Got Medieval

What's So Funny about Knights and Snails?

2009-07-06T23:49:00.001-04:00

Here's a little medieval mystery for you. Why is the following image funny?

What we have here is your basic snail/knight standoff. You get these all the time in the margins of gothic manuscripts. And I do mean all the time. They're everywhere! Sometimes the knight is mounted, sometimes not. Sometimes the snail is monstrous, sometimes tiny. Sometimes the snail is all the way across the page, sometimes right under the knight's foot. Usually, the knight is drawn so that he looks worried, stunned, or shocked by his tiny foe.

Clearly, medieval readers thought there was something funny, or at least interesting, about the scene, since they drew it so often, but none of them bothered to write down what that was anywhere that we've found. The snail vs. knight motif was first [and probably last] seriously examined by Lillian Randall back in the 60's; in "The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare"* she suggests that perhaps the joke is that snails, what with the shells they carry on their backs and can hide away in, are some sort of parody of a highly-armored chivalric foe. We're supposed to laugh at the idea of a knight being afraid of attacking such a "heavily armored" opponent. Silly knight, it's just a snail!

I've never been entirely convinced by that explanation, but I've also never been able to come up with a better one. So I toss it out to you. What's so funny about a knight attacking a snail?

The image above is from the Macclesfield Psalter. Here's another from Morgan MS M453:

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*Even though it sounds like something I'd make up, it's real and it's famous. See Speculum** 37.

**Non-medievalists might also think that "Speculum" is just me taking the joke further. But, no, sadly, we medievalists work our asses off to publish in a journal named after a device used in gynecological checkups.

Stonhenge Hidden in Windows 7 (from Americans, anyway)

2009-07-03T00:08:00.004-04:00

As you might have deduced from my comments in the search engine rundown, I recently installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on my main machine. Poking around looking for new themes with which to customize my desktop tonight, I found this site, which explains how to enable the themes meant for other regions that are hidden within the Windows system files. After enabling the themes meant for people in the UK, I was pleasantly surprised when my background changed to an image of Stonehenge. So now my desktop looks like this:

It may be the first time ever that Microsoft has made me go "Hey, that's pretty neat." And for the record, Stonehenge is a properly medieval subject. Don't believe the reports that it was built by neolithic cultures as a star calendar or what have you. As anyone who reads Geoffrey of Monmouth knows, Stonehenge was brought to England from Ireland in the sixth century by King Arthur's father Uther Pendragon (with substantial assistance from Merlin) to serve as a funeral monument to the native Britons who had been slaughtered mercilessly by Saxon treachery. Uther and his brother Ambrosius Aurelianus were later buried there as well (but not in that order).

Welcome to July

2009-07-01T23:58:00.005-04:00

According to medieval calendars, July is the time to gather up all the wheat you spent June scything and tie it into sheaves. Make sure it hasn't just rained when you do it, or you might end up with ergot posioning from moldy rye. Then who knows what hilarious mass delusion you'll end up taking part in!

Important dates in medieval history in the month of July include:

July 3rd, 987 -- The French crown Hugh Capet, kicking off the Capetian dynasty's 800-year run.
July 4th, 1054 -- Light from a star in the constellation Taurus going supernova reaches Earth. Arab and Chinese astronomers mark it down. Europeans, not so much. The remnants of that star come to be known as the Crab Nebula.
July 6th, 1189 -- Richard the Lionheart is crowned king of England.
July 7th, 1465 -- Joan of Arc wins her case on appeal and the verdict of heresy is overturned. As she had been dead for 25 years, her reaction was somewhat subdued.
July 11th, 1302 -- The Flemish kick some serious French booty, taking so many of their golden spurs as trophies they decide retroactively to call the event "The Battle of the Golden Spurs".
July 15th, 1381 -- John Ball, one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt is hanged, then drawn and quartered.
July 16th, 1054 -- The Great Schism begins--the one between the Eastern and Western halves of the Church, not the one between Avignon and Rome... you know, it would be easier if the Church would schism a little less often, just to keep the nomenclature clear.
July 21st, 1403 -- The Battle of Shrewsbury is fought, in which Henry IV of England's forces, led in part by his son Henry, defeat the rebels from the north led by Henry of Northumberland's son Henry. Rejected names for the battle include "Henrypalooza," the "Henreichpocalypse," and "The One with All Them Henries".
July 24th, 1487 -- The Great Dutch Beer Strike is struck. The citizens of Leeuwarden (Leeuwardenians? Leeuwardese?) take to the streets and burn stuff to defend their right to foreign beer.
July 25th, 1261 -- Constantinople, not Istanbul, is recaptured by Michael VIII, giving the Byzantine Empire another 200 or so years to slowly limp into collapse.
July 30th, 1419 -- During the First Defenstration of Prague, seven members of the city council are thrown out of windows by a Czech Hussite mob. Wordsnobs rejoice, because it gives them a reason to casually slip the word "defenestration" into conversations.

