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When I get back from my holiday, I may treat myself to this essay (though it is in German). The contents (with comparisons to Byron's Manfred and Goethe's Faust) seem sound. I would go further: he's proto-Dostoevskian. It's horribly unfortunate that the English-language unauthorised 'popular' retitling of Notre Dame de Paris gives a distorted ( Read more... )

I would, if I'd seen the modern illustrations. In a charity shop back in St Andrews today I managed to pick up Jan Needle's abridged (gutted, more like) translation of NDdP under the Hunchback title Hugo never approved. It has quite hideous illustrations by David Hughes.
I much prefer Aimé de Lemud (see above) and Gustave Brion's.

The tower on the left in the 15C painting is the north tower of Notre Dame de Paris.

( If you know the Victor Hugo novel... (click to read on) )

Have been having an interesting if frustrating exchange on IMDb, re: Hobbit 3, with an acquaintance who takes the view that gratuitously changing characters and motivations is preferable to depicting characters grappling with Heroic-Age type honour codes because
you have really got to make allowances for the modern viewer who fails to understand so ( Read more... )

Having managed to avoid all previous episodes, I steeled myself for the last part of The White Queen to see what kind of a mess they made of it. Soapy, badly costumed (some women's outfits might have passed muster in Renaissance Italy but not Northern Europe), badly armoured, badly coiffured (and men with facial hair in 15C?!), and Bosworth done on ( Read more... )

Another interesting book for understanding the intellectual world portrayed in NDdP is Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Routledge, 2002 ed. originally publ. 1964). It's clear from what we're told about his reading that Claude's interested in the newly accessible Hermetic works published by Ficino, and that (like Giovanni ( Read more... )

Here's some operatic eye-candy. I discovered the cute young Austrian baritone Markus Butter as Dom Claude the Archdeacon in the 2010 Dresden production of Schmidt's Notre Dame de Paris (updated to '30s USA: Esméralda as a peroxided Roxie Hart, going to the electric chair, and Phœbus as a cop). Video trailer here. He has a lovely voice, too: I do ( Read more... )

Read this and laugh (or weep).