For some noble reason that now seems somewhat foolish in retrospect given the amount of work involved,^* I agreed to host the March edition of Carnivalesque. What is Carnivalesque, you ask? According to its mission statement:

Blog carnivals are regular showcases of recent blogging, usually focused on particular themes, which usually circulate around a range of host blogs, giving each carnival a variety of perspectives.

Carnivalesque was originally launched in September 2004 as a carnival for early modern history. [...] Since July 2005, Carnivalesque has run monthly, alternating between early modern (c.1500-1800CE) and ancient & medieval topics (up to c.1500CE).

Carnivalesque is certainly not just for academics. We welcome perspectives from a variety of fields, especially history, literary studies, archaeology, art history, philosophy – in fact, from anyone who enjoys writing about anything to do with the not-so-recent past. You can nominate your own writing and/or that of other bloggers, but please try not to nominate more than one or two posts by any author for any single edition of Carnivalesque, and limit nominations to recent posts.

To nominate a blog post^** that you think is sufficiently awesome to be included in the carnival, you can either use Carnivalesque’s standard nomination form, my blog’s usual contact form, or email the blog’s gmail.com account directly. The blog’s username/handle is ‘gotmedieval’.^***

The carnival is set for March 25th, so there’s really no time to lose. Get to referring!

1. * I probably thought it’d make it more likely my own work would make it into future editions of the carnival. Oh selfish, short-sighted me, what won’t you get us into?
2. ** Even one of your own–I promise I won’t tell!
3. *** And the password is unhackable,‡ so don’t even try.  
   ‡Even by precocious scatalogically-minded time-displaced medieval foxes who are probably just manifestations of this blogger’s looming mental collapse.

When coming back after a brief hiatus, I always feel the pressure to make my next post something as epic as the lapse was long.^* If I knew what’s good for me, I’d probably just silently reappear without explanation,^** but when have I ever been accused of knowing what’s good for me?^*** Though it’s only been about a month since my last marginalia, I’m digging deep into my collection of weirdness this week, brushing past the milder fare, your stilt-walking monkeys and luxuriantly accessorized lady pigs and the like, and going straight for the top shelf: shockingly gratuitous blasphemy.

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.^****

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^***** 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^****** 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.^*******

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^********–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^*********. 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,^********** 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.^*********** 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.^************

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.^{*************} 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.^{**************}

1. * And as you might imagine, the desire to be proportionally epic itself delays the return, as ideas that normally would work just fine are discarded in favor of some unknown but surely more epic alternative, this extension only further increasing the return threshold and the concomitant requirement for still more epic levels of epic.‡
   ‡ Eventually, of course, I just give up and post something lame and/or self-referential. §
   §Barring that, I just garnish the hell out of it with footnotes ¶ that are as superfluous as the lapse was long.
   ¶Like so.†
   †Note that the grovelling blogger dares no longer use the † in his nestled footnote configuration, for fear of the wrath of the noble (and unconscionably sexy) Reynard!
2. ** Like I almost did last week.
3. *** Certainly never in the comments section of that much-traveled Gingrich post,‡‡ that’s for sure.
   ‡‡No, not that one. The other post in which I slag off on Newt. The Fisky one.‡‡‡
   ‡‡‡Actually, I’m pretty sure†† that particular post’s comments thread is what’s breaking the Disqus comment import utility. Every time I try to run it, it hangs up and crashes trying to import all eleventy-billion of them. Oh, well, I’ll always have the Huffington Post’s (much longer) comment thread to read, should I need a shot of self-flagellation.
   ††And I am pretty sure that your readers may no longer be described as readers, rather as cleaners or rag-weilders, for they long ago vomited at your mawkish display of self-congratulation and have stopped reading so that they may clean their intestinal juices off their keyboards and other peripheral devices. But the great Reynard does not pity them, even as they sop their puke from their desks, sobbing, no doubt, and cursing the name of the Holy Father who they blasphemously blame for entrapping them by allowing the invention of such an infernal device as “The Internet”, for these former readers of yours, insipid blogger, have only themselves to blame for reading the feeble leakage of blogger who links his own blog so often–not to mention one who leaks incontinent into his trousers as he pathetically onanismically linkwhores, one who is so foolish with his money that he can now no longer even afford a rag or sponge to clean up his squalid seat after his prematurely aged sphincter has betrayed him.
4. **** 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.
5. ***** Or He, if you prefer.
6. ****** Or he, if You prefer.
7. ******* And that this magic should be considered a holy sacrament and some sort of necromantic cannabalistic rite.
8. ******** 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.
9. ********* But also metaphorically, too, just to cover all bases.
10. ********** 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.
11. *********** Consequently, the medieval version of the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar has a rather tragic last few pages.
12. ************ Hey, baby, is that a consecrated wafer in my mouth, or are you just happy to see me?
13. ************* Of course, these monstrous sorts did tend to get their comeuppance later in the story.
14. ************** Never can be too careful.

