| Description
| Mark Twain's nineteenth-century Yankee visited King Arthur's Court. About a hundred years later, around the same time the American president was said to be living in Camelot, "Frodo Lives" was being scrawled on subway walls. To increase productivity, businesses today send employees on medieval retreats and to seminars on chivalry. Why? The middle ages can be defined broadly as that period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the 15th century Italian Renaissance - a dark time, if one is to believe the men of the Renaissance, in need of light, knowledge, modernization. Yet the stories of these dark ages - of Arthur and his knights, the Holy Grail, dragons and princesses - have endured beyond the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and even survived Post-Modernism. In ways major (Hollywood blockbusters devoted to King Arthur, Beowulf, and the heroes of Tolkien's alternate medieval world) and minor (the frequent and creative use of the phrase "holy grail" in newspapers and popular maga
|
|---|