Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches Book

Four stars for great scholarship and affable readability. Padel states her aim clearly--to use tragedy to 'explore some aspects of what the Athenians who wrote and watched them thought was inside and outside human beings. What came in from outside? What came out from within?' Her approach is language-driven: philological nuance drives the theoretical take-aways. Classics isn't really my thing so I'm in no position to judge, but it feels very responsible.

Notable passages: 

'It has traditionally been part of a philologist's job to prise apart a word's "shades" of meaning in a particular passage. It is against philology's grain to say that a Greek word has simultaneously an abstract or metaphorical as well as a literal and concrete sense. But the shades of meaning we find will always be directed by the relationship between Greek and the language or languages in which we ourselves think, and it may be that our own languages are not the best ones through which to approach these words and the picture of consciousness they enshrine.'       

'Wings, teeth, claws, running and kicking feet, goads, ropes, stings, poison, arrows: animals and daimones together created a spectrum of assault. All the ingredients of science fiction start here: insects, carnivorous grotesque pursuit, invisible enemies and masters, cosmic rays. Western technological imagination has added a bit to this arsenal, but mainly it glosses and rearranges these essentially Greek ingredients. ... But our continuing use of these shapes can get in the way of our seeing them in a Greek context, with specific Greek (rather than universal) significances ... we see more freshly if we try to separate our particular categories and preconceptions from the Greek material. For example, our assumption that emotion, sleep, misfortune, and gods are different sorts of thing is challenged by patterns of tragic language, which imply that all these act on the self in the same way.'

'But structuralism's early model for Greek approaches to the nonhuman was implicitly, and I think anachronistically as far as the fifth century is concerned, taxonomic. Taxonomy is dear, in the fourth century, to Aristotle's heart. But even he had to abandon it at some points. ... We should beware, I think, of superimposing later, taxonomic, worked-out models of relationships on fifth-century mentality, with its essentially unworked-out, disunited, kaleidoscopic vision of the nonhuman.'

'Fifth-century listeners did not have our option of saying that something is metaphorical, "therefore not real." Personification, as the fifth century inherited and used it, was not an isolatable trick of language, but part of explaining what happened to and inside people. Lived reality was air filled with nonhuman forces. There were good reasons to think of these as the main source of human feeling and experience: a style of thought that continued into Augustine's vision of demons and beyond.'

'Animate, chthonic, dangerous female multiplicity is the background for destructive tragic passion, and underlines by gender tragedy's general implication that the forces disturbing the tragic self, the male self, are not self, that human passion is nonhuman.'