Elijah, served cake and water by an angel of the Lord. Lucky stiff.

It’s still Π Day for a few minutes more here in the Eastern Time Zone, and I know it goes without saying, but what a holiday it’s been. Yet I still long for the simpler Π Days of my childhood. It’s all so commericial now, with the Π Nog Lattes at Starbucks and Justin Beiber’s cover of “Do They Know it’s Π Day?” on constant repeat on the mall’s muzak system. And that’s not to mention that fake precision that’s all the rage with the tweens, their memorizing π to all those places.^* “In my day,^** π was between 3.1408 and 3.1429 and that was good enough for us, consarnit!^***

Anyway, there was a rhetorical question in the title of this post, and I mean to answer it with another one. One day on which we all get really obsessed with a non-repeating decimal’s value is pretty sweet, but you know what’s sweeter than Π? Pie. But you know what’s often sweeter than that? Cake.^**** And you know what those medieval English folks got for an entire month, according to Bede? The answer’s the same: sweet, sweet cake.^***** Witness his venerableness’s words in The Reckoning of Time^****** :

Sol-monath dici potest mensis placentarum, quas in eo diis suis offerebant.

Solmonath can be called the “month of cakes”, which they offered to their gods in that month.

I’m afraid I got your hopes up a little prematurely, though, for Solmonath is the Anglo-Saxon word for February, which is nearly twelve whole months away. If only there were a blog that posted information on medieval monthly traditions on a regular schedule, then this tragedy might have been avoided.^******* But, on the up side, you’ve got twelve months to get those cakes ready for your gods.

However, if you absolutely must celebrate Π Day, celebrate it right, by baking a medieval pie. Here’s a recipe for a yummy one taken from The Forme of Cury (as translated by Gode Cookery):

Leche Frys in Lentoun

166. Leche frys in lentoun. Drawe a thik almaunde mylke wiþ water. Take dates and pyke hem clene with apples and peeres, & mynce hem with prunes damysyns; take out þe stones out of þe prunes, & kerue the prunes a two. Do þerto raisouns, coraunce, sugur, flour of canel, hoole macys and clowes, gode powdours & salt; colour hem vp with saundres. Meng þise with oile. Make a coffyn as þou didest bifore & do þis fars þerin, & bake it wel, and serue it forth.

Cold Slices in Lent. Draw a thick almond milk with water. Take dates and pick them clean with apples and pears, & mince them with plum prunes; take out the stones out of the prunes, & carve the prunes in two. Add currants, sugar, cinnamon, whole maces and cloves, good powders & salt; color it up with sandalwood. Mix this with oil. Make a coffin (pie shell) as you did before & place this filling in it, & bake it well, and serve it forth.

Of course, if your kitchen is low on sandalwood, you can always follow this modern adaptation of the recipe (also from Goode Cookery).

Cold Slices in Lent

• 2 cups extra thick Almond Milk
• 1/4 cup chopped dates
• 2 medium apples, peeled, cored, & diced
• 2 medium pears. peeled, cored, & diced
• 1/2 cup pitted prunes, sliced lengthwise
• 1/4 cup currants
• sugar to taste, up to 1/4 cup
• 1/2 tsp. each cinnamon, mace & cloves
• good powders: ginger, nutmeg, white pepper, etc., 1/4 tsp. each or to taste
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• few drops red food coloring (in substitute of sandalwood)
• 2 Tbs. olive oil
• one 9-inch pre-baked pie shell

Mix together well the Almond Milk, sugar, spices, oil, and food coloring. The color should be a brilliant red; the mixture should be thick but runny. In a separate bowl, mix together the fruits. Add the Almond Milk mixture and thoroughly blend. Place this filling in the pie shell and bake at 375° F for 45 minutes, or until the filling is set and the top has slightly browned. Remove from oven; allow to completely cool before serving. Serves 6-8.
An alternative to using real Almond Milk would be to follow the modern Swedish method of flavoring whole milk with almond oil or extract. For this dish, make a roux by blending 4 Tbs. flour with 4 Tbs. of melted butter; cook this over low heat until the flour has cooked and the roux has a slightly nutty aroma. Remove from heat; with a wire whisk, blend in 2 cups of milk. Return to heat. Beating with the wire whisk, slowly cook until the sauce has thickened. Add almond extract or oil to taste, and beat in the sugar, spices, oil, and food coloring.

