Got Medieval

Table Be Round

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:43:00 +0000

Quick, before the DMCA fairy comes in the night and takes this video from underneath your pillow,* check out "Table Be Round," from Robot Chicken's third season finale.**

Oh, and you can also see it, for the time being, at the Adult Swim website. After the WWE Divas promo, you can skip to it by clicking on the bookmark in the lower right corner. If the threat of WWE divas (our modern day Amazons) scares you off, here's a little snippet of the song--to the tune of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back," natch.

This Table's long
but it should be Round.
King Arthur can't hear a sound.
When a knight tries to talk,
that brother's got to walk
half a freaking block
to be heard.
Can't hear a word,
cause this table is so absurd.

--

*Yeah, that metaphor got away from me a little bit.

**I know, I'm a bit behind on this one. The season four premiere is right around the corner.

Manolo Blahnik: Getting Medieval On Your Feet?

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:28:00 +0000

In an interview with Ireland's Independent, the designer of Carrie Bradshaw's favorite togs had this to say about his new line:

"I've gone mad for warrior images this season," said Mr Blahnik, pointing out the Samurai masks on the boots, and armoured metal discs.

"I've used shapes for a modern, powerful woman -- a kind of medieval Amazon."

What kind of shoes does Blahnik think a medieval Amazon might wear? Well, this is the picture that accompanied the article:

So, there you go. No metal discs here, but that's one helluva heel.

Strictly speaking, of course, Amazons are the province of the classicist and the Xena fanfic writer, not the medievalist. But the medievals did have ideas about what amazons ought to look like, so I plan to keep this blog post going on that technicality. I did a quick search through the Bodleian's archives today and came up with two illuminations of Amazon queens.

The first comes from a mid-fifteenth century manuscript of Le Miroir du Monde, a universal history, and shows Alexander the Great meeting with the Amazon queen:

The second manuscript is a few years later, a copy of Christine de Pisan's Épître d’Othéa, showing the Amazon queen Tomyris overseeing the execution of the Persian emperor Cyrus:*

Sadly, in neither of the images can we see the feet of the lady in question--their long flowing fifteenth-century dresses get in the way. This is because if a fifteenth-century illuminator is going to draw an Amazon, he draws a fifteenth-century woman and gives her a sword or a helmet. This is pretty much the case throughout the Middle Ages; medievals simply didn't worry about anachronism. If you put King David, King Arthur, and King Henry I in a medieval lineup, you'd not be able to pick out the one who slept with your wife by looking for clothes or weapons appropriate for an ancient Hebrew, a fifth-century Briton, or a twelfth-century Englishman, respectively.**

So, taking my cue from the medievals, I'd be forced to conclude that Blahnik is spot on. Of course medieval Amazon queens wore red open-toed stilleto pumps with wide ankle straps. Haven't women always?

--

*Tomyris is famous for hollowing out Cyrus's skull and using it as her favorite novelty drinking cup.
**A trick question, of course, as all three got up to more than their fair share of naughty business between the sheets.

The Monkey Apocalypse (Mmm... Marginalia)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:48:00 +0000

OK, folks. It has been pointed out several times that this blog has become unduly concerned--perhaps even obsessed--with monkeys. That's a fair cop.* But bear with me for just a little while longer here, as I take you on a tour of the margins of the "Hours of Englebert of Nassau," a Dominican Book of Hours produced in Flemish lands near the end of the fifteenth century. Trust me, it's worth the trip. This marginal image is a bit later than most of the monkeys you've seen so far (who live primarily in the ornamental borders of late thirteenth to mid fourteenth century gothic manuscripts), and is roughly contemporary with Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur.** The artist responsible is today called the "Master of Mary of Burgundy," after a commission he undertook for said Duchess of Burgundy. The difference in artistic sensibility is marked:

[This and all the other images today should expand when you click them.]

As frequent readers of Got Medieval already know, the medieval unicorn can only be tamed by a maiden, but can be ridden by a monkey. The Master of Mary of Burgundy combines these two facts to tell a little story in serial installments in the margins of this manuscript. Here, we find the maiden, having tamed the unicorn, preparing it to be ridden by a knight, assisted by the knight's clever monkey squire. Just what sort of knight has a monkey squire?

Why, a monkey knight, of course:

This is actually the first image in the sequence, when the monkey receives his arms and armor from our mysterious Lady in Red.*** She then prepares his horse for him, as above. The next time we spy the monkey knight, he is riding toward adventure with his squire and another attendant, monkeys all:

What glorious adventure do they ride on to? The artist builds suspense. Several pages pass, until we spy another monkey, this one riding a boar, blowing a trumpet adorned with the monkey-knight's arms:

If this were a comic book, I would call the final image in the sequence a "splash page." It covers an entire leaf, on which we find that the monkey was riding on to a battle against some wildmen:

His monkey trumpeter appears to have left the battle, replaced now by a fox riding on a dog. And possibly, the wildman on the left has traitorously joined with the monkey's animal forces.

Two final points of interest. The first is the elaborate linework forest scene in the background. It's unlike anything I've ever seen elsewhere. Here's the full page, on which you can see the trees and the birds that nest in them.

And finally, I may be seeing things, but I'm pretty sure that someone-possibly our master--has signed his name in the middle of the piece. I can't quite make out the letters, though:

Paleographers? Any thoughts?

Extra credit to anyone who can put these images into a comic book-style series of panels and add narration and dialogue. I'll post any submissions here.

--

*But society's to blame.
**In other words, the printing press has been around for a generation at this point, though it has only recently arrived in England.
***This knight is occasionally identified as a lion, but I think that's a mistaken impression created by the way the artist draws the knight's tabard a bit later.

New Items in the Ye Olde Got Medieval Shoppe

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:15:00 +0000

At a reader's request, I've also added coasters to the Cafe Press site. I've not had time to order one myself yet, but they look nice. I've also started experimenting with photoshop, trying to restore some of the color that has been washed out of some of the scans I'm using, and also to edited out some of the text so that the image is the main focus. Like so:

When I do this, I'll try to offer an unedited version of the manuscript image as well. That's the nice thing about CafePress's digital delivery. I can make as many different versions of the same thing as I want. If there's anything you want in particular that you don't see there, drop me a line using the blog's contact form.

I'm also going to be working on turning some of the Historic Personals into some swag.

