Lesson 7. On the Renaissance.

In honor of today's trip to the NY Renaissance Faire, I have decided to compile everything literature et al have taught me about the renaissance.

Sources include, but are not limited to:
Monty Python, The Sword in the Stone, Le Morte D'Arthur. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Middleton, Phillipa Gregory, Geraldine Brooks, the Tudors

The Renaissance were a bawdy time.

In America, we were more or less taught that - until the 1960's - all people acted like a mix of Puritans and Queen Victoria. And not Arthur Miller's sleeping around and asking for forgiveness later Puritans. We're talking dunk her in the water because she lives alone Puritans.

You know. The mean ones.

But... if literature et al serve me correctly, apparently all the wenches were willing and every knight had an invisible dwarf keeping the skeletons in his closet company.

And I'm pretty sure everyone in the Renaissance were open sexually. Shakespeare, check. Anne Boleyn? Wasn't there that rumor about her and her brother?

In the Renaissance, peasants had bad teeth, but gentry (and a few ready-to-rumble farmer's daughters) had impeccable teeth and great skin.

Except for those who died by pox.

Which was terrible.

But not as much as the plague.

And the women in the Renaissance? They were more Mary Mags than BVMs. But everyone listened to them.

And adored them.

Wrote them sonnets.

Put them on a pedestal while valuing their input.

Double-entendre intentional.

Those women at court were manipulative and basically ran the country because the boys just wanted to hunt, fight, and have sex.

And they all spoke the most beautiful formal English.

And knew myths, the Bible, the classics, while being for the most part illiterate.

And they were all Catholic. Except Shylock and Othello.

More later...