1. * Again, I blame Beiber and his recent eighteen hour long single, ‘I’m Just Going to Recite the Digits in π for 18 Hours (Because, Girl, You’ll Buy Anything I Put Out)’.
2. ** When I lived two streets down from Archimedes.
3. *** Archimedes used to say consarnit all the time, I swanny.
4. **** I apologize if this all brings back memories of that Cake v. Pie decision the 5th Circuit handed down last year. But if it does, don’t worry, I hear Lisa Loeb has a strong case that the Roberts court is considering granting cert to in order to decide the question once and for all.
5. ***** Possibly sweet, sweet, sweetcake, too. The translation (of my own sentence) is unclear.
6. ****** Which, coincidentally, would be a pretty great subtitle for a direct to DVD Terminator movie.
7. ******* Blog scientists disagree about whether such a blog is even theoretically possible.

A reader (who asked to remain anonymous)^* poses the following question:

Have you seen this image of apes playing Ring Around the Rosie to ward off the plague at the Walters Museum’s site? I thought that explanation for that song had been debunked.

As it turns out, I hadn’t seen the image, so thank you, anonymous reader, for bringing this to us all:

Are these monkeys^** trying to ward off the plague? Not at all. Don’t blame the museum exhibiteers, though. It’s a very old mistake with an august history.

Snopes, home of the Internet’s foremost experts in debunkery, tackled this question back in 2007, and there’s not much I can add to their explanation. Indeed, it is so compelling that it managed to almost get the people who maintain the Wikipedia entry on the song to abandon their usual fetishization of impartiality that demands useless weasel sentences like this one in the entry’s head: “Urban legend says the song originally described the plague, but folklorists reject this idea.”^***

The version of the rhyme the kids knew when I was a kid was:

Ring around the rosies.
Pocket full of posies.
Upstairs, downstairs–
We all fall DOWN!

But you probably know a slightly different version, because that’s how things kids repeat at the playground work.^****

For those who want to see the Plague in a children’s game, the evidence is that 1) the ring of roses refers to the round red rash that is the first sign you’ve got the plague, 2) people put flowers in their pockets for protection against plague, 3) people’s skin gets ashy when they get the plague, OR their bodies are burnt to ashes when they die, OR the word is a corruption of “Achoo”, the sneezing sound plague victims make right before they die,^***** and 4) we all fall down because we’re dead of plague.

A quick summary of Snopes’ summary of the folklorist’s position should prove pretty darn convincing: the supposedly Plague-inspired “Ring-a-Round the Rosie” doesn’t appear anywhere in print until Kate Greenaway’s^****** Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes, published in 1881, over five hundred years after the Plague first hit England and two-hundred years after the last big plague outbreak there; the association with the Plague didn’t crop up until detective thriller author and amateur history buff James Leasor’s 1961 The Plague and the Fire,^******* about a hundred years later still; there are dozens of versions of the Ring-a-round the Rosie rhyme that cropped up in the years immediately after 1881, but the earliest versions never seem to include the details that Leasor and others say correspond to the Plague; and, most importantly, most of the details about Plague don’t correspond to how the plague actually worked.

A red ring isn’t the first sign of plague. Other than fever, pains, and other general flu-like symptoms, it’s a red swelling of the lymph nodes that soon turns black.^******** Flowers in your pockets wouldn’t ward off the Plague, certainly not a pocket of posies.^********* As any good English plague survivor^********** could tell you, the plague was caused by sin and best warded off by extreme piety and making sure your humours were in balance.^*********** The skin of plague victims doesn’t get ashy–at least no more ashy than the typical sick person who’s been bled and covered in pigeon crap–though their fingers and toes might start rotting off and turn black. If you prefer “achoo” in the song to “ashes”, you get no better, as sneezing isn’t the final fatal symptom before you die of the plague, or a symptom at all, for that matter. I suppose people do fall down when they die, if they happen to be standing, so point there, urban legendists, but the rest of the evidence is pretty thin.