Welcome to October

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:01:00 +0000

According to medieval calendars, October is the time for sowing your seeds. Also, it's the time to be on the lookout for giant six-armed taloned bear monsters.*

Important dates in medieval Octoberian history include:

October 1st, 959 - Edgar the Peaceable becomes king of England. Anglo-Saxon kings had awesome cognomens.
October 3rd, 1283 - Dafydd ap Gruffydd, prince of Gwynedd in Wales, is executed by being hanged, drawn and quartered. You have to admire Henry III's commitment to being a royal bastard.
October 9th, 1003 - Leif Erikson lands in Jellyfish Bay, Canada, thereby becoming the first man to become the first man to discover America. Don't tell the post office, or they'll surely close in his honor, just to be safe.
October 13th, 1307 - The Knights Templar are arrested in France by Phillip the Fair. And the early 21st-century English historical conspiracy book trade is born.
October 14th, 1066 - The Battle of Hastings. The Normans--they came, saw, and conquered.
October 17th, 1091 - The Great London Tornado destroys London Bridge. It won't be the last time that bridge goes down.
October 22nd, 794 - Emperor Kanmu moves the Japanese capital to Kyoto.
October 23rd, 4004BC - The world was created according to James Ussher's calculations. Next time you call Biblical literalism "medieval," remember that this guy outlived Shakespeare.
October 25th, 1147 - The Seljuk Turks defeat the German crusaders under Conrad III at the Battle of Dorylaeum. Just when the Crusades were going so well.
October 27th, 1275 - Amsterdam is founded. You hear that, stoners? Now you have a reason to "celebrate" at 10:27 every morning.
October 29th, 1390 - The first Parisian witchcraft trial. They had to hurry, too. Only 127 medieval years left to get that witch burning in!
October 31st, 1517 - Martin Luther nails his theses to the church door in Wittenburg. The Middle Ages are pronounced officially dead about thirty minutes later, giving rise to the expression "dead as a doornail."**

--

*For the most part, medieval illuminators had no earthly idea what a scorpion was supposed to look like, so you get some pretty interesting looking Scorpio images in calendars.
**Not really.

Text on the Margins (Mmm... Marginalia)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:49:00 +0000

Following up on my recent tirade about medieval textual precociousness, let's leave the monkeys behind for a week and instead peer into the lower margin of this manuscript of Alain de Lille's Anticlaudianus.

I apologize for the poor quality of the image. Apparently, generations of readers have leaned in for a closer look, too, and worn away a lot of the ink. On each side of the page we have fairly mundane grotesques.* The one I'm interested in is the old man on the left. You can just barely make out that he's holding a globe in his hands. And if we peer even closer at the globe (the image below should be clickable to zoom if you need), what at first looks like an image resolves to...

That's right--more text! And not just any text, but the Magnificat and part of the Ave Maria, as well as a teensy tiny scribal signature at the very bottom.**

The result is a fairly clever series of little jokes. In order to read the text "Magnificat anima mea Dominum" or "God magnifies my soul," you need a magnifying glass!

The recursion joke of a man at the edge of a text holding a text has theological dimensions as well. The Magnificat is no random ipsum lorem. It's a canticle in praise of Mary, from whom sprung Jesus, the Word Made Flesh, the Son who made His Daughter His Mother. In other words, this marginal text "outranks" the text that is in the center of the page. The text this weird grotesque holds praises Mary, who is the mother of the Word, who is the Father of all of Creation, including the main text it attends.***

And as if that wasn't already enough, Alain de Lille, the author of the main text, is famous for his description of God as "an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." We almost have an attempt to literalize this quote here: a sphere that is intelligible, because it is formed by words, a sphere whose circumference bleeds into those words and disappears, a sphere whose content is literally everything, including the name of the scribe who put it all together.

Pretty deep for a bunch of illiterate clods waiting on the printing press to give them their humanity, eh?

BONUS: Any budding paleographers out there, here's one last clickable image of the sphere, if you want to try your hand at some serious transcription:

Next week: A most thrilling tale of monkey adventure!

--

*You know you've seen too many marginal images when you can describe a man with a an old man's face for a butt as "mundane."
**Alas, the name is smudged in the middle, but our scribe appears to have been called something like "Humfredus R*smudge* Matt."
***Theology requires lots of capitalization.

The myth of pre-literacy

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:20:00 +0000

I've been reading BoingBoing extra carefully this week, hoping that Cory would comment on his monkey doppleganger. Alas, nothing yet. But this extra attention means that I haven't been able to just ignore the inane pseudo-academic ramblings of Douglas Rushkoff, BB's current guest-blogger.

This in particular draws my ire:

For me, the development of a gamer from player to cheater to programmer mirrors our development as a society.... Before literacy, we were mere listeners. We heard stories read to us as a group. After the printing press, we were elevating to individuals, each with our own, acknowledged perspective on what we read. (The Renaissance, if anything, was a celebration of individual perspective - just like the paintings.) This reading phase took us right through the reading equivalent of cheating: postmodernism, cut-and-paste, and other personal deconstruction of the author's original intent.

Finally, computers have changed our relationship to the text again. Instead of just reading the publications of others, we are free to write and distribute our own - on a relatively level playing field. We become authors.

I can't say exactly if Rushkoff means to conjure up a pre-literate society, one that actually has little to no written language, or instead one like much of Europe during much of the Middle Ages, a society in which the general populace is illiterate and literacy is primarily the province of an "elite" subclass of specialists. I'll assume it's the second, since he describes these stories as being "read" rather than recited from memory.

Certainly, there was some group-reading-to going on in the Middle Ages. In fact, lots of the manuscript images that I show off here during my Mmm... Marginalia are from gigantic books designed to be displayed as they were read--the Bodeian Alexander manuscript with the drunken monkeys, and Yale's Lancelot MS, are about the size of a (modest) TV when you open them up. Reading these manuscripts was a performative art, with the reader at the center. But the listeners, out on the periphery, are free to interpret and reinterpret the story they are receiving.

The textual margins, with their drunken monkeys and bizarre scatalogical humor, seem to be begging the audience to engage in just that sort of interpretive play. The reader might be reading aloud the story of Lancelot, but you, the audience, can see that on the same page as the main narrative, there's a man getting shot in the ass out to the side, and it's up to you to figure out how that's relevant to the main story, or perhaps even to turn away from the story entirely and to just sit and think about how funny ass-shots are while that jerk who knows how to read just drones on and on about how awesome a knight Lancelot was.*

And this is just one sort of medieval textual activity. It's hard to say exactly who the "we" in Rushkoff's pre-literacy societies is supposed to be. Maybe he'd cry foul and say that these elaborately ornamented books were just for rich folk, the nobles with too much time on their hands. And he'd be right there. But I imagine that at least part of that "we," is composed of the time-displaced analogues of the people who read BoingBoing now--folks with some spare time, some spare money, and an interest in technology. These sorts of people did not suddenly come into being in the Renaissance as a side-effect of the printing press.

Before the printing press, people had books--not as many books, surely, but they had books. And some of them loved books. They loved books the way BoingBoingers love Altoid tins and open source software projects. As hard as it is to believe, books were themselves once a cool, innovative technology, and that "once" happened well before Gutenberg came along.

