Scholarship
Literary critic Don D'Ammassa has claimed that the Zimiamvian trilogy has "powerfully drawn" characters, especially the villains. He notes that none of the protagonists, with the exception of Lessingham, comes across as "entirely admirable".
All the books contain a romantic ethic of fame, fate and eternal recurrence, in which the supreme value is chivalry, both in the sense of heroism and in the sense of the idealization of women. In Mistress of Mistresses the underlying philosophy is explained: a Spinozistic pantheism in which God is identified with the eternal feminine, temporarily incarnated in the two queens whom Lessingham serves.
Read more about this topic: Zimiamvian Trilogy
Famous quotes containing the word scholarship:
“The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo- scholarship which actually destroys its object.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)