And so there you have it, folks, a year of months is in the books. If you've been properly noting down my wisdom, your calendar should look like this:

January: Feasting

February: Pruning and firewood gathering

March: More pruning!

April: Planting and romancing

May: Hawking

June: Scything

July: Sheaving

August: Harvesting

September: Wine-making

October: Sowing

November: Fattening your swine

December: Slaughtering your swine

(Technically, February should actually read "feasting and/or pruning". The shortest month tends to absorb tasks from the months to either side.)

Judged by their calendars alone, medieval life doesn't look half bad. Sure, there's a lot of hard agricultural labor there, but you get at least one month off a year, as well as a month to goof off with birds and one for plighting your troth and other such amorous activities. Pretty sweet, all in all.

Check back in next month to see if I've come up with anything to replace medieval months!

Why Google Will Never Die

2009-06-30T21:41:00.006-04:00

There sure have been a lot of new search engines crawling out of the intertubes lately. Intrepid technophile that I am, I decided to put them to the test with the most impartial test I could devise: a search for the terms "medieval awesome".

First up is Wolfram Alpha, which claims to be "one of the most ambitious single intellectual projects ever attempted," as well as the "first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowlege immediately computable by anyone." I don't know what any of that means,* so me and Wolfram Alpha are even, because when presented with the query, they spit back "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

Medieval + awesome = ? gave the same result. Clearly, by my impartial and unbiased metric, Wolfram Alpha sucks.

Next up was Cuil. You remember, Cuil, right? Pronounced "cool," possibly named after the Old Irish word for knowlege (or, more likely, hazlenuts or salmon). It was totally going to revolutionize the way we searched for information back in July of last year, but then it didn't. And here's why. When told to find medieval awesome, it returns a link to the "ancient and medieval" section of the Awesome Library, a collection of lesson plans for the K-12 set.

Whoever snapped up the domain name awesomelibrary.org has clearly done the universe a disservice, since lesson plans are actually pretty high up there on the "list of most unawesome things ever."** Cuil doesn't realize that, and thus, it also sucks.

Microsoft's new search engine "Bing" turns out to have nothing to do with Bing Crosby. It might have overtaken Yahoo! as the #2 search engine overall--and it almost certainly overtook Ask! as the #1 search engine used by people whose default search has been hijacked by a sureptitiously installed toolbar for all their "restore Google to default search" searching needs.***

But when told to find medieval awesome, Bing returns a listing for an "Awesome Medieval Madness" pinball machine from rec.games.pinball:

So, on the one hand, Bing did manage to find a result that uses the word "awesome" right before the word "medieval", but on the other hand, the result is from the Usenet. In Bing-land, it's the early 90's! Quick, call the Microsoft marketing guys, I've got an idea for a new ad: "Bing! Because you always wondered what happened to Lisa Loeb after 'Stay'." (That's a freebie, by the way, 'cause I've got a million of them.****) Final verdict: unless you're a character on the first season of Friends, Bing sucks.

So what does Google do with medieval awesome? Voila:

That's right. Got Medieval: #1 Hit for Medieval Awesome. I think you'll agree, if you're the sort of person who googles medieval awesome, you'd rather be here than reading classified ads for pinball machines or planning lessons for 9th grade World History. So I don't think Google's got all that much to worry about, really.

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*Though the pedant in me is obligated to point out the superfluous comma between "ambitious" and "long-term." Is grammar computable?
**Even my lesson plans are all "blah, blah, boring stuff, vamp for time, more boring stuff, pop quiz, etc." and I'm an awesome lesson planner.

***In this case, the toolbar goes by the name "Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate".
****Bing! Find out who else ate your balls. Bing! Optimized for Netscape Navigator 1.22. Bing! It works over SLiRP.

Magna Carta: The Game (Video Game Week Day 3)

2009-06-27T22:58:00.005-04:00

Hey, kids, here's a fun game. Try to come up with an explanation for why these four characters (click to enlarge) are the stars of an upcoming video game called Magna Carta 2:*

In other words, I'm still fiddling with my more substantive video game related medieval posts (as well as my medieval related video game posts). Substantive soon, I promise.**

If you wanted, you could watch the trailer for the video game named after England's Great Chater here. It's probably not going to clear anything up, though, I warn you.

