Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. Some foxing on page block not on page face. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The medieval emissaries of the Catholic Church brought to Great Britain in addition to the whole corpus of sacred history a Continental university system based on the Greek and Latin Classics. Such native legends as those of King Arthur Guy of Warwick Robin Hood the Blue Hag of Leicester and King Lear were considered suitable enough for the masses yet by early Tudor times the clergy and the educated classes were referring far more frequently to the myths in Ovid Virgil and the grammar school summaries of the Trojan War. Though official English literature of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries cannot therefore be properly understood except in the light of Greek mytho- logy the Classics have lately lost so much ground in schools and uni- versities that an educated person is now no longer expected to know (for instance) who Deucalion Pelops Daedalus Oenone Laocoon or Antigone may have been. Current knowledge of these myths is mostly derived from such fairy-story versions as Kingsley’s Heroes and Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales; and at first sight this does not seem to matter much because for the last 2000 years it has been the fashion to dismiss the myths as bizarre and chimerical fancies a charming legacy from the childhood of the Greek intelligence which the Church natur- ally depreciates in order to emphasise the greater spiritual importance of the Bible. Yet it is difficult to overestimate their value in the study of early European history religion and sociology. (MP)