[Sca-cooks] pastry

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 05:55 PM 4/17/02 -0400, you wrote:

>[Aside: what the blazes _is_ it about the 12th century anyway??? It's
>like a magnet for people seeking difficult documentation for things
>that, half the time, aren't 12th century anyway... Is it a Norman
>thing???]
>
>Adamantius

Dear, dear Master A... whatever to do with you? I could pull a Stefan and
suggest that you go to the Florilegium and look up the 12th C. Bibliography
that a certain Norman of your acquiantance wrote?

Personally, I think that every era has people looking at it for
documentation for things that didn't exist. Silly people are silly people.

As to the attraction to the 12th c, there are a number of reasons. There
has been more than one writer who has published on the subject of a
'renaissance' in the 12th c, given the flourishing art, literature, music,
and quick changes in culture. You have Marie de France, the Troubadours,
Andreas Cappelanus, scholars such as Abelard, St. Benedict, Gratian,
bigger-than-life personalities such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry
Plantagenet, Thomas Becket, Richard Coeur de Lion, Philip of France. And
one that made a whole industry- Chretien de Troyes, who collected and wrote
the first substantial grouping of Arthurian literature. It is largely the
Chretien version of Arthur and his knights that feeds our imaginative vision.

It's not a Norman thing, any more than it is an Aquitanian thing, or a
German thing or a Saracen thing... though between the conquests of England
and Sicily, The Normans seem to have been in their heyday in the 11th and
12th centuries...

Lovely time period, I started out there. But now, for me? 1402, with a
handsome Gascon at my side... who needs Lion-heart? I have a Dragon!

'Lainie
-I'm home- I'm tired- I go *BOOM!* now...
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It's never the same river once you've stepped into it.