The Cloister and the Hearth

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Leave this pilgrimage, and instant return to Rome. Penitence abroad is little worth. There where we live lie the temptations we must defeat, or perish; not fly in search of others more showy, but less lethal. Easy to wash the feet of strangers, masked ourselves. Hard to be merely meek and charitable with those about us.'" --chapter LXXV

I wonder what the medieval period was really like. We know what the fictional medieval era was like because it can be found in every single work of fiction about this age for hundreds of years. Indeed even the writers of that time perpetuated the myth.novel by Charles Reade 1893 poster by Edward Penfield advertising a US edition of The Cloister & the Hearth If fiction is to be believed, there were soldiers and knights regularly roaming the country aimlessly on some pointless and digressive quest. Some were brave, some were evil, some were comical, some were weak – and there were very few of any other kind. These knights were always defending damsels, getting into skirmishes or being drawn into battles.

I do not know where I can find a book in which the highest qualities of head and of heart go together as they do in this one. [1] Arthur Machen, in his short story "The Islington Mystery, [3] contrasted the work with George Eliot's Romola: Rudyard Kipling, discussing his masterpiece Kim (in his autobiography Something of Myself) said he had wanted to write something “worthy to lie alongside” Cloister. ‘Not being able to do this, I dismissed the ambition as ‘beneath the thinking mind. So does a half-blind man dismiss shooting and golf.’ Doyle compliments the quantity of minute detail giving the feeling of daily life in the 1500s, from a clean Dutch home to a slovenly medieval German Inn to conflicted pre-Renaissance Rome. He incidentally mentions clothing, hobbies, morals, attitudes, and popular outlook at the end of the Middle Ages. On the downside he mentions

CHAPTER LI

Mercy! What's this? A gibbet! and ugh, two skeletons thereon! Oh Denys, what a sorry sight to woo by!" "Nay, said Denys, "a comfortable sight; for every rogue i' the air there is one the less a-foot." THERE IS AN ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF THIS TITLE WITH LINKED TABLE OF CONTENTS WHICH MAY VIEWED AT EBOOK Thus records of prime truths remain a dead letter to plain folk: the writers have left so much to the imagination, and imagination is so rare a gift. Here, then, the writer of fiction may be of use to the public--as an interpreter. The scene with the gibbet wherein (haha) they stand under the decaying bodies of certain criminals and are regaled with the tales of how each poor soul was brought to this sorry end. Classic macabre medieval lit. Toothsome, that.