Q. why is Amy Winehouse's No no no song quite sad? (This one was my fault -- she said she didn't like it and I said it was also quite sad now, not realising that she wouldn't have got the general import of the lyrics.) A. because she really ought to have gone to Rehab, obviously. That one at least was easy.
Q. why have you come to Italy? All that stuff about la bella vita isn't true, everyone in Italy is miserable. A. Everyone in England is miserable as well but at least you have nice bread.
Q. why study the middle ages given that we are living in 2008? (she does economics) A. first because I find it very interesting and the manuscripts are beautiful. Secondly (I'd had a few cocktails by the time I tried to answer this one) because it is a good thing to understand humankind. History is not a series of improvements leading up to the present day and an even better future; on the contrary there are things we have lost when we gained certain types of knowledge, and this loss is causing us problems in the way that the religious and the non-religious live together. Then I talked about American right-wing evangelistic Christians for a while.
Q. why is England Protestant? A. I didn't want to over-simplify this one, so I ended up going back to the marriage of Arthur Tudor and Catherine of Aragon, and in this way I may have fallen into the opposite trap. It's just that it makes me annoyed when people talk about Henry VIII as some sort of pragmatic man motivated by lust and the desire for a political heir; I think he was much more complex than that, and dangerously principled, even if he was perhaps a bit self-deluded about the motivation behind his principles. He genuinely thought that his lack of a son was a sign of God's anger at his marriage to his sister-in-law; and it was quite fair for him to get annoyed at his treatment by the pope. Henry VIII was not the first English king to get divorced, but the last (until we get Charles III), and medieval divorces and annulments were common on far far more flimsy grounds. Look at Eleanor of Provence, who had two daughters with Louis the whatnot before divorcing him and marrying the future Henry II. Henry VIII had a team of scholars who tracked down a manuscript of the Old Testament in Hebrew in order to analyse the texts more precisely, and he took it very seriously. The pope at the time, Clement VII, would certainly come out worse than Henry in any comparison of moral behaviour. He was a Medici by-blow, and had at least one "nephew" of his own whom he advanced through his power; he was certainly not motivated by the desire to uphold the sanctity of holy wedlock. Instead, because of some military reverses, he was completely politically under the thumb of Spain, and hence of Catherine's nephew. It's hard not to sympathise with Henry's anger that his scholarly arguments couldn't get a look in compared to political exigencies, that the pope wasn't considering God's laws but the wishes of the Emperor. The forged Donation of Constantine made the popes temporal rulers and diminished vastly their spiritual authority, and it's the best exemplum I know for the need to separate political power and religion. And then Mary's unpopular marriage to Philip of Spain, and the pope's ridiculous bull exhorting English Catholics to assassinate Elizabeth I, sealed England's Protestantism.
Q. Do people in England like the queen? A. She's OK, but we're not so fond of her descendants.
Q. Isn't it strange that England has a royal family when it's a very avant-garde country? A. Not at all, England is very traditional. Then I ended up trying to explain the failure of the Commonwealth and the restoration of Charles II. I may have overmade my point about the need to study history...
2. Italian is great, and having to speak it to my flatmates is very good for me. I think I have learnt quite a lot in a week and a half of the corso di Italiano per straniere. I don't have a natural ability with languages, but I do have a helpful OCD/aspergers-y tendency to become obsessive about things, which means I keep trying to work things out in Italian in my head, and it's making me tired.
3. Oh Figaro! Salsiciotto!
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