Medieval book enthusiasts were DIYers. They made their own books. They copied texts they liked, freely editing and recomposing--or hacking, remixing, and cut-and-pasting, to use the right lingo. Take a certain fifteenth-century Englishman who went by the name "Rate," for example. We know him, because he signs his name to a manuscript collection he put together, a book today held by the Bodleian Library that goes by the name MS Ashmole 61. It's what specialists would call "a commonplace book," and as other medieval scholars have pointed out, commonplace books had a lot in common with blogs. Scribes collected together texts they liked and copied them down into books for their personal use. If there was a romance floating around they liked, they would "rip" a copy of it into their commonplace book, alongside other things that caught their interest-- including recipes, sermons, devotional stories, saint's lives, dirty jokes (including fabliaux), registers of their finances, lists of animals that start with the letter A, the birthdays and christening days of their children, songs, and so on, and so on.

Rate's commonplace book is pretty common in this regard. MS Ashmole 61 includes a lot of things I've already listed; it's got some short exempla, a Breton lai or two, several romances, and some fabliaux. Rate was a pretty sentimental guy, apparently, so a lot of the texts in his commonplace book can be lumped together as "stories about faithful husbands and wives that end happily." But a lot of the texts he writes down, he alters as he does, to make them fit his own tastes. He apparently didn't have (or didn't like) the beginning of Sir Orfeo, so instead he made a new one out of a few lines he did like from the completely unrelated poem Of Arthour and Merlin (which happen to mention happy couples). Rate also decided he didn't like how the sinner of the Sinner's Lament didn't have a name, so he edits the first few stanzas to name him as "Sir William Basterdfeld of England" (pun intended) and then he took the whole Lament and turned it into a prologue for his copy of The Adulterous Falmouth Squire.

Rate is notorious, but hardly an anomaly. People were simply a lot savvier consumers of texts in the Middle Ages than they're often given credit for. If they saw a miniature they liked in one book, they might go to their local bookshop and ask for a version to be pasted into one of their books. Or they might take their business to one shop over another because, "That scribe they have there does a mean Piers Plowman, and his Chaucer's not bad, either."** At least one manuscript of Wace, the French translator of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, inserts all of Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian romances into the middle of the history's section on King Arthur--which would be kind of like pasting the script of the Untouchables into your 20th Century American History textbook right after the chapter on Al Capone or splicing up Shakespeare in Love to serve as a frame to your copy of Romeo and Juliet.

As I've argued here before, it's absurd to think of the printing press as a sudden world-shattering technology. People were jazzed about the printing press because it allowed them to do on a larger scale things that they already were doing with written texts. It was an advance in scope, not in kind. In fact, if anything, the printing press was more like Windows to the text-hacker scene. Moveable type forces text to behave. It standardizes presentation, creating identical products. Every copy of Sir Orfeo produced by a press has exactly the same beginning, middle, and end. Marginal notes suddenly stick out as interlopers; they're handwritten and shabby compared to the crisp machined text.

Rushkoff--and most of the people linked at BoingBoing--are committed to the American metaphor of technological progress. Important advances always start with an idea that nobody properly appreciates, an invention by an outsider (possibly with brightly colored hair or inappropriate piercings) that is initially scoffed at and even suppressed by a monolithic pig-headed status quo (of faceless disapproving men in grey business suits), and then, when it finally hits the market, this technological doodad revolutionizes everything, completely supplanting what came before. I think part of the reason why we medievalists have such a hard time convincing people that the Middle Ages was not a homogeneous thousand years of people coated in their own shit is the pervasiveness of this metaphor.

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*In fact, this sort of play gets taken one step further, as characters within romances are themselves often depicted as writing and reading romances and images based on them. Arthur's knights return to court to have their adventures dutifully recorded. Lancelot draws pictures of his love for Guenivere on the wall of his cell while imprisoned by Morgan le Fay, and then Arthur has to come along later and piece the story together then. The heroine of The Knight with Two Swords is given a mantle with the story of Arthur's conception embroidered along one edge. Chretien has his Fenis tell her love Cliges that she will not play the part of Isolde to his Tristan. Really, I could keep listing ways that medieval writers play with intertextuality and reinterpretation all day.
**And speaking of Piers Plowman, its author, Langland, appears to have revised it every few years, at least once by using other people's imperfect copies of Piers rather than his originals as the basis for new revisions.

Proof of Medieval Time Travel? (Mmm... Marginalia)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:04:00 +0000

Last week, I posted a picture of a superheroic monkey that reminded some readers of a superheroic blogger, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing. I'll let you be the judge:

I'll admit, the resemblance isn't exact. But the dark circles around the eyes, the shape of the head, and those ears are all suggestive. In the interest of art history, I suggest Cory remove his pants and pose with a long stick so we can be more exact with the comparison. If you don't know who Cory Doctorow is, or why he wears a cape and goggles, go read the xkcd comic that started that particular meme.

OK, back? Now for for this week's marginalia. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think I've found further compelling evidence of medieval time travel. Why else would a 13th-century illuminator plant this caricature of Tony Blair in the manuscript's margin:

Most people I've shown this one to agree that the likeness is spot-on... until I place it side by side with an actual picture of Tony Blair, and then they're less wowed. Like so:

Nevertheless, I remain convinced. Look at the eyebrows, the shape of the nose, and the teeth. Granted, former Prime Minister Blair does not have a tongue that spirals out into an acanthus leaf, and his tail is much less pronounced. Also, the marginal image is clearly many years younger--but this is time travel we're talking about. Either the young Blair had a glorious adventure he hasn't yet revealed to the world,* or the medieval illuminator traveled forward to 1980 or so. It's hard to say for certain. Either way, I smell a new book for Dan Brown.

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*It could happen. Look how long it took him to fess up to being Catholic.

Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! (Mmm... Marginalia)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:22:00 +0000

From the same manuscript as last week's azz-tappers,* allow me to present another famous first, the first monkey superhero:

What's this? Another monkey, so soon after the last? And no substantive posts between marginalia? I'm in danger of falling into a rut. A monkey shaped rut. If only I hadn't talked about Matthew Paris, I could pretend I was doing a theme month. Ah, lost opportunities.

In the main illumination in the lower left corner, we have a medieval commonplace, King David pointing at his eye to illustrate the Psalm 26:1, "The Lord is my light and my salvation." That's God there, poking his head in through the clouds, and David indicating that he could not see without God's light. This probably looked a bit less silly to the medievals, who were intimately acquainted with their psalms and who took the promise of God's light a bit more literally than we might expect. You cannot see without light, so David is thanking God for allowing him to see.

Up above, a man in red appears to be trying to eat his way into the picture from the margin, but is soon to be thwarted by our intrepid monkey's axe. He certainly cuts a dramatic figure there, his cape flying behind him in the breeze, doesn't he? No theological content here, unless we are meant to think that God's salvation might take the form of a be-caped monkey.

Someone should get DC and Marvel on the phone. They've been trying to trademark the word "super-hero" for some time. This qualifies as prior art, doesn't it? Actually, on second thought, don't. I'm putting the monkey up on my Cafe Press store, and I don't want them sending any cease and desists my way.**

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*There are enough strange monkeys just in this one manuscript, that it should be called "The Monkey Psalter."
**If you've not checked the store lately, you may be surprised to see I've added a few other monkey magnets.