*Usually, I would make the expected Breakin' 2 reference here--indeed, it's almost impossible for someone of my generational cohort to not follow all mentions of sequels with Breakin' 2's subtitle--but I'm beginning to worry that the joke only has a few thousand more iterations until it's no longer funny. In the interest of conservation, I think it's best to leave it a meta-joke about the joke, until some solution is found.

**But you all know my promises are worthless, so you have only yourselves to blame for your inevitable disappointment.***

***But do keep anxiously hitting 'refresh' all day tomorrow. It'll drive up my Google Ad Sense earnings.

More on Inferno (Video Game Week Day 2)

2009-06-26T13:52:00.004-04:00

Gameinformer had yet another feature on the upcoming video game adaptation of Dante's Inferno this past month. In the interview/article, the creators responded to criticism from humorless academics like me who think that it's a little weird to turn Dante into a scythe-weilding girlfriend-rescuing muscle-bound multiply-hyphenated anti-hero.

To begin, the developers admitted that a straight up adaptation of Inferno would be kind of dull, because, as others have pointed out, "It's basically Dante and Virgil walking through the afterlife describing what they see." So they made some creative choices that they insist are "reasonably deferential to the core narrative of the poem" in order to turn it into an action game.

Boring literary critics take note. The following is a list of newly revealed changes (that I did not make up, really I didn't) the game designers feel are deferential to the Inferno's "core narrative". (I expect you'll want to adjust your syllabi for next semester's Dante surveys appropriately.)

Dante weilds a giant scythe mounted on a chain which he can insert directly into the brains of even-more-giant demons in order to ride said demons around.
One of Dante's foes in the Underworld is a "smack-talking magic head attached to the bow" of an "evil ship".
The unbaptized babies who inhabit Limbo, the first circle of hell are also Dante's foes. In the game they have "glowing eyes and blade arms" and leap out of something called a "hell crib" in order to attack Dante.

This last change seems to have given the Gameinformer interviewers pause, as they followed up by asking the developers if they worried that the game's distributor, Electronic Arts, might have problems with a game in which you must fight the souls of unbpatized infants. Their response?

They [the unbaptized babies] are based in the mythology of the medieval time, and they have nasty swords for arms and try to kill you, so basically they are just another crazy enemy. Our enemies are one of the things that make the game unique. It's been really fun to come up with enemies themed after sins, and we didn't want to hold back, because our adult audience expects hell to be a pretty messed up place.

Somewhere in the middle of that response they stopped answering the question "Do you think it's OK to have a game that features unbaptized babies as enemies?" and instead answered the question "If a baby with swords for arms came after you, would it be OK to kill it?" for a little while. Or, possibly, they think that the souls of unbaptized babies actually do have swords for arms, and they're just using the medium of the adult-rated video game to explore the thorny moral questions such babies raise. Either way, this is going to be a seriously awesome game.*

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*But don't take my word for it. Take the word of CrystalDoll, a featured commenter on the official video game website: "Looks like it's going to be an amazing game! And I'm not even Christian!"**

**Which brings up another important question: do Christians enjoy sword-armed hell babies more or less than the rest of us?

So That's Over With Now

2009-06-26T11:11:00.012-04:00

Michael Jackson's death is giving everybody the opportunity for some public self-flagellation over our culture's celebrity obsession. Oh, we are so horrible, how we monster-ize and devour the objects of our affection, etc., etc. I don't really have anything to add on that front. I feel no personal shame over MJ, who I never met, but who is also the subject of one of my earliest memories--watching MTV announce that the video for Billie Jean was the Video of the Year or whatever they called it back then. He was a celebrity, and that's his job: be awesome, then weird, then pathetic. And he did it well. That he probably molested some children along the way, well, that's tragic, but since lots of non-famous people molest children all the time, I hardly feel like I'm responsible for it just because I liked Thriller as a kid.

If I had a beef with Michael Jackson, it was with how literally he took the title "King of Pop". Dude had a serious medieval king fetish. I'm pretty sure he named his son "Prince Michael" because he figured that the son of the king is a prince.

