Captain's, er, I mean, Einhard's Log

Einhard

*Drum roll*

Presenting, for your edification and delight, A List of Books wot I have Read!!

Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

I have to say that, even though I had heard good things about it, I approached this book with slight trepidation which, considering it was written almost 700 years ago and consists of 686 pages of quite densely packed text, is probably not all that surprising. On top of that, I really didn't know all that much about the work. I needn't have worried though. Decameron is a brilliant piece of literature. It's humorous (often laugh out loud so), ribald, shocking, bawdy, gleeful, full of vitality, and even touching at times. It's often said to have influenced the Canterbury Tales, and Chaucer's debt is immediately apparent.

There is no plot per se, more a loose structure employed by the author to tell his tales. The setting is Florence immediately after the Plague of 1348/9, and the opening pages contain a searing account of the devastation it wrought on the city, an account rendered all the more powerful because Boccaccio actually survived the pestilence, and by the contrast with the often light hearted material that follows. Ten wealthy young citizens, 3 men and the remainder women, decide to leave the city and seek the relief from the Plague in the countryside. Here they spend two weeks, ten days of which are devoted in part to the telling of tales. The narrative is thus simply divided into ten chapters, corresponding to each day, and in which each of the ten tell a tale. Each day, one of the ten is crowned king or queen for that day, and he/she decides on the theme of the stories to be told during their reign.

With that simple template, the first story of the first day is embarked upon, and within a few short pages completely blows away any preconceptions that the reader might have had regarding the Middle Ages. The medieval period is generally viewed as a dreary amalgam of the Monty Pyton version in The Holy Grail (bring out your dead!) and that of the Horrible History series- as a dreadful period of hunger, war, disease, plague and famine, a world where the power of the Church was absolute and the most innocuous of utterances or actions could have one before the Inquistition or tied to a stake, a dour, dark, humourless age, where the vast majority of the population were ground down by poverty and fear, living miserable, joyless lives. (Sounds somewhat like Ireland in the 50s actually!).

But Decameron punctures this entirely. Sure, all the conditions listed above were more or less extant. Boccaccio was writing after the Plague for one, Italy was riven with war and civil strife, the Church was hugely powerful etc. Shakespeare wrote something about all the world being a stage and all the men and women merely players, and the medieval stage was vastly different to our own modern one. What Decameron gets across though, is that the players were little different from you or I, they revelled in whatever freedoms they had, they delighted in tricks and pranks, laughed with their friends, and mourned with them, loved and lusted, hated and envied. For all the hardship of their lives, they were still lived to the full. Admittedly, Boccaccio's storytellers are all wealthy, and he's writing for a well to do, literate audience, whose existence was far removed from that of the average peasant, but I think that he captures something of the human spirit in his work, and reminds us that, whatever our physical circumstances, that spirit remains has remained unchanged over the centuries. Together with the Canterbuty Tales, it's an important antidote to the usual version of the Middle Ages.

Apart from all that, the tales of the Decameron are, more often that not, delightful. As mentioned, many are laugh out loud funny. The irreverance is breathtaking at times. The Catholic Church is mercilessly lampooned, friars and priests and even the papacy are ridiculed and scorned in a humorous manner, yet there is also quite a degree of scathing social commentary beneath all the banter. Monks and nuns are as likely to bed a good looking companion as their lay brothers and sisters are. Indeed, given the formers need to do so covertly, their antics are often more hilarious. The stories deal with love, both requited and otherwise, with friendship and its power, with family, with powerful kings and the poorest paupers, with knights and peasants, and often places women in the dominant position. The tales are shocking and scarbarous, but often quite touching and indeed sad. They speak of, and celebrate, the human condtion, but in a way that is both entertaining and edifying. In short, dacmeron is a brilliant, and thoroughly unexpected read. And what's more, the stories are generally very short, and don't have to be read in any particular order, so the reader can pop in and out at will.

Anyway, that's the first installment of my, ahem, Log. It's sad that I still find that word amusing...
I meant this to be a short, to the point synopsis, but I seem to have rambled a bit. Next up is Gulliver's Travels by Dean Cain Swift. Hopefully this time my review will be shorter than the actual book itself!

Einhard

I picked this book after reading Robin Lane Fox's "Classical World" thinking that, as it's short and compact, it would allow me to keep my knowledge of Greek civilisation somewhat fresh without having to re-read Lane Fox's quarter of a million word tome. I was sorely disappointed though. The book is far too short to even attempt to achieve the scope of Cartledge's ambition for it. There are 208 pages of main text in my copy, but this is reduced to about 190 pages of narrative when maps and other illustrations are taken in. Also, the individual lines are extremely short and generously spaced, further reducing the space available for expostion. I know people will argue that the book is supposed to be short and compact, that as Cartledge himself notes, it's a breviarum rather than an epitome, but I don't think that's a good enough reason for the paucity of material. If it was impossible to relate the minimum that needed to be related, then either the project should have been abandoned, or expanded. As it is, it gives only the most vague, unsatisfactory sense of Greek civilisation.

In discussing Cnossos for example, there is absolutely no mention of the eruption of Santorini which lead to the collapse of the "palace" civilisation of the island. The book purports to tell the "history" of 11 cities, yet one would think on that basis that Athens ceased to be after the 4th century BC, and only re-emerged in the 19th century AD. Indeed, for all the cities up to those covered in the Hellenistic section, there is barely a sentence to mention their existence after the 4th century.

Furthermore, the decision to enchew a chronolgoical or thematic narrative for what amounts to a geographical one, bears frustrating fruit. For example, when discussing Sparta, Cartledge makes a subtle hint at the diminuation of their power in the mid 4th century, but one has to wait 50 pages until the chapter on Thebes to read about the decisive battle of Leuctra, in which the Spartans were defeated. It's ironic in light of this, that Cartledge gives so much to the laconicism of the Spartans themselves.

All in all, I couldn't reccommend this book to anyone. For a neophtye, there is nowehere near enough information, and for anyone with even a cursory knowledg, there is nowhere near enough expostion. By attempting to cram an entire history into such a brief few pages, Cartledge falls between two stools. It's a great pity because he writes with great verve and energy, and obviously brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to bear on the subject.