So what are the monkeys doing? Probably just dancing in a ring while not singing about rosies. Medievals, you see, loved dancing in rings–like square dancing, but probably cooler looking.^************ Like so:^{*************}

In fact, medievals danced in rings so often that ring-dances show up in the most bizarre places. A common romance motif is for the hero to come across a group of dancers who are magically stuck together in a ring; anyone who joins the dance likewise gets stuck. (Until our intrepid hero–who’s probably Lancelot in disguise–breaks the magic.) And then there’s the marginal image I featured a few years back under the title “If You Give a Cat a Necklace“, which (my imaginative interpretation notwithstanding) actually depicts geese and foxes dancing together in a ring around an owl (while a feral cat feasts on a mouse nearby):

Sorry to be a killjoy, but what we have here in the Walters museum is just a plain old everyday humdrum case of ring-dancing monkeys. But speaking of both killjoys and old marginalia posts, another helpful reader wrote recently:

You know you messed up the counting when you numbered your marginalia posts? Two sets of seventies. And two different 82′s. You should be on 105 now, not 94.

(Through teeth gritted with ordinally-derived shame) I must thank the eagle-eyed, attentive Aspergerian reader. Yes indeedy, I did botch the reordering. That means today’s post marks 107 entries in this occasionally on-time weekly series.

Thus, retroactively, the 100th anniversary post turns out to have been this year’s New Years post. I didn’t intend it that way, but it works out nicely, as that post features images from many of the manuscripts I habitually feature. So it’s almost a best of.

See you next Monday for #108.^{**************}

1. * For obvious reasons. Why risk your name becoming associated with the #1 internet destination for medieval porn?
2. ** Yes, yes, I know they’re apes. Monkeys is a cooler word than apes.
3. *** Extend this sort of thinking to its logical end, and someone ought to go add to the top of the Moon’s page “Popular children’s lore says that the satellite is composed of green cheese, but geologists reject this idea.”, shouldn’t they?
4. **** If you’ve never compared notes on childhood rhymes and assorted games with friends, you’re in for a treat. You may even learn that some weirdos call “Duck Duck Goose” by the name “Duck Duck Gray Duck.” No, really!
5. ***** No idea how my cohort’s “upstairs downstairs” fits into this.
6. ****** While a pretty awesome illustrator, she doesn’t seem to have ever been trained as a folk rhyme researcher or ethnographer or anything like that.
7. ******* The book associated the rhyme with the Restoration outbreak of the plague that preceded the Great Fire of London in 1666.
8. ******** Do you often describe your bruises and blisters as rings?
9. ********* Though a nosegay, a bouquet of fresh-smelling flowers (often made of posies) would be useful if you had to walk by a rotting body or wanted to ward off the evil air.
10. ********** The idea that the plague was caused by Jews, a conjunction of planets, or “bad air” was really more a continental phenomenon.
11. *********** And if you did get sick, best to get someone to bleed, sweat, or purge you, depending on which of your humours were out of balance, and if that failed, you could always use a pigeon feather to prick the swelling and drain its venom by applying pigeon dung.
12. ************ And with fewer rhinestones.
13. ************* OK, I admit that it’s less cool and more “midgets in bathrobey”. But even that’s cooler than square dancing.
14. ************** Providing I don’t discover I’ve still further misordered the posts, which will likely happen, I’ll admit right now. This time, though, I’ll just edit the numbers silently and pretend it was this way all along, causing a certain dutiful reader to question his or her sanity… if all goes according to plan.

These days, it’s getting harder and harder to track down pictures of nuns riding flying fish, or fighting off hordes of misshapen pygmies, or falling prey to the fiendish war machines of the ape king. And if you want medieval-inspired versions of the same, forget about it!

That’s what I used to think, anyway, until I stumbled across the works of Marcel Ruijters, an artist from Rotterdam who’s taken the sorts of weird medieval art I feature here regularly in Mmm… Marginalia and doubled down on the weird, with some pretty cool results.