Don't Stop. Believing.*

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:53:00 +0000

For fans of really long recaps of movies (sort of MST3K in text), The Agony Booth has just posted its review/recap of the 1998 film animated film Quest for Camelot, a movie I'd never heard of until about ten minutes before I wrote the sentence you're reading now.

The more I read about it, the more I want to see it. A movie where Steve Perry from Journey is Arthur's singing voice? And it's got characters voiced by Urkel, Eric Idle, Don Rickles, and Bronson Pinchot? And it features a gratuitous Riverdance sequence?*** I'm so there.

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*I'm not sure if this is the first time I've footnoted a post title before, but now that that song is stuck in my head on constant repeat, I am suddenly aware of how weird it is that there is such a pronounced pause in the cadence of the line. He sings "Don't stop!" Then he stops before getting to the "Beleivin'!"**
**Also: Who are the streetlight people?
***Scientists believe it's theoretically possible for a non-gratuitous Riverdance sequence to exist, but one has never been sighted. It's like the Higgs boson of weird 90's pop culture ephemera.

The Medieval Origins of Common Phrases (Mmmm... Marginalia)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:21:00 +0000

At this point, we've all gotten the email at least once. No, I don't mean the one from the Nigerian male enhancement lottery asking us to validate our eBay account information, but, you know, the one titled something like "Famous Sayings Explained" or "You're Quoting Shakespeare (even if you don't know it)."* As a service to my readers, I'd like to share my own remarkable discovery that I have recently made regarding an increasingly common phrase and its unlikely medieval origins.

See if you can guess which phrase I mean by looking at this image, from the Bodleian Library's MS Douce 6:

Why is this stag so happy? Because he can see the rest of the image, which I am still cleverly hiding from you. Now, quickly, record your guesses in your notebooks and pass them to your neighbor. Ready?

As it is no doubt now clear, the phrase I had in mind was, "Tap dat ass." Stodgy professorial types may recognize this as one of those things said by "those kids today, with their clothes, and their shoes, and their clever euphemisms for knowing someone in the Biblical manner..."

If you've never heard it, here's the phrase used in context in Ludacris's Fantacy:

Table top or just give me a lap dance.
The Rock to the Park to the Point to the Flatlands.
That man Ludacris (woo) in the public bathroom,
Or in back of a classroom--
How ever you want it lover-lover,
gonna tap dat ass soon.

For my philologists, other attested variants include the less frequent "tap that ass" and "tap dat azz."

Anyway, for those of you who think perhaps this is an elaborate joke of the form "make an outlandish claim and then continue to delay for as long as possible until you reveal your original claim was only justified in a very narrow sense,"** have I got your comeuppance! Here's the rest of the image, which until now our happy stag and I alone have been privy to:

Quod erat demonstrandum. Tapping that ass is something that dates back to the Middle Ages, practiced by monkeys--and, occasionally, storks.

Why has it taken so long for this discovery to come to light? Possibly, it's because the Bodleian's catalogue entry for this image consists of "Scenes of daily life: stork, apes, stag-headed line-filler." The prudes.

I have every confidence that my discovery will net me a guest posting spot at the Language Log, if not a book deal and a seven part BBC special.

--

*From which I learned, for instance, that F.C.U.K. clothing company's name comes from the medieval phrase "Fornication Consented to Under the King's [jurisdictional power]".
**A form, incidentally, also used for most academic papers.

And You Thought Tomatoes Were Dangerous...

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:52:00 +0000

Did you know that tomato sales are still down in the wake of that whole salmonella thing?

I think it's unfair that my favorite fruit has had to labor under this cloud of suspicion all summer. So, attention media types: I have your next big story about the dangerous lurking in your grocer's produce case.

Gregory the Great tells the following story in his Dialogues (I.4.165D):

Once upon a time, a nun walking into the garden saw a delicious-looking lettuce. She ate it greedily, forgetting to first bless it with the sign of the cross. Immediately, she was possessed by a devil, fell to the ground, and was pitifully tormented. Word was carried quickly to Equitius, begging him to quickly come to see the possessed woman and to aid her through his prayers. No sooner had the holy man entered into the garden than the devil began to make excuses with the nun's voice, saying, "What have I done? What have I done? I was having a sit on that lettuce there, and she came and ate me!"*

Lettuce. It's not just boring. It's a threat to your immortal soul.

Or, if your readers happen to be demons, it can still work for you.

Lettuce. If you sit on it, nuns will totally eat you.

--

*Really, that's what he said: "Ego quid feci? Ego quid feci? Sedebam mihi super latucam; venit illa, et momordit me!"

An Arthurian Wiki

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:32:00 +0000

Now is as good a time as any to come out of the closet as an Arthurian and plug my next great Internet venture: Quondam et Futurus: An Arthurian Wiki.*

Here's my thinking. There's a wiki on the Muppets that lists every appearance of the Amazing Mumford. There's a wiki on Naruto that includes every plot arc, even the critically panned Sasuke Retrieval.**** And yet, King Arthur, the once and future king, hasn't got squat. Not diddly. Not even diddly-squat. If I want to find out why Arthur's battlecry is "Clarence!" I have to dig around the archives of the Arthurnet mailing list, but if I want to find out where Chewbacca died, it's a wiki-link away. This imbalance must be redressed. And since they won't let me nuke the Star Wars Expanded Universe from orbit, the best I can do is get a real Arthurian wiki rolling.

I secured the space at Wikia some time ago, but dissertating, moving, et al. have kept me from doing much of anything to it yet. My goal for the site is to create an encyclopedia of Arthurian knowledge accessible enough for the lay, non-academic audience (fan~~boys~~people included) and detailed enough to be useful for academics, too, a place where you can read about Malory's changes to the story of Pelleas and Ettard, as well as about that episode of the Transformers where they pull a Conneticut Yankee.

So, if you know anything about the Arthurian legends, please drop by the King Arthur Wiki. Trade me a few footnotes worth of your cognitive surplus. And if you want to become an official administrator, contact me offblog.

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*After the medieval monkey Cafe Press merch shop, soon to feature multiple designs of monkey magnets and much, much more, thanks to the heroic purchasing prowess of medievalists like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.** This is my way of saying that I made enough on the first magnet to justify opening a for real store that can handle more than one magnet, one tee-shirt, or one pair of boxer shorts featuring the souls of lechers damned to eternal torment.
**I was on hiatus for the entire "The Medieval Muddle Kurfluffle 2008," but let me say, for the record, that any scholar who buys stuff from me is my kind of scholar. I don't think Mr. Muddle ever bought anything, the skinflint. But maybe he did--anonymity and all.***
***Speaking of things that I was on hiatus for, I apparently got some web awards from a couple of blogs. I think by now that meme is dead, but thanks for the praise.
****Calm down, Narutonians. I have no clue what a Sasuke Retrieval is, nor if it was ever critically panned, nor indeed whether there are even critics of Naruto's ouevre. To any confused Naruto-googlers who find their way here, I apologize. I will not, however, be doing any Google Penancing about whether they had Sexy Jutsu in the Middle Ages.

