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- Author: David Wallace x
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The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga is a perfect vehicle for tracing the history of emotions, in that it offers an unparalleled darkening of mood over time. This chapter refers to William Thynne's great Chaucerian opera omnia and specifically to his including Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid immediately after Troilus and Criseyde. Giovanni Boccaccio marks the turn from pre-articulate emotional excess to regulated literary expression. James Simpson describes how Renaissance England essentially reduced and simplified the rich multiplicity of medieval literary forms and registers. Geoffrey Chaucer recognizes the popular aspects of Boccaccio's ottava rima verse form because many of its tags, tropes and epithets derived from the street singers of cantare are shared by an equivalent English verse tradition: tail rhyme romance. There is a solid internal evidence of William Shakespeare's familiarity with the Testament, or with the Troilus-Testament complex.
The chapter looks at how social and cultural capital are generated through civil society by a study of historical associations on the Outer Hebrides, known as the Comainn Eachdraidh (CE) in 2011–15 and followed up in 2019. This cultural and social capital, involving a sense of local pride, is related to the strong participation in civil society found in these remote places. Digitalisation has helped to further sustain these activities, made them more globally accessible, and produced a new focus of activity for local CEs and their collective representation through the digital platform, Hebridean Connections. However, digitalisation has produced both advantages and threats. The advantages include linking these islands to a wider diaspora and community of interest worldwide and encouraging visitor flow and benefits for the local economy. Threats include the loss of control of information by local associations and the creation of a demand that small groups of older volunteers cannot always fulfil. Furthermore, local authority cutbacks meant that the centralised system developed by Hebridean Connections was not able to manage the volume of demand with a skeletal staff. The chapter illustrates how cultural transmission occurs through technology to link the past with the present and the future. Despite its shortcomings, the CE movement helped to show how local control of digital infrastructures can also help to empower local civil society and thus benefit rural quality of life