Dirty....

Since it's been kind of slow in the blogging department, I thought I'd offer up a bit of an update.

First off, I'm nearing 10,000 hits to my site since first installing a counter. Not bad, I guess. It could be worse. The site could be wallowing in the mire of web obscurity. Clearly, it is not, but it's not in the limelight, either.

Secondly, the reading of Gargantua & Pantagruel has been very slow going so far, owed more to interruptions than to anything else. Thus far though, it's been, shall we say, interesting. It's rather entertaining. But if I had to sum it up in a single word, I would call it dirty. It's like a tremendous dirty joke, the kind you're afraid to tell in mixed company. Interwoven with all kinds of delightfully vulgar stories are some moral lessons and attacks on the institutions of Renaissance Europe. It's made for some entertaining reading so far, but I'm sure it will be a while before I complete it.

It's becoming no surprise that the hardline moralistic views of the church came about, and I don't just mean the Catholic church, because the Protestant denominations are just as responsible (Puritans, anyone?). If you read such works as The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, or Gargantua & Pantagruel, it appears that people were having a lot of fun, including the clergy. (The latter, particularly, have been skewered unmercifully in these books.) The backlash was inevitable, I suppose, lest the name of Christianity itself become sullied.

Thus, it seems, European attitudes are finally returning to where they were over 500 years ago. America, on the other hand, is mostly still sticking to more Puritanical views.