Introducing the new Honda Elephant (Mmm... Marginalia)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:43:00 +0000

This week's marginal curiosity comes to us courtesy of Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century Benedictine monk, historian, and illuminator of no small talent. The following is from the Chronica Majora:

It depicts an elephant owned by Emperor Frederick II, a gift of the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Kamil, in 1229. Emperor Fred used the fearsome beastie as a show piece during parades, and it is often called "the Cremona elephant" because its existence is attested both in Paris's account of the visit of Fred's brother-in-law Richard of Cornwall to Cremona and in Cremona's local city annals. It's unlikely that Fred's elephant could seat thirteen, as he's depicted here, however. Imagine how much you could save on gas if twelve of your coworkers made your daily commute atop this sturdy mount.

Aside from its remarkable fuel efficiency, the most interesting thing for me about Matthew Paris's Cremona elephant is that Paris knew full well that this was not what elephants looked like and chose to draw it that way anyway. Paris had earlier in his life been afforded the rare opportunity (for an artist in medieval England, anyway) of drawing an elephant from life at the court of Henry III of England, when the latter received the elephant as a gift from Loius IX of France.* Henry's elephant, poor thing, survived four years of drafty accomodations at the Tower of London, reportedly fed a diet of red meat and red wine.

Paris's sketch of the actual elephant looks like this:

Note the distinct lack of thirteen guys riding its back, and the realistic shape of its ears and trunk. So, why did Paris, when sketching Frederick's elephant, depict it so apart from reality? The answer, I think, is the one-two punch of representational tradition and audience expectation. In the margins of the Chronica Majora, the elephant's job is, as it was in Frederick's parades, to demonstrate the majesty and grandeur of the monarch able to command such a behemoth. If there was one thing that medieval men and women who had never actually seen an elephant knew about elephants, it was that they were big enough to fit a castle on their backs, like so:

A realistic elephant, one that defied the established visual vocabulary, would hardly demonstrate Emperor Frederick's imperial might for the readers of the Chronica Majora as well as an exotic, mobile battle fortress, so the castle elephant is the one that makes the cut for the margins.

BONUS: Because it wouldn't be properly medieval if I didn't mention signification, let me add that according to medieval bestiaries, elephants represent Adam and Eve, for just like Adam and Eve before the fall, they feel no sexual desire. When elephants want to mate, they go to the east, near Eden, and eat the mandrake plant in order to inspire lust, just as Adam and Eve were inspired to hanky and panky by the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle (against Satan for your immortal soul)!

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*What do you get the king who has everything? Nothing. But if you know a king who has everything but an elephant...

Welcome to September

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:42:00 +0000

According to medieval calendars, September is the time for harvesting your grapes and stomping them into wine. Don't be like the slacker on the left: no sampling the grapes as you stomp, please.

Got Medieval is officially back from its month long hiatus, but this week's Medieval Marginalia Monday won't come until Tuesday, on account of Labor Day. Yay, Labor Day! Celebrate working by not working! I'm not sure if you need to stomp grapes on Monday or not--maybe a few just to be safe.

Notable medieval events that went down in September include:

September 3rd, 1189: Richard the Lionheart crowned at Westminster, two months after the death of Henry II.
September 3th, 1260: The Ghibellines defeated the Ghelphs at the Battle of Montaperti, AKA The Hill of Death.
September 7th, 1191: Richard the Lionheart (hey, that name sounds familiar...), defeats Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, AKA Saladin at Arsuf. Don't feel too bad for Saladin. He lost the battle but won the war, and eventually Dante lets him hang with the virtuous pagans in Limbo.
September 8th, 1264: The Statute of Kalisz issued by Boleslaw the Pious grants the Jews legal rights and protections in Poland.
September 11th, 1297: The Battle of Stirling Bridge, depicted with 100% less bridge in Mel Gibson's Braveheart.
September 16th, 1400: Owain Glendower crowned Prince of Wales, back when the title meant something.
September 20, 1187: Saladin begins the Siege of Jerusalem. See, I told you things worked out for him in the long run.
September 23, 1122: Calixtus II and Henry V agree to the Concordat of Worms.
September 25th, 1066: Harold II of England ensures that 1066 is remembered for the Norman, not the Norwegian Conquest at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
September 28th, 1066: William the Conqueror gets the conquering started properly.

Welcome to August

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:01:00 +0000

According to medieval calendars, August is the time for harvesting, threshing and reaping your corn, so you'd best get on that.

Got Medieval is going to be going on hiatus for the month of August, so that your humble bloggist can move (again), go to three weddings, and work up a western civ course for the fall. Oh yeah, and there's that dissertation thing, too.

Notable medieval events that happened in August include:

August 1st, 1492: The Jews are expelled from Spain.
August 10th, 991: The Battle of Maldon, where Byrtnoth fell, his ofermod spawning a thousand subsequent scholarly skirmishes.
August 12th, 1099: The Battle of Ascalon, the final major battle of the First Crusade.
August 15th, 778: The Battle of Roncesvalles, where the shot heard round the world is made by Roland's brains exiting his ears.
August 15th, 1040: King Duncan I of Scotland killed by a fellow you may have heard of, goes by the name of Macbeth.
August 22nd, 1485: The Battle of Bosworth Field, more fodder for that Shakeshaft guy.
August 23rd, 1305: William Wallace, AKA Braveheart, is executed. Mel Gibson rejoices.
August 24th, 410: The Visigoths sack Rome and everyone has to change their desk calendars over from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

See all of y'all when I'm back from my bloggervation, right after Labor Day.

Mmm... Marginalia: Monkey Merch

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:30:00 +0000

Is everyone tired of all the monkeys I pull out of the margins and post on my blog? And is it fair to stereotype the Middle Ages with all this binge drinking? Well... how about both at the same time?

Pretty much speaks for itself, doesn't it?

You may have noticed that a link has appeared recently in the upper right hand corner of the blog. If you click on through to Got Medieval's Ye Olde Cafe Presse Shoppe, you can buy a magnet featuring these very drunken monkeys, for a limited time only.* I got mine in the mail Saturday, and I'm pretty pleased with it.

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*It costs money to have a Cafe Press shop with more than item of any given type available, so I plan to offer just one marginalia magnet at a time, rotating them periodically--at least, until I've bought all the ones I'd like to have, or the DMCA police come and try to enforce the intellectual property rights of thirteenth-century illuminators, whichever comes first. Or, I suppose, if I sell enough to justify paying the monthly shop fee, I'll do that.

