14.2 “The Peekaboo Priest”

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來自 Yale University 的課程

Age of Cathedrals

137 個評分

Yale University

Age of Cathedrals

137 個評分

An introduction to some of the most astonishing architectural monuments the world has ever known—Gothic cathedrals. We shall study the art, literature, intellectual life, economics, and new social arrangements that arose in the shadow of the cathedrals and that were such an important part of the revival of cities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The goal of the course is a better appreciation of the High Middle Ages, a world that is still recognizably our own.

從本節課中

Intellectual and Everyday Life

Here we examine the cathedral in terms of surrounding intellectual and everyday life. A reading of Peter Abelard’s autobiography, The Story of my Misfortunes, testifies to the growth of the scholastic method in the context of the earliest university culture; and two verse comic tales, “The Crucified Priest” and “The Peekaboo Priest” introduce the new mentality of the inhabitant of towns with emphasis on cleverness, quick thinking, and timing along with an anti-clerical spirit.

14.1 “The Crucified Priest”9:14

14.2 “The Peekaboo Priest”3:34

與講師見面

Howard Bloch
Sterling Professor of French
French

This is the point of another comic tale you read for today, The Peekaboo Priest,

which is the story of a poor peasant who's wife was courtly, wise and

pleasant, lovely, nor could you fault her birth.

He, beyond any man on Earth, kept his vow to honor and cherish her,

who loved the priest of their parish, to whom she had given her heart.

The priest, who likewise felt Love's smart.

One evening around dinner time, the priest decides to visit his paramour.

In front of the peasant couple's door, he knocks and

asks, what's this you're up to, honest folk?

Answering him the peasant spoke concisely, father, eating dinner.

We'll share it with you.

Come on in here.

The clever priest not only refuses the invitation to dine with the peasant and

his wife.

But looking through the keyhole he accuses them of engaging in sexual intercourse.

Eating you call it?

Nothing doing.

To me it looks more like you are screwing.

When the husband denies the accusation, the priest continues to challenge him.

Come on out here, if you don't mind, while I go take a seat inside and

leave it to you to decide if what I've said is false or true.

Once inside, the priest locks the door and

begins to engage in intercourse with the peasant's all too willing wife.

Then, when the peasant himself, looking through the keyhole on the outside,

protests, the priest, having turned the tables, takes no notice.

The priest goes right on with his meal and says, so how does it appear?

Don't you see I'm just sitting here, eating my dinner at this table?

And so the peasant fell for it, thanks largely to his lack of wit.

This is of course an alternative version of the ways in which medieval priest

were supposed to act.

But the tale of The Peekaboo Priest, as the medieval comic tale in general,

unlocks the world of the body and the senses before the Protestant reformation

that is also part of the age of cathedrals.

This is that other Middle Ages that is visible in many obscene sculptures,

in Romanesque and Gothic churches.

As in these two figures exposing their genitals, one male and one female.

On capitols, in the Church of Sainte-Radegonde in Poitiers.

It's also visible in the doodlings,

in the decorative margins of many Gothic manuscripts.

As in this image of a nun picking phalluses off a tree in a manuscript of

the Romance of the Rose in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Or this image of a knight shooting a crossbow into the anus of a monk

while the monk sermonizes, and admonishing finger in the air.

Or this embroidered doodle of a nude man and a woman about to embrace,

as William the Conqueror charges the army of King Harold of England,

in the upper margin of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Or less sexual, but nonetheless lighthearted, this image of boys,

one of whom is well-behaved, and the other is rude and crude, above the south portal

of the west facade of the cathedral of Chartres to which we now turn.

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