My final exam today required an essay on the Albigensian crusades and their effect on European society and church institutions. So I wrote a few pages about the Cathars and why they freaked out the papacy, and concluded in discussing the Dominican order and the Inquisition. I won’t bore you with the details, but that phrase kept popping into my head every time I wrote ‘Inquisition.’
I could hardly keep a straight face, and my teacher thinks I’m nuts I’m sure… but I had to work that in there somehow… Ever since I concluded a serious essay with the phrase, “I called Napoleon lame,” I get a kick out of unexpected asides or otherwise amusing statements. It didn’t really work in the body of the essay, considering I’d just been discussing torture in the preceding paragraph.
So I threw it in as a footnote:
For several hundred years, the Inquisition remained an official church institution used to eliminate heresy and intimidate suspected apostates, particularly in Spain.*
*Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
I only hope my teacher gets the joke. He apparently didn’t mind the introduction I used on my midterm, which referenced Comedy Central’s Axis of Evil comedy Tour and included a joke wherein the comedian laments the fact that you never see Iranians on TV just… baking cookies. So it appears he has a sense of humor.
Every time I see it I think “OK, who have we pissed off now…”
Funny how so many people think that Spain was the only place to have an Inquisition or that only Catholics had one. And of course, nobody ever remembers that the bloodiest “Inquisition” trials happened in those kingdoms where they were civilian, not religious (Spain wasn’t a single kingdom until 1844).
Not quite the same, but last week in my MidEast political science class we watched part of a movie on Saladin’s retaking of Jerusalem. It was a re-enactment, so there were scenes of the Europe the Crusaders came from.
It was raining. Grey castles, a creek…
It took all my self-control (because I am a smartass) to not say, “Ooh, there’s some lovely muck over 'ere!” So, because I couldn’t say it, I giggled. A lot.
And, of course, though it’s one of the funniest of many funny catchphrases to come from the demented minds of Monty Python, I cannot help but observe:
Almost everybody knows “The Impossible Dream” from “Man of La Mancha.” A surprising number of people have seen the actual musical, either on Broadway, a national tour, or the local high school or Little Theater production.
Man of La Mancha is, like Midsummer Night’s Dream and many another literary work, one story within another frame story. In this case, the interior story is of course that of Don Quixote – but the frame story is that of Cervantes himself.
And for the whole duration of the play, make a wild guess what he is doing that would be related to this thread.
You can imagine my amusement when I discovered that the city of Amiens in france is an actual Anarcho-Syndaclist Commune. I even posted the link here on the SDMB.