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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
['all that adolescent stuff' was something he was mature enough not to need in his Legendarium. Bowdlerized? Nah. He was not on some mission to 'clean it all up'; it just didn't have the kind of front-and-center importance to him that it seems to have for so many authors of our era.
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Oh dear, I'd never thought of Chaucer as an author of our era. Nor as particularly of an adolescent flavour.
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Originally Posted by lmp
The language I was using -- besmirched, ravages of infidelity, deplores -- have to do with the realities of adultery in a society that holds as its rule of law Christian standards, as did the high medieval. I'm not talking in Victorian terms here, just the realities of what a Lady faced from her Lord if she had been unfaithful with one of his knights.
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Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm. I rather think there was a bit of difference between the historical reality of medieval times and Christian standards and literary genres. For the women of, say, Henry VIII's court--which is a bit late to the times we are talking of--beheading was the more likely consequence rather than besmirched.
And about writing in the spirit of Tolkien: if, as you admitted a few posts back, that Tolkien was clearly working within cultural constructs of feminity, then what will happen to his concept of fantasy as those cultural constructs change? Or are you suggesting that there is some eternal stereotype about romantic males and idealisation? (Kudos by the way, for the way you have inverted the standard feminist complaint that male authors don't know what's going on in female characters' minds.)