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name of the rose continues to slap. i'm realizing that part of what i enjoy so deeply about this sort of monastery-centric fiction is the same thing i enjoy about any realistic medieval material, which is that for all intents and purposes it is offering a postapocalyptic fantasy -- in that the tenets of the storyworld are a sort of perverse reinvention of the tenets of our own world, twisted just enough to act as historical metaphor -- and that the best media in that genre tends to gravitate toward the humanity underneath the religiosity.

which is the most interesting part to me, i think. medieval monastic life was overwhelmingly religious, obviously, to a sort of dizzying degree compared to the modern world, but ultimately the way that power worked in medieval societies is not that different than the way power works now. the structure of the medieval catholic church might as well be the structure of modern corporate capitalism, it's just that the way that the power is defined is along religious rather than capitalist lines.

which, of course, hilariously, makes me sound like some sort of 15th century protestant, but that's the funniest part -- i do find myself thinking like a 15th century protestant sometimes when i'm reading Name of the Rose or whatever, because you can see exactly how those movements gained ground in the context of the time.

of course, all of this is fiction, so all of it is a bit twisted to serve a neat/concise narrative function, and in real history things are rarely that neat or concise, but you get the idea


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in reply to @dante's post:

Have you read A Canticle for Leibowitz? I first read it as a teenager, before I was exposed to historical monastic fiction, but reading more later made me realize how much the literal post-apocalyptic science fiction really is, like you say, recognizable in monastic fiction and historical accounts of monastic life.