Reddit mentions: The best medieval dramas & plays books

I don't know about adding stuff like the tale of beryn or finishing off the cook's tale, but the Nevill Coghill version is the adaptation most accepted by critics today.

Peter Ackroyd did a prose translation of it in modern English that's meant to be very good as well.

Either one retains the subversive humour of the original. I wouldn't worry about a feeling of cohesion - all Chaucer intended is a collection of tales. These two are very 'complete' as far as I can tell, and any incompleteness is only really frustrating to Chaucer scholars.

My personal take on them is that they are a fascinating way of getting into a medieval mind, so I read the original text, with help from notes of course. They are funny, rude, exciting ... this is high-quality entertainment. There's a reason they've survived 700 years.

I think you are underestimating Rome's influence. If you still wish to read more, I recommend A Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal by Richard Jenkyns if you haven't read it already. It's a wonderful look into Roman influences in language, mathematics, law, architecture and literature and does take into account its Greek inheritance without going into a comparative discussion. It's a bit old but it still collects a good number of essays that you might like.

> No, I'm saying your methodology and arguments are silly, even if the question itself was one somehow empirically decidable, which it isn't.

You just admitted that you are not disagreeing with the original argument, but with my personal writing skills, and then said you do disagree. Either way, you never bothered to expose how they are silly, nor provide anything that supported your views. It cannot be empirically proven if you keep refusing to accept facts that contradict your views.

> I could answer that Greek letters are far more prevalent than Roman numerals in mathematics (the axiomatic form of which was itself invented by the Greeks and not advanced at all by the Romans). Both of these points, though, are completely ridiculous.

You initially said that "we don't use Roman numerals" and now you are back-tracking to insist that we use some but we use Greek numerals more.

> Again, I think your view on this is more strongly influenced by the fact you happen to speak English than anything to do with the Romans.

But the fact that we are speaking English has to do with the Romans. We are talking about Roman influence in the West -- and even if we did not, English has now become a global language. If anything, the fact that we are both using Roman alphabets to have this very conversation is a testament to that. By "anthropic principle" you're just calling me biased, but that would've been acceptable if we were discussing other cultures.


At this point, you have turned this into an argument about my personal beliefs rather than about the question that was originally asked. You've digressed this without backing anything up to support your own arguments beyond insisting some notion that my "methodology" being "completely ridiculous". I honestly don't see what more you have to add to this beyond some rhetoric back-and-forth about our biases. I think we're done here.