"For as myn auctour seyde, so sey I."
Some musings on popular culture, spanning several centuries and using ridiculously sweeping generalizations.
Lately I, and many other people, have been lamenting the state of popular entertainment. Reality shows aside (because that would be a rant all in itself), most of the successful shows, movies, etc. are basically remakes of older ideas. A book is made into a movie, which is then made into a televison show; an older movie is remade into a newer movie; comic books become movies and television shows become comics; books and films rely more on sequels and prequels than on new ideas. What hit me today is that this is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the medievalist in me should have embraced it long ago. While the strategy of reworking old ideas has been common for centuries, it really hit its stride in the Middle Ages.
Medieval Europe did not generally prize originality. Or rather, they didn't prize it in terms of content. If you can present an old story in a new way, that's fantastic. If you have a new story that you want to tell, you'd darn well better lie and say that you found it in some old book written by a guy with a Latin name. It was almost always safer to have an "authority" (or "auctour") on which you based your work, or at least parts of it. (This was obviously long before copyright laws. But then, the longer your authority has been dead, the better, so the books would have been in the public domain for ages before it was worth stealing from them.) Nearly everything Chaucer wrote is gleaned from other sources -- some of the Canterbury Tales are almost word-for-word translations -- and the genius is that Chaucer told the tales better than anyone else. So really, taking an old story and adapting it is not limited to the present age. The difference is that modern culture claims to value fresh ideas and daring concepts. I think that's where the problem lies. At least the Middle Ages were honest about appealing to the authority of older texts; we're just too afraid to try new concepts.
I'm still mourning the loss of one of the few new, original shows on TV (Pushing Daisies, I still love you!), but it's nice to know that a derivative culture can still produce something great. Well, at least in theory. Setting aside some decent retellings of old myths, I have yet to see Revenge of the Killer Asparagus IX laballed as the next Morte D'Arthur.
Lately I, and many other people, have been lamenting the state of popular entertainment. Reality shows aside (because that would be a rant all in itself), most of the successful shows, movies, etc. are basically remakes of older ideas. A book is made into a movie, which is then made into a televison show; an older movie is remade into a newer movie; comic books become movies and television shows become comics; books and films rely more on sequels and prequels than on new ideas. What hit me today is that this is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the medievalist in me should have embraced it long ago. While the strategy of reworking old ideas has been common for centuries, it really hit its stride in the Middle Ages.
Medieval Europe did not generally prize originality. Or rather, they didn't prize it in terms of content. If you can present an old story in a new way, that's fantastic. If you have a new story that you want to tell, you'd darn well better lie and say that you found it in some old book written by a guy with a Latin name. It was almost always safer to have an "authority" (or "auctour") on which you based your work, or at least parts of it. (This was obviously long before copyright laws. But then, the longer your authority has been dead, the better, so the books would have been in the public domain for ages before it was worth stealing from them.) Nearly everything Chaucer wrote is gleaned from other sources -- some of the Canterbury Tales are almost word-for-word translations -- and the genius is that Chaucer told the tales better than anyone else. So really, taking an old story and adapting it is not limited to the present age. The difference is that modern culture claims to value fresh ideas and daring concepts. I think that's where the problem lies. At least the Middle Ages were honest about appealing to the authority of older texts; we're just too afraid to try new concepts.
I'm still mourning the loss of one of the few new, original shows on TV (Pushing Daisies, I still love you!), but it's nice to know that a derivative culture can still produce something great. Well, at least in theory. Setting aside some decent retellings of old myths, I have yet to see Revenge of the Killer Asparagus IX laballed as the next Morte D'Arthur.