Seven Words Elsewhere

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:40:00 +0000

My (re)quest to find the seven words that describe the Middle Ages* continues to be this blog's most linked to and commented upon post in a long while, surpassing even fanfiction and chainmail bikinis.** At this point, I guess I should be thanking my students for all the traffic their inability to periodize brought me.

Here are some links to other people's musings on the subject elseblog:

Steven Till has a list.
Magistra et Mater has three lists, to cover the sixth, seventh, and tenth centuries that my slacker readership missed.
Quid Plura? hid a list inside a Billy Joel joke. Of this I approve.
Teaching College English has several lists, including one from her son.
Wynken de Worde doesn't seem to have a list of his own, but has a few thoughts on whether "books" should be on anyone else's.

I'm sure there are others, and these aren't counting those from the comments threads of the two relavent posts. All in all, that's a lot of words in clumps of seven. Thanks, everyone, for playing along.

Also, I saw this over at Per Omnia Saecula. It's called Wordle, and it's a nifty widget that makes word cloud graphics. Here's one made from your lists (click the link to see it in its full glory):

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*And yes, I know that I'm cheating and using multi-word concepts.
**Though medieval pr0n continues to--and I suspect will always--reign supreme at bringing random visitors here via Google.

Stunning Advances in Medieval Cuteness

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:13:00 +0000

Via GoNintendo.com:
I was beginning to fear that Japan's reserves of inscrutable supercuteness might be running low, but it appears my fears were misplaced. Allow me to introduce Gimli, son of Gloin, in amigurumi-form.

Apparently, amigurumi (literally: knitted stuffed toys) is the latest Japanese trend in making cutesy versions of established geek properties to hit our shores. And unlike Beanies, Legos, Mighty Muggs, Kubricks, Minimates, Bobbleheads, Animaquettes, Super Deformed Crap, et al., they're hand-knitted [or hand-crocheted] and people trade clothes patterns online, so it's conceivable that you might be able to make one yourself.*

Here's a link to a flickr gallery chock full of LOTR amigurumi, and here's a link to the website (from whence I snagged the picture above) where you can purchase little Gimli clothes for fifty bucks.***

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*Or, failing that, you could drop strong hints to the ~~knitting~~ crafting readership of your blog that you might like one. You know, if you have a blog, and loyal readers who knit. [Or crochet. I'm not picky.]
**Or Legolas, or Boromir, or... Kif Kroker?

One for the Lawyers (Mmm... Marginalia)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:28:00 +0000

This one goes out to all the law students, lawyers, paralegals, and other assorted legal professionals who read this blog. I know that you come here for diversion because the reading you're forced to do for work and school is ungodly amounts of boring. You should, however, consider yourselves lucky. Medieval law books are just as eyeball-numbingly tedious, and just think, many medieval law students had to copy their textbooks out by hand.

Take this passage from the Codex Iustinianus, for instance:**

4.27.1. Emperors Diocletian and Maximian to Marcellus.
It is undoubted law that, excepting possession, nothing can be acquired through a free person not subjected to another's power.
1. If a procurator, therefore, entered into a pact, to which a stipulation was added, whereby it was agreed that not he, but the person whose business he managed, should have the right to have the property restored to him, no obligation accrued in favor of the master.

Eyeballs numb yet? Tsk, tsk. We haven't even gotten to the commentary!

So what could an enterprising scribe do to liven this up? A few marginal monkeys playing at procurator and slave, perhaps? Well, whoever commissioned the Bodleian's MS Canon. Misc. 495, a copy of Justinian with the marginal gloss by Accursius, had other ideas, as you can see below:

That is exactly what it looks like: the initial I** of Imperator decorated with a woman holding a giant erect amicus curiae. And while there's something fitting about illustrating the laws of possession in such a manner, the scribe didn't limit himself to just the one onus probandi. Witness these, as well, from various places in the MS:

If anything, that first obiter dictum is the least weird member of the set, eh?

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*Translation taken from the University of Wyoming's excellent resource.
**And so really this is an Mmm... Initial Capitals rather than a true Mmm... Marginalia, but don't be too pedantic, because the interesting part of the capital is still out in the margin.

Medieval Standup Comedy

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:24:00 +0000

Salon.com posted a review of the new book, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, today. The review mentions Poggio Bracciolini, the 14th-century Italian author of the Liber Facetiarum, a work it describes as "Europe's first joke book."* Since I've never heard of the guy or the book, I Googled until I found my way to this site, which hosts a public domain translation of some of the jokes, mixed with some from other medieval sources.

Alas, Chaucer it ain't. In fact, I think Poggio must have been like a fourteenth-century Don Rickles, only not as funny.** Below, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of,*** I've tried my best to translate some of the jokes into that idiom:

This Florentine cook goes to the Duke one night after he's served him dinner, goes right up to him and says, "Oh, lord, if you would be so gracious, could you please turn me into an ass?" The Duke looks at him like he's crazy. "An ass? Why'd ya rather be an ass than a man," he says. "Because," says the cook. "I've seen all those guys you've given titles and treasure too, and they always end up as total asses. So I say, turn me into an ass!"

Man, I tell ya, those Florentines are nuts. Ever hear the one about the Florentine tailor? One day his wife gets pretty sick, so he goes and begs the doctor and says, "Couldja come by my house and take a look at my wife? I've got some tailoring to do, so you can just let yourself in." The doctor says "Sure," and he heads over to the tailor's place, where he finds the woman in her bed, so sick she's out of her mind. And then he rapes her. In fact, he takes his time with it and just barely makes it out the door as the tailor comes walking up. The tailor asks how she's doing, and the doctor says, Oh, don't worry, I'd say she's just about cured." The tailor heads in and finds his wife in tears, but what can he do, so he keeps quiet. A few days later, who comes calling at the tailor's shop but the doctor's wife, wanting a special new dress. The tailor says, "Yeah, I could do that, but I'll need to come by your place to take the measurements." When he gets her alone, he tells her he needs her to strip down naked, so he can be sure to get the measurements just right. She does, and, wow, she's a looker. So he rapes her. Then he goes and tells the doctor what he did.

Heyoooh!

At least the Florentines can get wives. I once knew this guy in Pergola. He was looking for a wife, so his neighbor says, "How about my daughter?" "Her?" She's way too young to marry," he says. "Shows what you know," says the neighbor, "She's already had three kids by our parish priest!"

I said, "She's already had three kids by our parish priest." Is this thing on? Hello? Hello?

Two peasants go to buy a crucifix for their village church. They go to town to the crucifix guy, who sees them coming a mile away--total bumpkins--so he says, "I'll sell you a crucifix, but you've got to tell me, do you want it alive, or do you want I should kill it for you now?" After talking it over, the peasants agree, "We'll take it live. If the folks back home want it dead, they can kill it in less than a minute, we figure."