For example, aforementioned warrior nuns, fighting aforementioned weird hybrid men:

And the same nuns taking down a bear (who must’ve made the mistake of coming for their honey):

And being judged and found wanting in a monkey court:

And playing chess:

And being absent from the front cover of Dante’s Inferno:

Good stuff all around. All but the last can be found in 1348,^* a book Marcel did with Le Dernier Cri, which he describes as “a hyperactive underground publisher from France.” His newest work can be found on Facebook, and also on the blog Eaten By Ducks. He’s currently working on an as of yet untitled project inspired by the works of Jheronimus Bosch.^**

If you want to buy some of his stuff^*** and you read Dutch, here’s a webstore that sells it. I think Le Dernier Cri also sells stuff, but good luck navigating that site.^****

1. * I couldn’t brave their website for long, as my dog started howling at the noise. I would’ve had a better link to where you could buy his stuff if I could.
2. ** Or, if you prefer, Hieronymus Bosch.
3. *** Or, say, gift some of it to your favorite medieval blogger.
4. **** These artists with their clever ways of making it impossible to buy things from them…

I moved to a new place recently, so I have been hitting the local consignment shops pretty hard in search of new furnishings. Thankfully, the major furniture purchases are all behind me and now all that’s left to acquire are the pictures, lamps, and other decorative bits and bobs that round a place out.^* To that end, this afternoon I dropped into Estate Gallery Consignments^** and stumbled across this on a back shelf:

I snapped it up because I vaguely recognized the scene as Arthurian,^*** though I don’t know how exactly, as I didn’t see the name “Geraint” (which is clear as day now) until I got home. Turns out the tile depicts a scene from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Geraint slaying Dorm. It’s part of a 12-tile set that illustrates the full cycle, designed by John Moyr Smith around 1875 for the Minton Tile Company.^**** I’m assuming mine’s a fake, but either way, I’m glad to have stumbled across it, as I’d never known till today that the Victorians sometimes tiled their washrooms with scenes of dudes with swords hacking up other dudes–Arthurian dudes or otherwise.

1. * I’m still searching for a rug that will really tie the room together.
2. ** Who I’d link to if they had a webpage. If you live in Atlanta and want to visit them, go to that part of Chamblee where all the antique stores are stacked on top of each other five deep.
3. *** And the price as $8, well within my knickknack budget.
4. **** The same tile company that tiled part of the White House.

Sorry, God of Love, today we don't need your advice. We're going straight to the horse's mouth. And other animal's mouths, as well.

Written in the first quarter of the 14th century, Richard Fournival’s Bestiary of Love takes the form of a male lover’s argument with his female counterpart in which he explains how the various important facts about animals apply equally well to people in love. It was a popular enough text that it survives (in part) in a fair number of manuscripts and spawned a couple continuations and even a Response written as if from the lady, disputing all those things her male counterpart said about the animals.^*** The Bodleian has a particularly lovely copy (MS Douce 308), so let’s peek between the pages and see what the animals have to teach us about love.

First up, there’s my usual obsession, The Monkey.^****

Naturalists as far back as Pliny the Elder^***** were convinced that simians had a sartorial obsession. Leave clothes, boots in particular, out for them, and they’ll try to wear them, with hilarious results. The Bestiaire d’Amour explains that just as the monkey can be caught by the hunter who leaves out shoes that he’ll be compelled to try on, so “to love is to be clothed with love and imprisoned by it.” Also, I suppose, love makes you wear your shoes on your hands. Your love shoes, I mean.

Uh… anyway, see how this works? An animal has a well-known quality, but so does the lover. As we hit the rest of the high points, see if you can’t predict what the lover will learn from each animal.^******

OK, pencils and buzzers ready? Let’s start with an easy one. The Weasel:^*******

As we all know, the Weasel conceives through its ear and gives birth through its mouth.^******** You did all know that, yes? Either way, from this, the lover should take warning. Women are like weasels–only with flattery (and not so much the baby-making). For after they have heard so much flattery that they should love the lover, women “turn and say quite different sorts of things.” No matter how honeyed your words, your lady love is just going to vomit all over you and anyone who’ll listen. Love vomit, I mean. I hope I mean, anyway… er… moving on.

What does the lover have to learn, I wonder, from The Weasel?

I know, didn’t we just do that one? Well, turns out there’s still more the lover can glean from the weasel, who you may be surprised to learn, gives birth to its children dead, but brings them back to life by vomiting fire upon them. Thus, the lover, “dead of love, knows that there is a medicine that will cure him, but he knows not what.” Presumably he means the love of his lady, but maybe it’s his lady’s vomit. The text is obscure on this point.

OK, enough with weasels. Fancy something more exotic? How about The Crocodile?

It is important to realize that few illuminators had ever actually seen a crocodile.

