Boethius wrote one of the most influential manuscriptsof the Medieval age. In his Consolation, he writes about how, in order to be truthful, one needs to take his trust from Dame Fortune and instead place it with the Suma Bonum, or highest good. From what I know, this was the standard arguement for Chirstianity in the middle ages. One needs to place his trust in that good.

Boethius echos throughout the literature of the period, Chaucer translated The Consolation, and we can see Boethius' influence in most of his work. Dante's Divine Comedy works Boethius in, my friend-/No friend of Fortune- has found his way impeded/On the barren slope as a reason for Dante the traveler's wandering from the "correct path."

With so many references to the idea of fortune's wheel, and the idea of the Suma Bomum, it seems almost apparent that in our representation of people from the Medieval times, we would not only know this idea, but it would be ingraned into our minds.

My problem is in maintaining that idea when it applies to my thoughts. It's not that it's a strange idea, but rather it's not a mode of thinking that i am used to. I guess I'm looking for ideas on how, as re-enactors, are we to synthesize the philosophy to the point where it becomes second nature to us?

Any ideas would be greatly apprecated.

edited to change html tags to ubb tags, doh!

An interesting post. I don't have time to give it the attention it deserves until this weekend - I don't want you to think I am ignoring it.

It's not the question that Corey poses that I'm stuck on, it's the one we usually get stuck on here- what can we assume is "typical"?

Corey says:
in our representation of people from the Medieval times, we would not only know this idea, but it would be ingraned into our minds.

It's a leap of faith to assume that Joe Average Medieval Person would be familiar with this high a level of theological philosophy, isn't it?

I think it would take more than just your average educated person to be versed in sophisticated dogma of this nature. This isn't the kind of thing that would have been taught along with reading and writing in any of the public grammar schools that proliferated in the 13th & 14th C.. I think this is more the kind of stuff that would have been taught in a monastary school, along with "how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin".

I'm not suggesting that common people weren't familiar with Chaucer's stories, on the contrary, I believe they were as popularly known as the stories from the Decameron. However, Joe Average knows the stripped down version told in the street and enacted by street performers. My guess is Chaucer's tales had an entirely different and entertainment-centered focus when diluted and retold for the common guy. The difference between Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the Disney cartoon. Hugo's book fairly reeks of pathos and moral lessons, where Disney's version is stripped down to a cute protagonist and a few catchy tunes.

So my answer is not how to ingrain it, but to question whether it *was* ingrained at all.

Sorry- I know that wasn't what you were looking for...

Gwen

"The One [Suma Bonum] creates in its overflowing goodness; it attracts as taht which is beloved, pulling all toward itself. The Neoplatonic One who binds together the entire universe through love-though lacking Christianity's transcendent but personal deity-came to evoke the New Testament's God of Love. thus the Neoplatonic concept fo the One coincided with the Judaeo-Christian belief in a Creator God who providentially sustains all that exists...

Throughout the medieval era Neoplationism exerted a perbasive and lasting impact that Carolly Erickson maintains was central to the era's belief in a vast realm of unseen beings and in the possibility of using magic to control the natural world, "triggering by secret methods the life principle that united all things" (13). Thus the medieval period's double vision, its percasive sese of an unseen, spiritual level of existence-which is more real and more permanent that the visible material world-had its roots, at least partially, in the Neoplatonic philosophical framework.

That framework merged successfully with the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the universe to provide an overarching paradigm that lasted until the Copernican revolution in the sixteenth century." (6-7)

I can hartily recommend the book, however, plan on taking a while, it's a very dense book.

Please tell me that you don't believe that Joe Average Medieval Guy read Plato on a regular basis?

So let's assume that you're a brilliant theological philospher who understands and has the time to sit around discussing arcane philosophy. The question is how do you incorporate that into your portrayal?

Seems like if you have a handle on it in your real life, it shouldn't be difficult to use it when you're a medieval person. Maybe you just need to be able to talk about it with other people, like you and I are now. You can't learn how to use something adroitly if you don't practice.

But I'm not Joe Average Medieval Person... How do you think this discussion would run if you were talking to someone who wasn't capable of meeting your mental abilities, or didn't know about the NeoPlatonic "One"? I think just being able to ask this question sets you well above Joe Average.

Corey's question, or rather how I twisted it, is just the sort of thing we as reenactors run up against. Of course I was playing devil's advocate and debating the extreme. It's difficult to debate unless one has an opposing position to debate against.

I can't joust, so matching wits is the next best thing. Keeps the adrenalin running.

Corey wrote
"Boethius wrote one of the most influential manuscriptsof the Medieval age. In his Consolation, he writes about how, in order to be truthful, one needs to take his trust from Dame Fortune and instead place it with the Suma Bonum, or highest good. From what I know, this was the standard arguement for Chirstianity in the middle ages. One needs to place his trust in that good."

Actually, I have been discovering through my various readings that people with any education at all in the later middle ages thought, or were trained to think in terms of allegory as an expression of complex thought - the 14th & 15th c. were veritably the age of the allegory. I will never be fully able to appreciate such things as Olivier de la Marches poetry, as the allegory he uses in his poetry does not paint the immediate clear mental image that it would to his contemporaries.

In terms of allegory, fortunes wheel was one of the most popular images of the time - it was a frequently painted subject, and alluded to often in literature. More tellingly, she appears as an object of frustration for earnest spreaders of the gospel if you care to try to wade through any collections of sermons of the time.

I think that fortunes wheel would have been a common popular image to even the uneducated mass of common people - the argument to take ones trust in fortune however, and place it with the Highest Good is a theological nicety that would more probably only be known to the better educated person or theologian. As Corey points out, it is a standard argument theologicaly of the time - which points as negative evidence for it to be a commonly understood idea by the masses - otherwise there would be no need for he who preaches to convince his audience of the necessity to do so.

Now, if i could steal Gwen's devils horns for a moment...

If we learn about any period in history that is not our own, we are primarily relying on documentation, correct? If we then are relying on books, paintings, letters, etc. In an age where literacy is an iffy prospect, wouldn't that state that we can only understand the literate class fully? The mindset and knowlege that the illiterate class owned would then have no record.

And on a seperate part, let me pose this one: Let us take an idea from the current timeframe, one that permiates most of society and is one of those "school-of-life" issues. I'm going to pick drinking, because it's late, and its the only example i can come up with after seeing the Exorsist

Here in American society we consider drinking not only a rite of passage, but as a "fun thing to do." The idea of having a beer after work to wind down permiates our entire culture in some way. However, I don't see the justification/reason/value being a particularly hot topic of discusion. So, I am going to say that this is something that we have absorbed into society's unconsious. Now, how are we going to be able to justify future reenactors absorbing this into their portayals of us? Can an analogy help us to see what we should be doing?

Is there any reason to think that this "Wheel of Fortune" idea would be more prevalent in male- generated philosophy than in female? Rather than reading military histories, I tend to read things about women's roles and female writiers like Christine de Pisan and Margery Kempe. I dodn't notice anything but devout and pretty mainstream Christianity from these sources.