Turner, inter alia, comes out with the fine phrase “his own grail was knowledge”. He also did wonders for the clever revisioning of Chaucer: see the recent great piece by Marion Turner on The Conversation website.
He was a beloved amateur historian, in the best sense of the words – amateur has its roots in the word love – and did more than most professional scholars to change attitudes to the myth of the parfait gentle knight, refettling that through rereading as an ugly thug possessed only of a sword and wibbly “faith”. A lot of what we assume to be medieval ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval world.”Ī few years ago he said that he wanted to be remembered not for the Life of Brian or the Meaning of Life, or even the Pythons themselves, but as a children’s book writer and for his “academic stuff”, saying that “those are my best bits”. Terry Jones disliked the term, arguing that “the medieval world wasn’t a time of stagnation or ignorance. His great friend Michael Palin attempted a (typically) modest tribute, which included the phrase “renaissance man” – which Jones would have bristled at – with kindness.
The other Terry, Gilliam, sporting, to avoid confusion, an “I’m not dead yet” T-shirt on Graham Norton’s BBC chatshow on Friday night, spoke of “passionate, crazed, angry, happy, generous, sweet, kind … and yet somehow he’d just faded away … in the end I just think he’d just left.
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