Just as the crocodile “eats a man wherever it finds one, and then in repentance weeps and cries for the rest of its life,” so too the lover’s lady will kill and devour him with her love, unless she deigns love him back. He can only hope she has the good manners and moral sensibility of the crocodile, and will repent even if she does spurn him. (Hint-hint, ladies. You don’t want the crocodiles to show you up, do you?)

If crocodiles aren’t sufficiently impressive, consider instead what the lover has to learn from The Wyvern:^*********

The Wyvern is a fearsome beast related to the dragon with a poisonous tail-stinger and rows of sharp teeth, but it has one weakness. It fears no man clothed, but the sight of a naked man will make it start away in fear, open-mouthed. “So is the lover at first naked and vulnerable from being in love, but later is clothed in his pride at being loved and gains courage from this.”

Now, what do you think the lover might stand to learn from the Wild Ass?^**********

According to bestiary lore, the wild ass only brays when he wants his dinner, and as the Bestiary d’Amour explains, “so cries the lover when he has lost his love.” Which works, I guess, because man is it grating when people go on and on about that girl with the hipster glasses and the nose ring who works behind the counter at Starbucks who totally was into them, and they were getting ready to make their move any second, if only she’d not scalded her hand on the Clover machine and–er, maybe I’m the only one that’s happened to got friends like that.

Next up, we ask, what does the lover have to learn from The Cock?^***********

As the Bestiare d’Amour explains, the cock crows at dawn and dusk, which are times when day and night come together.^************ This is like love, “which is neither all hope nor all despair.” ^{*************}

Now, tally up your score, giving yourself one point for each correct prediction, deducting seventeen for each incorrect, and then tossing out the whole paper, because it’s the bonus round now and all points are sextapajupled and then squared.^{**************} What does the lover have to learn from The Wolf? Careful, there are three lessons ahead, and you need each to get credit:

Three things about the wolf are relevant to the lover. The wolf is quiet as it stalks its prey, because if one of its feet accidentally snaps a twig and alerts the prey, the wolf bites it off.^{***************} Also, the wolf cannot turn its head without turning its whole body.^{****************} And finally, the wolf never catches food near its own den, knowing always to seek prey far from home.

From this, the lover should learn that the love of a woman is three-natured, like the wolf. Just as the wolf has head-turning problems, the Lady “cannot give herself, except completely.” But if that sounds too good, remember that like the far-hunting wolf, “she loves most when her lover is far away and least when he is near.” And of her words, which sometimes “run ahead of her and thereby her lover knows he is loved in return” know this: caught, like the twig-snapping wolf, the lady “tries to conceal what she has revealed, using other words.”

Hope this is helpful tonight, as you’re all out wooing ladies with chocolate and flowers and suchlike. Remember, women are all gossiping, lying traitors who will vomit fire on you just as soon as look at you. Your only hope is to avoid their offer of fancy boots and strip naked. Only then will you have them in your power. Then, quickly, sing to them like an ass or a cock, because they can’t turn their heads without turning their whole bodies.

Happy Valentines, all!

