somewhere in the early 20th century. I'm not sure what it is - I enjoy Victorian prose, too, and I've read reams of modern stuff, of course, and liked a ton of that. But somehow the stylings of the 20th century really hit that sweet spot. This is a long way of just saying I really enjoy reading about Alleyn and Fox and the inter-war setting and all that. Death at the Bar has an amazing scene near the end where Fox is poisoned and Alleyn flips out and orders the roomful of suspects downstairs to stay there or be arrested for murder, and drags the pubmaster (where they're staying) upstairs to help save Fox. Look, I'm just very into competence, OK. Also Alleyn keeps calling Fox nicknames like Foxkin, and it's adorable. I enjoy the recurring characters very much.
I found Lampreys to be the weakest of the three, even though it's her tenth, and she definitely improved as she went along. I think it's maybe because I never quite liked any of the Lampreys, despite the POV character in the beginning being Roberta, who is enamoured of them. Also, I did say I don't care that much about the mystery, but I do feel it often chickens out if the murderer in a sea of gentry turns out to be a servant.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/198893.html.