Rude Strength

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Pater's description and recognized precisely that quality of the literature of the Middle Ages that I find so compelling. Soon enough, however, it became clear that "" was not something Pater meant as a compliment; he was giving a description of medieval artistic efforts I have since learned that many who champion the Renaissance are apt to give. What Pater was identifying was a lack—a lack of conscious aesthetics, of a "purely artistic quality."3 The Middle Ages, in his estimation, produced art that was unpolished, roughhewn. I disagree with many of the conclusions Pater comes to concerning medieval art, but I still believe it has . I am amazed that he could so misrecognize a virtue for a fault.
When Pater considered the of the Middle Ages, he surely did not have Julian of Norwich in mind, but I did—specifically, I had in mind the bloodbath scene and its direct, determined treatment of its extreme and gory subject. The virtue of this passage, I think, is its persistence, its ...

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but who nonetheless had a lot they wanted to say.

These people were poor, uneducated, and foreign to the language they were speaking, or drunk, or simply speaking in the unaffected, slipshod discourse used by the working-class folks I grew up around. I listened to the stories my father's sisters told me, in awkward, broken English, about their lives in Italy. I sat with my seven year-old legs dangling from a barstool in the tavern drinking strawberry soda pop and overhearing conversations between my grandparents' patrons—it was there, in fact, that I heard my first bloodbath narrative when a steel worker explained a car accident he had seen on his way from the mill: "You ...

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