You've probably seen these pictures before, but if not, consider them my tribute to the fallen idol or something. They were among the items from Neverland Ranch auctioned off a few months ago:

And another:

And the most awesome for last:

For the sake of his legacy, let's just pretend that this is the way Michael had the items arranged in his own home. Wouldn't it be pretty to think he commissioned a painting of himself as a bored medieval monarch and hung it on the wall over his life-sized replica of the Tim Burton-era Batman costume,* positioned so that it seemed to say, "My excess, it bores even me; quick, bring forth my minstrel Emmanuel and have him caper for me, for I am in a black mood"? That would be pure class.

*Which, it should be noted, is being worn by a life-sized Michael Jackson mannequin.

How Authentic is the Video Game Joust? (Video Game Week Day 1)

2009-06-25T16:38:00.006-04:00

Welcome to Medievalism and Video Games week here at Got Medieval.* This week, I'll be considering the obvious intersections between Medieval Studies and Video Game Studies, which are, more or less, my two great loves.** And why the hell not, eh? It's my blog, after all.

To get things rolling, I'll be pulling off the rare triple cross-over post. Not only is this a Theme Week Intro, it's also both an Mmm... Marginalia installment and a revival of Google Penance.***

Recently, some poor sod discovered my blog while doing a Google search for the answer to this question: is atari joust real?****

For those not in the know, Joust is a video game from way back when--or 1982, to be precise. In Joust, you control a lance-wielding knight who navigates a landscape of floating volcanic platforms atop his trusty steed, a giant flying ostrich. The object of the game is to direct your ostrich--or stork, if you're the second player--into evil enemy knights who ride dragons, thus following the old video game law: lizards are evil. When your ostrich-knight hits a dragon-knight correctly, the foul miscreant is magically transformed into an egg, which you must then collect in exchange for a bounty of points. This continues ad infinitum; the more knights you eggify, the more knights spawn to plague you, until you either die (the usual outcome) or... a pterodactyl appears. Like everything else in the game, this pterodactyl hates you and wants you to fail, naturally. If you manage to hit the pterodactyl right square in mouth, it disappears in a shower of points. But probably you'll just collide with it and die. Either way, the game sends more dragon-knights at you until you're out of lives. Rinse, repeat, empty your wallet.

As you may have picked up on by now, I hate the game Joust with a lavalike passion. If this game were a knight mounted on a stork, I wouldn't mess around with waves of dragons. It'd be pterodactyl all the time. Waves of pterodactyls homing in on its sucky stork- and/or ostrich-mounted ass.

On a cash per minute spent playing basis, Joust is probably the most expensive game I've ever played. A quarter bought me maybe ten seconds of gametime, tops, because the difference between a lance hit that turns your foe into an egg and a lance hit that kills you is approximately two pixels. But I digress. The original Googler wanted to know if Atari Joust is real, which I'm going to choose to interpret as, "is Joust authentically medieval?"

The answer to this is most certainly yes. I submit to you two images of medieval Joust. From the margins of the Macclesfield Psalter:

And from Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24:

Obviously, there's no ostrich, as they had not yet been invented, but I think the parallels are clear. Atari Joust is real--in that medieval illuminators, like modern video game programmers, thought that there was nothing weird at all about a man borne aloft on the back of a giant bird.***** I hope my more skeptical readers can now see why we need a whole week devoted to video games here at Got Medieval.

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*What do you mean, "Weeks don't start on Thursday?" Don't be so square, daddio. Thursday is so obviously the new Monday. Everybody's doing it.
**There used to be a footnote here, but it wasn't funny enough. You'll have to wait until my blog hits DVD for the deleted scenes.
***Google Penance: A barely-recurring feature at Got Medieval in which I atone for the fact that Google sends people to my blog who are looking for stuff that's not on my blog by retroactively creating the requested content.
****I have no clue why Google thought that my post on Life Magazine's College Joust photo spread was relevant. Presumably, it's because the original version of the article featured lots of pterodactyl-based puns, and they never cleared them out of their cache. Also, incidentally, the game was not made by Atari, but its most famous incarnation is probably the Atari 2600 port.

*****Indeed, the creators of Joust likely had a copy of the beginning of Chaucer's House of Fame posted to the bulletin board with red marker circling various passages.

A Week Away

2009-06-19T10:10:00.004-04:00

Pollen and intense Georgia heat have me feeling under the weather, so rather than fretting about not having posted this week, I'm retroactively declaring a week off. Go me. In the meantime, please console yourself with this image from the Macclesfield Psalter. It's a monkey doctor and his ursine patient.

I've always liked this one, because the monkey seems to be saying something along the lines of, "Look, Mr. Bear, we've been over this. If you go into the woods today, you're in for a big surprise--your spleen is going to rupture. So don't even think of getting out of that bed. The picnic's off."

