For once, my post is not deceptively titled. It is what it is. Good show.

Though, for the record, it is the long-standing position of this blog that Medieval Batman should be more Robin Hood than Black Knight. ((Who is Dark and an Actual Knight and Not a Metaphorical Knight that is Metaphorically Dark)) Or, barring that, Robert the Bruce.

As it so happens, the Breviary of Renaud de Bar ((A fourteenth-century manuscript in two parts. The winter portion survives as MS Yates Thompson 8 at the British Library, the summer as Verdun Bibliothèque municipale MMS 107. The post’s image is from the summer portion, f. 137v.)) provides the answer:

In case you’re reading this from 1996 and have images turned off for quicker browsing, the answer is dogs. Dogs? Dogs! Lots of dogs!! But before you raid the local shelter and mount your attack, a word of caution. As the image clearly shows, one of those dogs should be King of the Dogs. If His Majesty‘s not available, you can make do with a dog that’s only King of Rather Quite a Lot of Dogs. If, however, there’s no king dog available at all, not even the King of a Couple of Royalist Holdout Dogs Who Mostly Just Think All the Pomp and Ceremony Adds a Certain Touch of Class to the Place Anyway, and if one cannot be quickly fashioned out of a sufficiently charismatic terrier and many common household items you probably have on hand already, it really is best to wait until His Royal Dogginess deigns dignify your droll little sally with his majesty.

In this case–and I cannot stress this enough–under no circumstances should you try to substitute foxes for dogs. A certain local fox’s tendency to nick around the back of the castle and rape ((Daniel Tosh Dampeners activated. Resistance to Topical Controversy holding steady at 82%.)) get friendly with your lady completely aside, foxes are pants at sieging. Longtime readers may remember this (via this post): ((Which introduced the concept of Monday Medieval Marginalia. My tendency to miss my self-imposed Monday deadlines was introduced shortly thereafter.))

In truly desperate and dogless times, I suppose you might could employ woodwoses, though they, too, have been known to nick around back and make time with your lady, so be on your guard. ((Though, come to think of it, in this example “you” have somehow become both sieger and besieger. (Or is it besieged and besiegeder?) So “you” could end the discussion here and just let “you” in the front to skip straight to the celebratory three-way with “your lady” (who may actually be a dude depending on how “your toast” is “buttered”.) )) (As this other earlier ((Earlier than this present post; later than the post mentioned immediately previous to this note’s reference in the present post.)) post demonstrated:)

And, finally, should you protest that I have neglected to consider the fact that the Magic Kingdom has sizable reserves of meeces to call upon to protect its crown jewel, then surely you are remembering one final scene of marginal besiegery once discussed ((But not discussed once. Discussed one, two, three times.)) here. Just as I must commend your memories for bringing up the point, I must also cede it. Castles are all but invulnerable once mice have taken them over; don’t even try to re-siege your former home, just get over it already. ((Note, I’m purposely NOT including these final disturbing images in the text of the present post. Don’t follow the links that my vanity made me include in the text. The horror is too great, and the tragedy as well.^†  
†  But while I have you here in the footnotes, a word to anyone still worried about the delay in this week’s post. As I already explained on Twitter in a humorous nonexplanatory way, certain unavoidable technical difficulties presented themselves, and so isn’t society then really to blame? Of course, if you don’t obsessively follow my tweets,^§ you have only yourself to blame.  
§  Though if you did obsessively follow them previously but recently unfollowed because of your shock and outrage at my Patton Oswald eel/penis joke,^|| you could blame me if you wanted, as how could I expect you to see the delay tactic tweet with your having already unfollowed me in your aforementioned shock and outrage? In that very limited set of circumstances, consider this footnote my explanation. Or consider some other one explanation, if it seems to answer your fears more directly. Knock yourself out. I’m not really committed to this bit either way. 
||  And, yes, I know some of you are all about the eel/penis humor, so all about it that you have flooded my inbox with extensive (though, oddly, still tightly-plotted) Patton Oswald/Me-In-an-Eel-Suit slash-fiction^¶. Please stop that immediately. If there were a way to make my entire blog shudder, this text would probably be harder to read, because I’d be honor bound to employ that technology.  
¶
FOOTNOTE STACK ERROR OVERRUN
lp0 on fire
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?)) Plenty of fish with castles in the sea.