I kid the peasants, but they know I love'm. Now, merchants on the other hand--can't stand'em! My buddy Frankie Ortani, he once owed a merchant a lot of money--I'm talkin' seriously in the hole to the guy. He's working for King Ladislas out in Perugia at the time, and the merchant sends him a letter to remind him he needs to pay up. Thing is, the letter arrives on the same day as a letter from his wife. She's complaining that he's not been home in months and she's getting... well, you know, she's not had it in a long time, faithful girl that she is. So Frankie writes a letter for each of them, only he puts them in the wrong envelopes. His wife gets the merchant's letter, and boy is she upset. It's like he doesn't care about her at all: he knows he owes her, but it's going to take him some time to get it all up and please be understanding yadayadayada. The merchant, on the other hand, man, he's pissed, cause his letter is full of promises of the kind a young fella makes to his wife, if you know what I mean. So the merchant takes the letter to Ladislas and says, "Will you get a load of the nerve of this guy? Doesn't say a word about the money he owes me, and promises when he sees me he's going to chase me around the room and then ride me until I'm tired of him. And let me tell you, I'm tired enough of him as it is."

Speaking of debts, my buddy Dacko, he's working as a tutor over in Florence, you know, looking after this young guy and his money. Old Dacko, he spends all this kid's dough on wine and sandwiches. When the kid finally wises up and hires a lawyer, they call Dacko in to the magistrate and tell him he's got to provide a legdger of all his income and outgoing expenses. So Dacko points at his mouth and his ass and says, "Sorry, I've got no record of incomings or outgoings other than that."

You see, the sandwiches went into his mouth and came out his--aw, forget it.

You guys hear about the Easter sermon the priest gave in Perugia last year? "Brothers," he says, "I need your help here. I just got finished listening to confession from your wives, and not a single one of them confessed to breaking her marriage vows. But when I heard your confessions, every one of you said you had been out there fooling around with the wives of other men. So let me ask you: Where are these women?"

Ha! Where are they, I ask ya? They're not in my village, I tellya that. Anyway, that's my time, folks. For those of you staying around, remember, the ten o'clock show is completely different from the eight o'clock show. Thank you, and don't forget to tip your waitress. Good night, everybody.

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*There's probably a silent [extant] there in the claim that Poggio's book was the first, since the name was used by Gervais of Tilbury in the twelfth century for a book of jokes he gave to the young son of England's Henry II, sadly lost.
**Or possibly a fourteenth-century Andrew Dice Clay, only much, much funnier. Ayyyoah!
***To tell you the truth, about halfway through this post, it sort of morphed in my head into Gilbert Gottfried doing a parody of Don Rickles and became legitimately funny again, but not in the way that I think Poggio was hoping for. I realize that if you're not as big a standup geek as me, this claim may not make any sense, so some of you will have to trust me when I say that while G.G. is just OK amounts of funny when he's doing his own jokes, when he does meta-jokes about other comedian's jokes, he's a comedy god--much funnier than you'd think from a guy who whose chief claim to fame is voicing the parrot in Aladdin.

Reader Mailbag: The Middle Ages in Seven Words (or Less)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:15:00 +0000

A week ago, I gave you, my readers, a challenge to condense the Middle Ages down to seven concepts. I realize that this was a tall order. The medieval period is a thousand or so years of (mostly European) human history, which boils down to less than one concept per century. Looking at what you all had to suggest,* it looks like the most skippable medieval centuries were the sixth, seventh, and tenth, and by far the most popular were the twelfth and thirteenth, with a smaller cluster of entries in the ninth century. Lots of your concepts were transcenturial, of course, and others weren't datable at all.

So now, according to Got Medieval's readership, these are the seven things that sum up the Middle Ages:**

The Black Death (and assorted associated plague paraphernalia)
Feudalism
Monasticism
The Crusades (and individual Crusade milestones)
Book Making
Law (and its foundations)
Religious Potpourri

That would be one hell of a Jeopardy round. If I had to pick my own favorite list from the submissions, on the other hand, it would be:

slippers woefully lacking in arch support
monkeys
weird attitudes toward the Classical past
those silly plague doctor bird masks
musical enchiladas***
apple pie
The Turk

And finally (and seriously) after a fair amount of thought on my part, these are the seven topics that I think an academic medievalist in America ought to be prepared to give an account of to a lay audience at a cocktail party:

Feudalism
The Crusades
Witches
King Arthur
Black Death
Chivalry
The Church

Overall, I think my list doesn't need that much explanation. Witchcraft might raise some eyebrows, as what most people think of as medieval witchcraft is actually Renaissance or early modern witchcraft, nonetheless, most people do think about witchcraft and witch burning when they think about the Middle Ages. King Arthur is accorded the honor of being the only fictional character worthy of inclusion on the list because people are always asking me if he was real or not (in two words: he wasn't--but most people want more than two words), and because he routinely makes it near the top of those Most Recognizable Characters in Western Civilization lists. I end the list with the church (or, to be pedantic, the Church), because for me, the definition of the Middle Ages boils down to this: the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation, when people in Europe generally conceived of themselves as being united by common citizenship in Christendom.

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*As of today. You're all perfectly welcome to keep adding your own lists to the original post, which has the longest comments section of any post on this site ever, by far, and that includes my BoingBoinged fanfiction thing.
**I had to make a lot of judgment calls to make this list, so don't send me angry letters. Also, I left off extremely general references that aren't particularly confined to the Middle Ages, like the very popular "war."
***That's what I though I read when I read "musica enchiriadis," and I'd be lying if I said I knew what it was before looking it up.

George Monbiot Hates the Middle Ages, Too

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:35:00 +0000

In an editorial by George Monbiot in today's issue of The Guardian, we learn that Britain's libel laws have gone so far that they are positively [...wait for it...] medieval.

Make any accusation, anywhere in the world, and if the subject can demonstrate that a single person in England or Wales has read it, you could be sued here for every penny, cent, rouble, rupee or renminbi you possess. The internet and the global nature of publishing ensure that these medieval laws have become the most powerful extra-territorial legislation ever drafted.

And

The blogger Richard Brunton tells a shocking story of the threats he received from a leisure company (which he is now too frightened even to name) after contributors to his site had made adverse comments about some of its products. Such threats could bring an end to critical online reviews. The internet butterfly is repeatedly broken upon the wheel of England's medieval laws.

At first, I wasn't certain that these were medieval-in-a-bad-way's, as I don't know very much about medieval English law (my medieval law prof was a Gratian scholar). Maybe the roots of British libel law really do stretch back to some medieval king, I thought. It only took a smidgen of research to discover, however, that modern British libel law took shape under the rule of James I, who took the throne at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I suppose "Jacobean libel law" doesn't pack quite the same punch, as it conjures up images of Shakespeare rather than medieval butterfly torture.

One reason modern libel laws took shape under James, rather than one of those horrible old medieval kings is, of course, that libel refers to printed falsehoods, and ye olde printinge presse is a very late medieval advance. This is not to say that there were no medieval laws concerning slander or libel. [UPDATE: However, for most of the Middle Ages, defamation (which covers written and spoken injurious statements), seems to have been primarily a matter for canon courts (the Church's legal system) not English civil courts, though there was the occasional civil prosecution.]