1. * How many times can I link the same post before people start to get annoyed? Have to ask the SEO folks if I’m optimizing my eyeball retention synergies right.
2. ** And not a bit of it bestiality-related. Sorry if that disappoints, but this is a family friendly blog when Reynard’s♣ not mucking it up.  
   ♣ Oh, precious little funny man, against the invasions of Reynard, you are entirely impotent–and I mean that sexually, as well. It is a double entendre, which is what we French call it when a thing means one thing and another that is sexual. Like when I say to your wife that I wish to come by and give her a gift, and the gift is my penis, which she is happy about because of your impotence. And then I take the jewelry you gave her as gifts and sell it to the pawn broker. And then I use the money at the whorehouse. See, so many entendres Reynard possesses! But I digress. Carry on, impotent ignorant, unwashed Blogger.
3. *** You can read both in Jeanette Beer’s Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour and the Response, available for an absurd price from Amazon. I don’t have a copy on hand,† so today I’ll be limiting the discussion to the male half.  
   † Though if someone wants to send me one through my Amazon Wishlist, ♣♣ maybe a sequel post will materialize that gives the female side of the story.  
   ♣♣ Yes, yes, very clever Blogger of the Unclean Feminine Undergarments. No one will think poorly of you for your blatant plea for financial compensation hidden in a footnote.
4. **** Alas, the flash off the gold leaf makes the hunter hard to make out. This is a problem with a lot of the images to come, so just bear with.
5. ***** “Apes are cunning animals. It is said that they put on as shoes the nooses set out to snare them, imitating the hunters.”
6. ****** Be sure to record your answers on the answer grid without reading ahead. No erasures! When done, send your completed grid to Got Medieval Enterprises for your shot at a complete mahogany living room set, a pair of his and her Ski-Doos, this handsome bronze bust of Napoleon, and a year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni, a prize package valued at over eleventy-billion pretend imaginary bucks–but wait, you can trade that all in now, for whatever we have waiting behind footnote number *******[8].
7. ******* And behind footnote number ********[8]… *muted trumpet wah-wah noise* we find: an obligatory but dated Pauly Shore reference. You know, the Weasel, buuuuuudy? You should have been content with the Ski-Doos. Don’t take it too hard, though, you can only eat the San Francisco treat three times a year, tops.
8. ******** Much like Pauly Shore. Now, go back and watch Encino Man with that in mind. It’ll change your world.
9. ********* Other than that it has 7d12+14 hit dice.
10. ********** I let it pass with the naked dude, but if I see you giggling one more time, young man, recess is cancelled. That goes double for tittering–a word which is itself a reason neither to giggle nor titter, I might add.
11. *********** Minds out of the gutter, ladies. Really. If your mothers knew what came out of your mouths. No better than vomiting weasels the lot of you.
12. ************ In a non sexual way. Geez, people, try to keep this clean, will you? We’re almost done here
13. ************* The author also adds that he in particular is near despair and has no more hope of his lady’s love, “so he must sing loudest at the last, just as the cock who sings oftenest and dawn and in the day, must force himself to sing even louder at night.” I hear this was the original inspiration for John Cusack’s boombox in Say Anything.
14. ************** And square rooted, but squared one more time after that.
15. *************** When the wolf says ‘Feets don’t fail me now,’ he means it. If they do fail, off they go. Apparently having three feet is not as big a handicap to sneaking as you might imagine, as the remaining feet have been sufficiently encouraged to virtuous stealth by the example of the severed other.
16. **************** Which makes it hard to see how the wolf can bite off its back leg if it gets out of line. But who am I to judge the bestiary writer?

Greetings once more, gentle readers,

Mayhap thou remembrest me? It be’st I, Sir Ten-to-Three, formerly Baby New Year 1023, the same soul who didst some months past gain some small pittance of coin from yon King of This Blog, long mayest he reignest, by listing the posts of his majesty’s that once werest posted on the holiday of Christmas, once upon a time. Today, I maketh a return engagement in order that you may be revisited by the posts that formerly marked the Feast of St. Valentine.

In the year of our lord 2010, the King didest favorest thy with a marginalia depicting The King of Love. I’truth, I hath not been to the kingdom of said king, but I hear from mine confidants that he is far too metaphorical to put out decent hors d’oeuvres.

In the year of our lord 2009, yet another Feast of St. Valentines-themed marginal imageth wast featuredeth–zounds! Where dost The King findeth it all? This one, it befell, concerned a lover’s heart pierced by a fell arrow.

Also in the year of our lord 2009, the King of the Blog didst expound upon the role played by the noble Geoffrey of Chaucer in beginning the sanguine holiday of Valentines.

I hath been instructed to append below a disparaging remark concerning some soul dubbed “Geoffrey Chaucer Who Hath a Blog“, as is the wont of the King of the Blog, but slay me, I canst not discern the magic of the footnote-making machine. A gentle fox didst try to assist me, but he could not make the infernal contraption work, either, even after I vouchsafed to him the new magic word of passage. Alas.¹

It appears that these are all the Valentine posts the blog’s author hath posted. I wouldst have thought there wouldst be more. Truly, even in the Feast Calendar for February, the King of the Blog didst slight the noble saint. Then again, looking as I hath at many of the King’s former posts of olden days, such as this, and this, I wonder if betimes the King ist not somewhat melancholy wherest the subject of ye olde faire maidens is’th concerned.

1. ♣ Muahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha–ahem–haha.

While I am much obliged to the New Yorker’s blog gremlins for linking my recent post on naked dudes and nuns, I must grumble a bit over their word choice. To wit:

Girls just want to have fun: surprising marginalia doodled by medieval nuns. [Emphasis mine.]