If you missed this blatant manuscript defacement before–and who wouldn’t, with that dashing bridled man on the left drawing the eye–it’s cool. What once was there, now damaged beyond recognition, is that most useful of manuscript illuminations, the original patron’s coat of arms. Nobles who directly commissioned manuscripts often instructed the illuminators to include their coats of arms, so that all who gazed upon the commissioned book would know exactly whose wealth was squandered on its lavish decorations. You might keep such a tagged manuscript on display in your personal library or gift it to a friend or potential ally–though in that case, it’d probably be a good idea to include the giftee’s coat of arms, too, at least on a couple of pages. ((Otherwise, how rude.))

So why the defacement? Usually it’s my oldest foil Reynard the Fox social mobility that’s to blame. Say you’re a noble who’s fallen on hard times. That fancy manuscript with all the penis trees in the margins might fetch enough to keep you in lavishly embroidered surcoats for at least a few more months, so off it goes to the consignment shop. Now say you’re an up and coming middle class type, ((Not you, the one who was just a noble. Some other you reading this.)) and you’d like a couple of manuscripts around the house you just bought cheap off some other impoverished noble–y’know, class the place up, with the butt trumpetry and all that. You’re not likely to want to keep the old owner’s coat all splattered on everything, especially if you’ve managed to purchase a coat of arms of your own. Fetch hither the pumice stone, time to rub and scrape away the offending evidence of someone else’s patronage!

This particular manuscript, though, its damage is probably coincidental, ((I theorize the damage was caused by generations of monocles dropping from the suddenly widened eyes of upper crust leather patches and tweed types all “My word, a man being ridden by a horse?! Such ribald debauchery! I daresay!”)) as there are still some other pages in the manuscript bedecked with the owner’s original coat. But since I don’t have any good pics of those, here’s an example of an intact coat from a manuscript held at the same library:

As you might expect (and current exemplars notwithstanding), coat-of-arms pages tend as a rule to be more conservatively decorated than other pages in the manuscript. Wouldn’t want to detract from the stately splendor of a shield wrapped up in ivy. That’s another reason I was glad to come across last post’s image and the one above. These manuscript patrons were unafraid of marginal hijinks detracting from their familes’ good names. And just for giggles, care to wager a guess as to what the monkey on the right of the coat immediately above is shooting at, or what the monkeys to the left are up to? Got your guesses all together? Good. Here we go:

OK, so the first one was a gimme. Of course the one monkey is shooting another monkey’s willingly offered butt. That’s just what marginal monkeys do with their butts, when they’re not having other stuff stuck up there.

[Update 7-13-12: Actually… it looks like my old enemy Not Tagging Images As I Download Them has struck again. The proffered monkey-butt is actually from a different image I found in the same manuscript image repository. Should’ve noticed that his floriate border isn’t quite a match to the one in the other image. Ah well. The monkey on this coat-of-arms page is shooting at something far more prosaic, a butterfly that’s flitting over a fishermonkey’s head:

So if you predicted butterfly before, go ahead and give yourself an extra 20 points. Those who predicted monkeybutt, you can keep your points, as it’d be unfair to dock you now.] But off to the left?

What are they up to? Well… you got me. No idea. Comparing shoe sizes? ((Does what they say about men apply to monkeys, too? Y’know, big shoes mean big… <insert word that isn’t penis because you were totally expecting a penis joke here>.)) Y’know, on the off chance they come upon a hunter’s booby-trapped shoes? Actually, the more I stare at certain details of the picture, the more I worry that the joke I just made in that last footnote ((And I know you read all the footnotes as you go, so it’s kosher for me to reference them in the main text. That sort of attention to detail is why I let you be the up and coming middle class guy in the example earlier.)) might actually be true. I’m not enlarging anything, ((I’ve got enough dubious claims to fame to add ‘monkey genitalia retoucher’ to my resume now.)) but it is curious how all the monkeys have little pouches strategically placed to cover their naughty dangly bits, except for the seated monkey, who may just be having a little wardrobe malfunction.

