[UA] Darkening Children's Tales

[James Palmer]

>Going off on a tangent to this thread which isn't really related to the 
>other bits of the thread:  Did you ever notice that the disney characters 
>tend to have nephews (Donald has Huey, Dewey and Louie though he has no 
>siblings to father them, Mickey has several nephews whose names I forget, 
>only Goofy actually gets a son, and no mother for the child) instead of 
>sons?  I have a theory on this.  In Renaissance times, when a clergyman 
>didn't live up to his vow of chastity and fathered a son, often the child 
>woul be given to the church under the patronage of that priest, who would 
>raise the kid into the clergy, all the while claiming the kid was his 
>"nephew".

That reminds me of a truly excellent joke, which I shall now share with you 
all.

Sometime in the 16th century, a baby was abandoned on the doorstep of a 
nunnery.  The nuns, who were a poor order, couldn't raise the child, but it 
so happened that a priest had come in the day before, suffering from 
indigestion.  Reasoning that a celibate would know little of the mechanisms 
of childbirth, they drugged him, gave him a curative for his bellyache, and 
presented him with the child the next day, claiming that he had been 
pregnant.

The priest took the child home and raised him under his patronage, but 
everybody in the village suspected that the boy was really his bastard.  
Naturally, he grew up calling the priest 'Father,' as everyone else did.

When the boy reached sixteen, the priest called him into his study.  'My 
son,' he said, 'Now you are a man, I have something to tell you.'

'Yes, Father?'

'That's exactly it, my son.  I'm not your father.  I'm your mother.  The 
Bishop of Krakow was your father.'



_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com


_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua