In Search of the Once and Future King: A Stranger In A Strange Land
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
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The past, if you will permit me to begin in the fashion of a high school book report, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. It is, or was, inhabited by people so very similar to us but whose modes of thought and world view were nevertheless informed by their differing social, cultural and political circumstances. The conventions and contextual underpinnings of these historical societies were plastic, changing over time in reaction to internal pressures and outside stimulus just as the shape and character of our own society is inevitably shifting around us. If the polities and civilizations of the past were malleable and occasionally even volatile constructs, so too were the cultural touchstones and inheritance that passed through them.