Goddamn it. Just when you think you’ve managed to write a proper scholarly post about coats of arms and the second hand manuscript market, someone goes slipping gratuitous monkey smut in while you’re not looking. I’m just going to pretend that’s a bit of foliate border, and I think you all should as well. ((Lest I make you be someone entirely unsavory in my next second-person example. Like monkey genitalia retouchers, for instance.))

Moments before this image was illuminated, I’m pretty sure we heard a certain now-mounted marginal man exclaim, “Oh, yeah, horse? Well I’ll show you…” Once more, the horse, he has done the showing.Though to his credit, the rider-now-ridden does seem pretty blasé about the whole turn of events:

Were it The Flintstones, I’d expect a closeup and a shrugged out “It’s a living!” to follow–though perhaps it’s just the smoothing from the image enlarging software I used that makes him seem so mellow.

One final thing. For those who follow this blog regularly, be on notice: horse-based-allusions are the closest I plan to come from here forward to apologizing for my lack of activity. I’m done with explaining why I haven’t done stuff. I’ve decided just to do stuff.

Strangely enough, you can thank my occasional co-blogger ((And more than occasional footnote taunter.)) Reynard for my new resolve. I’ve been pretty low lately, so low that talking my problems over with anthropomorphic twelfth-century rapist fox ((Who is himself likely the symptom of a more serious mental decline.)) didn’t seem like it could make things any worse. After much time spent insinuating impotence, incontinence, impiety, insolence–you know, basically the whole im/in- section of Roget’s Thesaurus for Bastards–even Reynard could see that there wasn’t much point. “The chump’s gotta have dignity, else it’s just sad, man,” he said, uncharacteristically thoughtful. He then added, “When I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.” ((Then he left and sodomized my mom with a recently used plunger. Rubber end first. True story.))

It didn’t matter much to me that he’d tried to fob a two year old How I Met Your Mother bit off on me as some sort of hard-won wisdom, because, well–what the hell? Seems worth a try. Not like not not being sad has been working out for me.

I went to thank my inadvertent balm, but found he was already off being awesome himself: ((This picture was taken pre-revenge sodomy. But what am I saying–with Reynard, it’s never truly pre-revenge sodomy, just pre-his latest revenge sodomy. What a stinker!))

Fly on, Reynard, Fly on to great justice. ((I’m assuming the giant eagle can still fly all yoked up like that. Otherwise, seems like he’d be better off employing something from the normal range of draft animals. But never mind me. I’m just here in the footnotes over-analyzing my own jokes. Maybe it’s best if you just show yourselves out. I may be some time.))

As an ancient series of posts here has exhaustively demonstrated, using the word “medieval” when you really just mean “stupid,” “backward,” or “wrong-headed” ((Or, increasingly, “Muslim”.)) is a pet peeve of mine. ((A peeve, I might add, I’ve tried to kill off through neglect, but the darn bugger keeps finding enough food on its own, even when I don’t put any out for days on end.†  
†Perhaps there’s a no-kill shelter you can send your old pet peeves to, one that makes sure they get sent to a farm upstate.)) The worst is when people attach it to fundamentalist Christians, the Westboro Baptist Church types (who picket at any funeral guaranteed to piss people off when picketed), because the “Answers in Genesis“, “God Hates Fags” ((By the by, anyone know if Westboro Church has always been in charge of godhatesfags.com? And while we’re (not really) on the subject, why was there no Internet movement to preserve godhatesfigs.com when its registration lapsed? A criminal oversight!)) way of reading the Bible is essentially hyper-Protestan and thus Early Modern at the earliest, really a feature of Puritan-era England during the Interregnum, ((That dude who said the Earth was essentially 6000 years old on the basis of some Biblical ‘calculations’? He published that finding in 1650, the same year Harvard incorporated.)) to be more precise—so not medieval by about a century and a half. ((And that’s using the most gracious definition of medieval, ending it around 1500, or with the (re)discovery (by Europeans) of the New World.))

But those of you who long for the chance to lay the medieval smack down on some modern day Biblical literalists without being countersmacked by yours truly, rejoice! For I say unto you, the people responsible for the ACE line of fundamentalist textbooks are now appear to have been for some time ((If this story from a Scottish newspaper can be trusted  reliable on matters of American textbookery.)) including the Loch Ness Monster as possible evidence against evolution in their Biology textbook designed for home schooled ninth-graders. Thus spake the ACE:

Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

While medieval Christians would’ve rolled their medieval eyes at people who thought that every word of the Bible was literally true, ((For the letter killeth, and the spirit quickeneth)) they did know there was a lot to be learned from the story of Nessie. As even Wikipedia will tell you, Capitulo XXVII of Adomnán’s seventh-century Life of St. Columba ((Vita Columbae if you’re pedantic, Miss Jackson if you’re nasty.)) bears the first extant reference to the aquatic beasty haunting the Ness area. Observe:

On another occasion also, when the blessed man [Columba] was living for some days in the province of the Picts, he was obliged to cross the river Nesa [the Ness]; and when he reached the bank of the river, he saw some of the inhabitants burying an unfortunate man, who, according to the account of those who were burying him, was a short time before seized, as he was swimming, and bitten most severely by a monster that lived in the water.

It should come as no great shock to find that medievals believed in monsters, of course, even famous ones like Nessie. ((Whether they believed in Wolfmen, Draculas or Frankensteins has not yet been conclusively proven.)) But did you know that they also used these monsters to conduct scientific experiments? As Adomnan describes it, after hearing of the monster Columba goes all Mr. Wizard/Bill Nye/Beakman and sets to experimenting, calmly and dispassionately, like a good scientist should: ((And, like Mr. Wizard, he lets his volunteers do the actual heavy lifting while he watches on. We’re going to need another Timmy, indeed.))

The blessed man, on hearing this, was so far from being dismayed, that he directed one of his companions to swim over and row across the coble that was moored at the farther bank.

Columba’s not content to just go with the report of these men who say that a monster killed their friend. Men you come upon randomly whilst they are burying someone in the forest might have reason to lie about what happened pre decease of the buriee, after all. Even Adomnan himself, presumably following Columba’s blessed example, gets all sciency when he describes the predictable result of the saint’s experiment:

But the monster, which, so far from being satiated, was only roused for more prey, was lying at the bottom of the stream, and when it felt the water disturbed above by the man swimming, suddenly rushed out, and, giving an awful roar, darted after him, with its mouth wide open, as the man swam in the middle of the stream.

Note how careful Adomnan is to explain why the monster attacks and the physical mechanism of the attack. It’s practically Natural Geographic film narration. ((Witness how the beast uses disturbance carried through the dark water to locate its prey. Evolution has gifted the monsters of the Ness with specialized sensory organs that allow them to use ambient vibrations for aquatic echolocation.)) Luckily for the blessed man’s test subject they call him Saint Columba for a reason. ((A reason unrelated to his tendency to trick people into playing his Loch Ness Monster games, which are like Reindeer Games, but with more rending and teeth, and less Ben Affleck.))

Then the blessed man observing this, raised his holy hand, while all the rest, brethren as well as strangers, were stupefied with terror, and, invoking the name of God, formed the saving sign of the cross in the air and commanded the ferocious monster, saying, “Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man; go back with all speed.” Then at the voice of the saint, the monster was terrified, and fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes. […] Then the brethren seeing that the monster had gone back, and their comrade Lugne returned to them in the boat safe and sound, were struck with admiration, and gave glory to God in the blessed man. And even the barbarous heathens, who were present, were forced by the greatness of this miracle, which they themselves had seen, to magnify the God of the Christians.

So, you see, using the Loch Ness Monster to learn simultaneously about both biology and God’s glory is very medieval. The ACE editorial board is kicking it old school–sixth-century old school.

The one thing they seem to have missed in the Loch Ness story, though, is how hearsay is no adequate justification for belief, at least not in the sixth century. Columba believes in the monster only when he sees it. The barbarous heathens believe in God only when they see him working through Columba’s miracle. Screw this “faith is something you believe with no reason” nonsense–that, too, is just so Early Modern.

I believe I’ve mentioned at least once before my new hobby, antiquing. ((A common hobby for the heartbroken, it seems.)) Well, whilst ((Suck it, Coquette.)) haunting the local monthly antique show, I stumbled across a man selling manuscript leaves. Or, rather, he stumbled across me, as I was standing there helpfully pointing out to passers by that he’d completely mislabeled every single manuscript leaf he had for sale. ((Bibles identified as secular works, books of hours identified as histories, Flemish manuscripts labeled Irish and Irish labeled Russian, and nearly everything pegged as two to three centuries older than it was.))

Now, in general, leaves ripped from manuscripts and traded as framed art raise both my dander and my ire–cutting up old books completely destroys the manuscript’s provenance, rendering it mostly useless for scholarly work–but this guy clearly wasn’t cutting up manuscripts himself, just reselling leaves someone long ago cut up, so I cut him some slack and struck up a friendly conversation with him. ((Like when you run into the guy who delivers the girls to the happy ending massage place by the airport. It’s not like he’s the one who kidnapped and enslaved them. He’s just the middleman–and who doesn’t love a middleman?))

To my surprise, the dealer was glad to have the corrected information on his wares and interested to know how this random guy in the Voltron tee-shirt ((See footnote #2, Coquette, if you would.)) knew so much about manuscripts. Indeed, once he knew my scholarly bonafides, I couldn’t shake the guy. Each step away from his booth brought to his mind some new stashed away treasure that I must be told about immediately. There’s a happy ending to the story though, as my feigned interest was replaced with the actual stuff when he trotted out this, a (presumably) ((I say presumably as, for all my recently vaunted manuscript lore, I’m still but an amateur at manuscript identification. Weird eyes to me says Spanish, but I’m willing to be proven laughably wrong here, actual experts. *hint hint*)) late medieval Spanish liturgical ((See the immediately previous footnote, experts.)) manuscript decorated with marginal saints. I snapped a few pictures, a gallery of which I’ve attached to the end of this post. ((For once, the only person to blame for the image quality is me. But I think these shots, snapped with my cell phone camera, are way nicer than nearly anything the Morgan Library is willing to offer the public. Thus, clearly, if you’re considering donating money to the Morgan to help pay for manuscript conservation, you might think about sending some my way instead.)) A couple of interesting high points first.

I’m always happy to see a marginal illuminator respecting that rule of page gravity I’m so often on about. Saintly they may be, these marginal guys still have to hold on to the letters and the ivy to avoid a game over: ((I do worry for the descending fellow, as the guy waiting to help him in the lower margin clearly suffers from that genetic condition that causes your fingers to never fully separate.))

And like the nun’s naked men of posts past, these creepy crawly saints don’t appear to have been part of the original plan of the manuscript. They were added later in the manuscript’s life, else the illuminator probably wouldn’t have gilded the part of the letter that’s covered by the climbing saint’s hand:

And finally, have no idea why the saints are fleeing into the margins, but it does put me in mind of the marginal fellow from an earlier liturgical manuscript once featured here.

If I wanted to tell a just-so story, I’d claim that the saints were added after the book was purchased from the church by a non-clerical book lover. The saints were meant to symbolize the resulting desanctification, fleeing the holy words of the liturgical ceremony for the wilds of the margins where anything goes. But probably the guys at the monastery got tired of looking at the same boring book each Sunday and, after a few years had passed, got someone to spice it up for them later–perhaps after they’d managed to secure a healthy donation from some poor sot with too much money and too many worries about the course of his soul through the afterlife.

———-

Me, too.

Anyone have a spare Benjamin? ((The extra thirty bucks will surely be used for a good cause and almost certainly absolutely not for a Kid in Aladdin’s Court / Kids of the Round Table double feature.))

——————-

Bonus: IMDB is a strange place.

Bonus Bonus: There are even response reviews.

Were the next panel of the marginal monkey below’s life extant, it’d almost certainly feature his monkey pals assuring him that, really, recent setbacks ((And that he’s still being drug behind said horse by the stirrup.)) notwithstanding, horsetop is the way to go:

As the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons, you don’t even think about making lemonade until you’ve gotten a good horse ride in, mister. ((Also, never run after buses, because there are plenty of fish in the sea, but you can only catch them from horseback with lemons as bait.)) But my recent (representative by authorial fiat) experience has given me reason to suspect that the standard equine-mounting advice leaves a couple of important things out. Most importantly, horses are jerks. Sometimes they don’t want you back on them. Medieval manuscript illuminators knew this:

And again:

And once more, with feeling:

Fortunately, medieval illuminators provide us with a third option.

Sometimes, it’s best to forgo the horse entirely, sever your head, attach it to the tail of a fire-breathing dragon, and go wreak fiery vengeance on the horse-obsessed. Let them see how easy it is to get back on the horse when both they and the horse have been reduced to smoldering piles of ash!

Welcome back, BoingBoingkateers! And welcome, too, to all you How-To Geeks, Geek Thinkers, Neatoramans, ((Not to be confused with the neato ramens once sold on Neatorama.)) and all other various and sundries referred to my old Mario marginalia post by Making Light. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but a sudden spike of attention in the wider blogosphere also makes the heart grow to be less absent, so here I am, back to blogging, after long absence. And what better way to return than by returning to an old subject? ((What you say?? New content would be better? Raising expectations would only put the blog on the path to destruction.))

As you’ll all no doubt recall, the main thesis of my Mario post, ((One wonders why I didn’t just write my thesis on marginal gravity…)) and several posts before and after that, is that Gothic manuscript pages–particularly those pages found in the more de luxe manuscripts–are laid out as though the elements on the page were subject to a force of gravity that pulls–or threatens to pull–everything down toward a gaping pit in the lower margin, save, of course, the text on the page and a few anchored elements. Initial capitals and large bordered illuminations count as “anchored elements,” which, like Mario’s question blocks, are attached directly to the sky/page somehow, and everything else needs to be held up by those anchors. Thus, the snail at the head of this post, having strayed into the page’s left margin to escape the jousting monkey knight, ((As you may also recall, snails vs. knights was a joke so hilarious to medieval illuminators that they put it everywhere.)) has to be supported by a last minute “hill” composed of a scribbly “u”.

This generally recognized rule of gravity’s pull affords the clever manuscript illuminator room to make jokes based around almost-but-not-quite breaking it. Like the illuminator responsible for the snail, as it turns out. Here’s a joke I like to think of as the long-distance fakeout. Look at this page from a distance, and it seems like all the rules are being followed slavishly. The long border in the lower left margin is supported by the anchor of the central image of Mary and Jesus, and the border across the bottom and sticking out into the free space hangs off the lower-left border.

Except when you look at the point where they’re joined, you find that the connection between the two borders is actually an armored monk ((Because the image quality is so bad, I’m taking the archivist’s word that he’s a monk and not a knight.)) thrusting a sword into a marginal-dragon’s mouth:

Apologies for the crappy image quality. This is the best resolution I could get.

Thus, it’s only at this single moment in time, when the knight kills the dragon, that the border is supported. Rewind the fight back a stroke, or follow it on to the dragon’s death, and the border that runs along the bottom would “fall” right off the page.

Elsewhere, the illuminator goes for the old “stupid self-destructive monkey” punchline by putting a wood-splitting monkey out in the margin, supported only by the very wood he’s splitting!

Taken with the main illumination, the joke is actually one step more complicated. This monkey has gotten so caught up in “monkey see, monkey do,” that he doesn’t realize that, unlike his human doppleganger, he’s supported only by the wood beneath him. Haha, doubly stupid monkey!

So let us peel back the pages of the Lovell Lectionary, shall we? (British Library MS Harley 7026)

For those of you confused by why I’d advertise blasphemy and deliver a picture of two men with huge icepicks standing over a table with a bloody circle on it, some perspective is in order. ((If, on the other hand, you’re in the camp that knows all about that transubstantiation thing, feel free to skip this next few sentences.))

Once upon a time, well before anyone you ever met was alive, a certain well-spoken carpenter broke bread over dinner with his some of his buddies and told them to keep meeting and breaking bread after he died as a way of remembering him, and they did, which is kind of sweet and touching. But at that same meal, he ((Or He, if you prefer.)) also told them that the bread they were eating was his body and the wine they were drinking was his blood, which is a really strange thing to say at the dinner table, but who am I to question the manners of people in Galilee two-thousand years ago? Point is, as you may or may not be aware, certain religions hold that the carpenter was the Son of God, and certain subsets of those certain religions hold that He ((Or he, if You prefer.)) was being literal at that dinner table and meant that his disciples ought to stage that meal ceremonially every Sunday and that when they did the bread and wine would be magically transmuted into His actual body and blood. ((And that this magic should be considered a holy sacrament and some sort of necromantic cannabalistic rite.))