Here are some of my favorite non-ecclesiastical defamation laws:

The Lex Salica puts the penalty for (as one early twentieth-century scholar circumspectly put it) "the false imputation of unchastity against a woman" at forty-five shillings.
By the same law, men who falsely call another man "wolf" or "hare" must pay three shillings. A bargain, especially considering...
...that the Anglo-Saxon Dooms, on the other hand, set the punishment for folcleasung, or slander, as the loss of one's tongue.
The Norman Costumal dictated that a man who falsely charged another with thievery or murder not only had to pay damages, but also had to publicly confess to lying while holding his nose with his fingers.
And according to Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law, falsely calling a woman a harlot (meretrix) under the legal codes of medieval England was fineable, though the fine was one shilling less than the fine for falsely calling a man a thief (latro).*

The last time that Mr. Monbiot drew this site's attention, it was for comparing carbon offset credits to medieval indulgences. As a certain famous brush management technician once said, "fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again."** With this in mind, I did a quick search of the Guardian and pulled up still more Monbotian medieval horrors:

In a June 2007 editorial, Monbiot warned that the UK had "been allowed to remain in an almost medieval state of ignorance." About what? The health benefits of breastfeeding. I know there were a lot of things the medievals didn't know about, but breastfeeding?
In an April 2005 editorial lamenting Paul Wolfowitz's appointment to the presidency of the World Bank, he wrote that one of the few positives would be that it would remind the world that the Bank "is run like a medieval monarchy." (Note: This was well before Wolfman's mistress saw the light of day.)
In December 2001, he childed "Torquemada Blair's inquisitors, the lord chancellor's medieval department" for threatening to dispense with jury trials for enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan. Isn't there something about trial-by-jury in some medieval document or other? It's on the tip of my tongue... uh, Magma Blarta? Flagna Marta? Something like that, anyway.***

Huzzah for bulleted lists! But anyway, that's five it's-so-bad-it's-medieval's for George Monbiot. Sure, it doesn't quite match Christopher Hitchens, but what is with British journalists and the M-word?

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*That led historian Richard O'Sullivan to postulate the following algebraic formula:

Thief - Harlot = 1 shilling.

**That old Tennessee--I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee--saying.
***There once was a footnote here that said nasty things about the Star Court and compared it to the Bush administration's secret military tribunals. I've removed it after a dressing down by a reader in the comments section for the post. Any similarity between the US's now unconstitutional tribunal system and a court that (in the late Middle Ages, at least) held secret sessions with no right of appeal, no witnesses, and no juries I will leave to my readers to suss out on their own.

A Medieval Unicorn Chaser Chaser (Mmm... Marginalia)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:33:00 +0000

In penance for my distasteful Google Penance, please see the attached unicorn chaser for my medieval unicorn chaser, a marginal illustration from a 14th-century Flemish Psalter (MS Douce 5) of a monkey riding a unicorn:

Ride on, my monkey friend, ride on to freedom. If you see a virgin, you know what you have to do.

Medieval Unicorn Chasers (Google Penance)

noreply@blogger.com (Got Medieval) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:20:00 +0000

According to my sitemeter, Google sent someone with the question "Is it true about medieval unicorns?" to an old post here about Harry Potter, giving me reason to suspect that, once again, people at Google are having me on. But since it's been a while since my last Google Penance, I'll play along.

So, is it true about medieval unicorns?

Yes, it's true; medieval unicorns, like everything else in the Middle Ages, signify Christ. Unicorns cannot be tamed and run fierce and wild--just like Christ... who could not be held by the prisons of Hell. Their horns symbolize the unity between God and Christ,* and their small size symbolizes Christ's humility in taking on the form of a wretched human.

Ok, it's more likely the Googler wanted to know if it's true that medieval unicorns could only be tamed by virgins. (If there's one thing I know about Googlers, it's their love of virginity trivia.)

Answer to this "it": A definite yes. You cannot catch a unicorn unless you have a spare maiden around who is willing to stay seated until a unicorn happens along and puts its head in her lap. She may or may not have to bare her breast and let the unicorn suckle first.

Given their fierce untameableness, you might think that medieval depictions of unicorns would feature a lot of unicorns proudly running free, chased by hapless knights (or 13th-century wouldbe P.T. Barnums), their silver manes dancing with light and their horns pointing ever on toward freedom.

Certainly, these days, you're most likely to encounter a unicorn in a poster hanging on a bubble-gum pink painted wall in the room of a pre-teen girl. There's even an (only slightly outdated) internet meme built around using unicorns to banish away all the bad things one runs into while surfing the ~~blagoblag~~ blogosphere.

U · ni · corn chas · er [yoo-ni-kawrn chey-ser]
-noun
1. An internet post featuring an extremely cute and/or sparkly picture of a unicorn, meant to cleanse the palate after a blog reader has been subjected to a distasteful post or image such as goatse.cx, 2 girls 1 cup, etc.** The concept was first popularized at BoingBoing.net.

The medievals, however, had a different sort of unicorn chaser. Their pictures of unicorns were, instead, of unicorns being chased and then brutally murdered by clever maidens and their knightly accomplices. Witness this, from a 14th-century Book of Hours (MS Douce 48):

Or this, from a 13th-century bestiary (MS Douce 132):*****

Or this, from a completely different 13th-century bestiary (MS Bodl. 764):

In short, medieval unicorn chasers were more like to inspire, rather than banish, feelings of uneasiness. Oh and, poor Unknown Googler, if you really wanted to know about Christ signification and are shocked at all this unicorn snuff-porn, take heart. Unicorns being killed also signify Christ, who was brought to earth in the lap of a maiden only to be betrayed and horrifically murdered.

For everyone else, if images of unicorns impaled on spears don't satisfy your hopes and dreams of prancing, noble, carefree medieval unicorns, you can at least take a little comfort from knowing that you're not first to be disappointed by unicorns of the medieval variety. Marco Polo was shown a unicorn--actually, a rhinocerus--on his journeys and had this to say:

They are scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant's. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead... They have a head like a wild boars...They spend their time by preference wallowing in mud and slime. They are very ugly brutes to look at. They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.

--

Read more about medieval unicorns here and here.

*But only when the Holy Ghost is off scaring those meddling kids away from the old abandoned amusement park.
**Note that this bloggist has not provided a link to either of said examples, and this is done as a service to you, my dear readers. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt Google searches for either phenomenon on your own.***
***No, really. Don't. Really. Really really.****

****Readers accustomed to jokes in the footnotes, I promise you, none of these footnotes are jokes. I also understand the dilemma of a jokey footnote telling you it's no joke. To quote a certain band, "I'm finished with lies. If you don't believe me now, you'll never believe me. (You'll think it's a lie.)"
*****I do not know what Mr. Douce had against unicorns.