Elia Marinova - A Quest for Prohibited Knowledge скачать в хорошем качестве

Elia Marinova - A Quest for Prohibited Knowledge

A Quest for Prohibited Knowledge: Remakes of the Descent Motif from the Medieval exemplum to the Modern Science Fiction Chapter 107 in Oesterley’s edition of the 14th century bestseller “Gesta Romanorum” tells the story of a cleric who found the entrance code for an enchanted palace full of treasures beneath the earth of Campus Martius, and because of his avarice was trapped forever in the darkness. Like most of the content of “Gesta Romanorum”, designed as a selection of inspiring exempla for the church sermon, this story ended with an allegorical explanation and a moral teaching about the transience of material possessions. On the other side, the earlier account of a similar underworld trip in the “Deeds of the English Kings” of William of Malmesbury (1125) put focus on the dangerous inventiveness of human mind, supported by the magic arts; this time, the intruder in the prohibited realm, the great scholar and alleged necromant Gerbert of Aurillac, was able to escape the punishment for breaking borders and taboos. There is a direct remake of the story in the poem “Writing on the Image” of the English poet and painter William Morris in the 19th c., and a lot of indirect reception in the European folktales and their literary adaptations by the Romanticists (L. Tieck’s Die Elfen, Pogorelsky’s Little Black Hen et al.). The tale in “Gesta Romanorum” is a starting point for us to reflect on the different ways of secularization of the archetypical motif of ritual descent in the post-classical popular and intellectual culture. The first stage of this secularization was reached already in ancient time with Lucian’s Dialogues and Apuleius’ Tale of Amor and Psyche; the second – with the new development of the motif towards “subterraneous fiction” after the transmission of Arabic knowledge, but also of Eastern lore from Al-Andalus to Latin Europe, and attaching of the classical Eastern motif of hidden treasure to the names of some Christian Roman emperors or to the name of the Pope in the case of Gerbert d’Aurillac; the third stage is concurrent with the birth of modern science “subterraneous” fiction (Holberg’s Klimii Iter subterraneum, Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Centre of the Earth). Although being pseudo-initiatory, these accounts about passages to the underworld with its miracles and imagined inhabitants have a special place in the interplay of science and religion, as far as they tell a story of the quests of human intellect in its relation to God and nature – from Psyche’s curiosity through the intellectual concupiscency of the hero of medieval tales to the scholarly hybris (the challenge to nature laws) in modern science (fiction). Elia Marinova (Sofia University)