For about a thousand and a half years after that meal, give or take a decade, generations of pious folks who belonged to the religion that sprung up out of the queer little stories this aforementioned (possibly divine) carpenter used to tell (and the things his buddies, The Disciples, [were said to have] later told about him)–which, by now, I hope you’ve pieced together was called the catholic Church ((And which, for most of those thousand and a half years was more set than subset, so they didn’t really need a capital C on the word catholic.))–believed that the normal physical rules that governed their mundane daily lives were suspended once a week so that bread and wine could become flesh and blood, not just metaphorically, but in actual fact ((But also metaphorically, too, just to cover all bases.)). And for the last two or three of those fifteen-some-odd centuries, during the time when the Medieval was giving way to the less interestingly named Early Modern era, ((Tarantino could hardly have had Marcellus Wallace get Early Modern on someone’s ass without Jules having to later allow that, yes, in some contexts, Marcellus Wallace might be mistaken for a bitch, but that was no excuse for trying to collect on Mrs. Wallace’s marriage debt.)) the magic of the miracle wasn’t thought to be limited merely to ensuring the potency of the metaphor. That ceremony the priests performed was powerful stuff.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic:

The officiating priest was required to swallow the contents of the chalice [used in Mass], flies and all if need be, and to ensure that not a crumb of the consecrated wafer was left behind. The communicant who did not swallow the bread, but carried it away from the church in his mouth, was widely believed to be in possession of an impressive source of magical power. He could use it to clear the blind or the feverish; he could carry it around with him as a general protection against ill fortune, or he could beat it up into a powder and sprinkle it over his garden as a charm against caterpillars. ((Consequently, the medieval version of the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar has a rather tragic last few pages.)) Medieval stories relate how the Host was profanely employed to put out fires, to cure swine fever, to fertilise the fields, and to encourage bees to make honey. The thief could also convert it into a love-charm or use it for some maleficent purpose. Some believed that a criminal who swallowed the Host would be immune from discovery; others held that by simultaneously communicating with a woman one could gain her affections. ((Hey, baby, is that a consecrated wafer in my mouth, or are you just happy to see me?))

The only thing more pressing on the mind of the late Medieval/early Early Modern Christian thought about more than all the things they might be able to do with a bit of magic blood bread was the worry that someone else might steal said bread and do something terrible with it. Jews, naturally, were thought to be covetous of the Host, and precautions had to be taken to ensure none of them got their hands on it, but Jews weren’t the only miscreants who might get up to no good with the sacramental wafer. Dispicable sorts might just steal the host in order to profane it. Stories circulated of thieves who would steal communion loaves and use them to sop up their soups and stews and later boast to horrified onlookers about how many gods they’d managed to eat in their time. ((Of course, these monstrous sorts did tend to get their comeuppance later in the story.)) The less gustatorially minded blasphemer might steal the host solely to desecrate it, as the fellows in that original picture up there are doing, stabbing it just to see it bleed.

Truth be told, those guys are amateurs at Host desecration. If you really want to show that magic wafer who’s boss, you press a crown of thorns into its top part and then nail it to a wooden cross, so it’s not just bleeding, but wracked with the humiliation of being re-crucified. At least, that’s what those Host-venerating late medievals worried might happen. They even passed laws banning the theft of the Host and requiring it to be kept under constant guard and/or lock and key, except during Mass. Really, it makes modern blasphemy seem somewhat pale by comparison. The worst we modern day infidels get accused of is trying to get Target to use generically inclusive holiday language over Christm–ha, you almost had me there, Christians. Well played. But this blogger knows that every time an atheist types the name of that carpenter’s birthday, the closest megachurch gets an extra wing. I’ll not have that on my conscience. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see a man about a transubstantiated something-or-other that I plan to run as a write in candidate in the coming Republican primary in Wisconsin… er, venerate in a wholly appropriate way. ((Never can be too careful.))