The more I delve into medieval literature, the more it seems as though the Medievals were smarter than us, not dumber. Or at least the people who could read were. There's such a dense intellectualism in all the romances and tales and poems. Even love itself is transformed from this thing ruled by passion to a kind of meditative contemplation. It's operating on a higher level of understanding, of consideration, than a lot of contemporary literature, or at least it seems that way to me. And that doesn't even touch on how heavily symbolic and allusive everything is, how nearly everything has multiple meanings and senses.
>>7427376
>And that doesn't even touch on how heavily symbolic and allusive everything is, how nearly everything has multiple meanings and senses.
unlike modernity
o wait
>the more it seems as though the Medievals were smarter than us, not dumber
the idea that intelligence waxed and waned throughout history is idiotic
>It's operating on a higher level of understanding, of consideration, than a lot of contemporary literature, or at least it seems that way to me.
do we have a word for medieval weeaboos yet
>>7427376
selection bias senpai only the best a brightest could read and write and compounding this people don't bother preserving shit
>>7427376
i think there less to detract from human consciousness back then, from the serf to the noble. there was very little to impede upon mans direct contact with reality, nature, other human beings, the arts, etc. actions back then carried so much more weight, emotions more raw, nature more unforgiving. there were idiots and geniuses like in all time periods, but life was definetly more authentic then than it is now for those of us in the consumer industrial technocrat world.
>>7427376
>the Medievals were smarter than us, not dumber
There is no much difference between the medieval's and us in terms of intelligence.
It only happens that the class distinction was stronger and capable people in arts (poetry, music) were the only ones who receive enough education (whether born in a upper class family or separated by an elementary teacher) or funding (a mecenas) to allow them to work on their art instead of doing manual work.
Nowadays everyone can take their book to the public (published or self-published). As the literacy grows there is also a bigger market and a wider spectrum (instead of simply ignorant slave and wise old monk) so the kind of literature grows even bigger.
tl;dr: to get a book published in medieval time, it had to be very good - not enough resources to waste, not many people to read them
Medieval romances are boilerplate genre shit. The "meditativeness" is their inability to stray from these genre constraints and having their characters ossified into the most trite archetypes, expounding in the most vacuous way on "honour" and "virtue".
Compare the worthless extolling of love in medieval and Renaissance and you'll see a qualitative leap in greatness, it's astounding that these people are the same, medieval writers seem barbaric. And Renaissance writers transformed passion into courtly love a thousand times better than what medieval writers shat out.
>>7427376
Even love itself is transformed from this thing ruled by passion to a kind of meditative contemplation.
Explain what you mean by this, every piece of medieval literature I've read involving love typically meant some faggot running around doing shit to impress a woman he's never even met
>>7427973
Fuck, I meant to put that first part in quotation marks.
>>7428020
I can get on board with the concept of what you're speaking of towards the end of your post, but knowing little of the person one is acting in favor of still seems pretty idiotic, or as though it's the ideal method of courting for people who are so socially inept that it's easier for them to go out and fight in plate armor than it is for them to talk to another human being.
>>7427405
Human intelligence has never waxed, it has only waned, and technology which is built on thousands of generations of development allows you to think otherwise.
>>7428750
take your mythological "fall of man" narrative and go somewhere else
>>7427441
This. There's also an added reward bias: when you read Shakespeare you need to constantly refer to annotations referring to all of the cultural references he was making. As it seems incredibly complex, you feel as though it must be valuable simply due to its complexity. However, to the people of the day, those references would have been as clear and straightforward as your average Family Guy cutaway gag.in five hundred years professors will be teaching Family Guy as a masterful example of 21st Century post-post modernism, and they will periodically pause the video to explain to their class of first years who Bill Clinton is, what 'He-Man' was referencing, and the relevance of 'Conway Twitty.'