Put aside the issue of errant agency clause,^* because it’s the word “doodle” that really riles my pedantic dander. Granted, it’s not the first time that a marginalia post of mine has been disseminated to teh wider internets under the heading of “doodle,”^** but it still irks me, because, as I try to make clear, the images I post here on Mondays^*** weren’t scribbled into the margins by surreptitious snarkers whilst no one was looking. They were explicitly commissioned by the manuscript’s patrons as part of the project from the very beginning. For the well-heeled noble, ordering a book was not just a matter of selecting the text; deciding on size, presentation, illustration, and ratio of naked dudes to non-naked dudes in the margins was all part of the process of getting a book made.

This is not to say that medieval readers and scribes didn’t ever doodle. It’s just easy to tell the difference between images planned as part of the manuscript’s commission and those scribbled in by a creative, bored scribe or one of the later owners of the manuscript. Just as you might imagine, a reader might decide a chunk of text was particularly important and make a note in the margin, like so:

Or, they might decide to play around in the blank space at the bottom of the page around one of the catchwords:^****

Or, someone might just decide a page looked too blank and thus attempt to fill up some of that space:

See, the thing about medieval doodles is they look just like modern doodles. They don’t look like this:

For this page, somebody sat down and sketched out a rough draft, showed it to somebody else, possibly even multiple somebodies. There were meetings. Consultants were brought in. The client was consulted. And at some point somebody said, “Yes, that’s very nice, the nuns smuggling that dude into their nunnery. Very topical. But I don’t like that blanket. Too drab. Can we get someone to put some flowers on it?”^*****
The difference is, I hope, clear. You don’t doodle in gold leaf.

1. * It wasn’t the nuns that made the pictures of naked dudes. They were made for a nun, not by.
2. ** And it probably won’t be the last.
3. *** Or on Thursdays and backdated to Mondays, as the case may be.
4. **** A ‘catchword’ is a word or two placed at the end of a page or a quire to help make sure that the pages of a handwritten or (hand typeset) book are arranged properly when the book is bound. You match the word at the bottom of one page with the word that should appear at the top of the next. It’s particularly handy if there are multiple scribes working on the book simultaneously.
5. ***** “And by the by, lose the poop in the monkey’s hand. We’ve already got three poop jokes in this sucker, and the countess warned us that she prefers sacrilege to scatology. Make it a rock or something. Still gets the point across, without the danger of fecal overload. Don’t worry, we’re doing a psalter for the Earl of Tewkesbury next month, and that dude is crazy for some poop-flinging monkeys and monkey hybrids. We’re going to need to double our order for dark brown pigment just to be safe.”

As faithful fans of Terry Pratchett know well, the hedgehog can never be buggered at all. Behold, a poor marginal monkey who just learned that the converse does not hold:

Though, I suppose he might’ve just mistaken the hedgehog for a tuffet. Painful either way.

The manuscript in which the pair appear can today be found in the British Library (MS Royal 15E iv), a late fifteenth century edition of Jean de Wavrin’s Anciennes et nouvelles chroniques d’Angleterre probably comissioned by Louise de Gruuthuse, a Flemish courtier who was gaga for illuminated manuscripts. Louise’s annual bill from the finest Flemish manuscript houses was second only to Phillip the Good’s,^* and between the two of them, they accounted for almost all the business the most skilled Flemish illuminators could possibly handle. Louise so loved grand multi-volume histories, he would’ve been a sucker for travelling encyclopedia salesmen–if only they’d^** been invented–or the Time Life series as seen on TV.^***

Jean de Wavrin’s chronicle begins with an adaptation of material from Geoffrey of Monmouth, who I understand is all the rage these days with the in crowd. The breakdown in hedgehog-monkey relations depicted in the margin may have been intended as a bit of a commentary on the main image on the page, which shows Cadwallo, one of the last kings of Britain according to Geoffrey, losing to the well-armed Saxon soldier, an ass kicking that may have suggested a different sort of rear-entry pain to our clever illuminator.

Overall, this illuminator was fairly sparing with the marginal critters. Most of the time it’s just leaves and pinwheels and fruit and such. So any deviation from the pervasive dullness calls out for attention, just as a monkey with a butt full of spines might. Poor guy. Will he ever be able to play the trumpet again?

[Thanks to my secret spies deep within the BL for tipping me off to this one.]

1. * The Duke of Burgundy who’s way more famous than Louise on account of his troops’ having captured Joan of Arc.
2. ** Imprecise pronoun reference? Not at all. Neither encyclopedias nor travelling salesmen had been invented.
3. *** Likewise, medieval TV advertisements were far too primitive for infomercials, of course, and bankers would not perfect the technology of pricing in easy installments of $19.95 until the end of the Restoration.