The Children's Crusade书摘若干
- But in “this business” death would not be the fate of self sacrificial, young crusade heroes. Far from it. Instead, the murderous outcome of twisted idealism would be the death of countless others. Victims no longer, these youngsters are now the willing perpetrators of up-to-date horrors.
- “‘when a yearning towards crusades swept... all over Europe’.” Behind the crusades, we learn, were dreams and, more frightening still, visions.
- After a short time all that came to nothing, because it was founded upon nothing.5... Their journey was brought to nought.6... But they succeeded not at all. For all, in different ways, were ruined, died, or returned.7
- What the pueri (boys, children; youths, youngsters) lost historically, they gained mythistorically
- Though this view of “mythistory” seems too despairing a relativism and perhaps too easy a cultural determinism, who can doubt that before historians became self-conscious demythologizers or postmodernists, myths, both as overarching explanations, and as self-contained narrative episodes, pervaded historical literature.
- Perceptively describing the mythistoricizing process, Roland Barthes argues that “myth… abolishes the complexity of human acts.”10 Myth, in other words, simplifi es, clarifi es, and reduces historical complexity to an essential meaning. Does that fatally undermine historiography or merely make it digestible?
- From this world of moralizing, theologizing, cautionary, prognosticating,道德化、神化、警示、预言 wundergeschichten (miracle tales or “histories”), a select number of medieval mythistories outlived the Middle Ages and entered the modern world. One was called the Children’s Crusade.
- Scriptural histories were nothing less than the canonical vessels of God’s truth. Wholly conscious of the dignity of their craft, medieval chroniclers and historians passed up few opportunities to trumpet it.
- Once mythistoricized, the narrative of the Children’s Crusade was not so much history deformed, as history outgrown, transfifigured. Disengaged from linear events, liberated by mythic motifs, the medieval runaways, now equipped for time travel, hurtled through the centuries. Then, every so often the pueri would be released from suspended animation and taken on a tour of the ever-multiplying cultural media—encyclopedias; histories, both scholarly and popular; verse; illustrations; children’s literature, novels for grown-ups; music; fifi lms; TV documentaries. Such a moment came not so long ago when the culturally mummififi ed spirit of these forever youthful crusaders stirred and reawakened. Mythistory, history’s stepchild, had come of age. It was now the proud parent of metaphor.
- 对历史的神话化叙事超越历史生成隐喻，Thereby an imagined past could be enlisted in the service of the present
- “The primary function of metaphor is to provide a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another.”26 That is fine, providing partial is emphasized, and the danger signals warning of misunderstanding are kept switched on. Historical metaphors invite anachronism, for historians the deadliest of the deadly sins. Thanks to the postmodernists, writers of history are now very well aware of how readily tropes—figures of speech, metaphors in particular—have infiltrated historiography.27 We have been warned. Metaphors need to be taken metaphorically.
- All of Latin Christendom’s towering Gothic super-structure rested on the stooped backs of peasant laborers
- It was an opportunity to escape from vilification and exploitation, a means of running away from a selfhood brutally imagined by others.
- As a response to the extraordinary in the workaday world—a myth-reading rather than a misreading of history— mythistory simplifies, but also elaborates.
- Figuratively, it implies the fate of the Lost Boys. Betrayed, perhaps by those whom they most trusted, they vanished. In a manner of speaking, they were eaten, consumed, devoured.
- Mythistory, like history, sought causal agents. In that search there was a certain logic, a certain fearful symmetry. A foreboding presence at the start of the story made an eventual scene of carnage all the more inevitable. The search was on to fi nd the guilty party.
- As with Alberic, Matthew, Vincent, and the ARC writer, mythistory, the storyteller’s art, can impose a shape, a pleasing curvature of meaning, that real history often struggles to attain. History has its satisfactions, but these are other than what one gets from a well-told tale. Thanks to mythistory, the pueri, those never-to-be-seen-again child-(better, infant) crusaders, became the Lost Boys of the Middle Ages. Not for the fi rst nor for the last time, a once-historical incident was denatured—then fortifi ed—with mythic motifs, the signatures of literary art. What mythistoricization insured was memorability.
- Andrzejewski’s complex poetic vision is sensitive, lyrical, and lustful. The innocence is childlike; the sexual passions, heterosexual and homo-erotic, not so. Individual human needs and guilty secrets demanding confession co-exist with Catholic-romantic feelings about Christ’s tomb far, far away. Crusade ideology and emotional subjectivity intermix.