Check back in next week for my first weeklong feature: Video Games & the Middle Ages.

The 1,000,000th Word? Pfeh

2009-06-12T14:57:00.004-04:00

A lot of people* have sent letters asking me to unmistruthify the recent claim by Paul JJ Payack that English, the language, just added its 1,000,000th word, as of June 10th, 2009, at 10:22AM. That word? (Drumroll me, if you would...) Web 2.0--wait, huh?

I assume that people think I'd have something to say about this because the official announce-a-ma-bob was phrased like this:

"Web 2.0 is the 1,000,000th English word or phrase added to the codex of the 1,400-year-old language."

1,400 years ago--that's medieval, right? Let me do a few calculations here. Right. The year 609. That's technically medieval, since the Roman Empire had done been fallen for, oh, a century and some change. You may also remember the year 609 as the year the Parthenon was consecrated to the Virgin Mary by Pope Boniface the Somethingth, and popes are darn medieval. So, yes, eager readers, this story is bloggable by medieval-type bloggists such as myself.

But where to begin with such a claim? Perhaps with what might seem like a strange phrase, "the codex of the language". You probably weren't aware that there was such a codex. You probably also didn't know that it was first codexicated in the year 609. But that's why you come here, to get the real medieval skinny on such unponderalia.

So, yeah, the first codex of the English language was written by the Venerable Bede in 609, which was a feat of much stultifyication, as wismy Bede did not officially dewomb until 673 or so. Still, some sixty-four dodecamonths before being born, Bede encodexed English with the publication of Caedmon's Hymn, a most soulhavingest little tune, one with a good beat, very danceable, which shot straight to the top of the Anglo-Saxon hit parade (then spelled hwit paeraed) where it sat for several centuries.

How could a boring ditty about how exultantatiously awesome God is stay at number one for so long? There's a perfectly cromulent explanation. There simply weren't enough words in the language to fabricash any other songs! Go on, read the Hymn. No, go on, I dare you. Seriously, go. A full half of the 18 half-lines in Caedmon's Hymn just mean "God." From this representatible sample, we may conclude that a full half of the words in the entire English codex of 609 were just names for God. That's right! If you wanted to say, "Honey, pass the toast," in 609, you'd have to say, "Daughter of our Lord, pass that which was given to you by God, the holy shepherd" and just hope she knew what you intendled.**

It was tough going in those early days. According to Payack's site, the Global Language Monitor, English adds words at an average rate of 14.7 a day, or one word every 98 minutes.*** So by the end of 609, there were roughly only 5,000 words available to the average speaker of English (and rerunremember, at least 2,500 of those were reservated for God). Since your average good song has 150 words at a bresh minimum, it wasn't until the mid-eighth hundredyearspan that there were enough spare words available to make a new song. The publication of Beowulf slowed the songicizing down even more, as it laid claim to 15,000 words alone, or roughly the entire yearly wordput of Sussex.

Obviously, the medieval angle to the story is not the only interesting thing about it. With 1,000,000 words, experts calcule that there is room for 8731.22 post interesting factiks! Here are but a fule:

Though some people complain that "Web 2.0" is not a word, they're just bitter, delathered old academorons! Web 2.0 is just a new web-spelling for an old word (like the kids today spell 'elite' 1337). The original word, whebtoopointo dates back to the Mississippian culture of the American Southeast. At first, it meaned "obnoxious," but when it came into common pearlance in American English (around 1802) it took on the more nutmeged meaning, "obnoxiously overpromoted hollow buzzword".
Insimilarly, frombulash, which had previously been named as the 900,000th word, was replaced with its more politically correct spelling fabricash.
The internet slang words hax and hax0r share one entry in the Official Codex, as do pwn, pown, and p0wn. And while sux and suxor follow this rule, sux0r does not! According to the GLM, "If someone sux0rs, that's way worse than just someone who is teh suxor. Like eleventy-billion times worse, ftw." When reached for further comment, they added: "lol [sic]" [sic].
Obamamania famously made the list, but obamabamabobamamania (defined as a mania for singing the name game with Obama) was left off due to a technicality. Here's hoping it makes it in before 1,100,000!
In the year 1731, English lost nearly 2,000 words due to the famous Cotton Library fire. Thankfully, texperts cloxing abound the clox have recovered nearly 1,700 of those missing words!
Words 958,632-958,784 entered the language in 1997, when Gamefreak released the first Pokemon game in America. That's right, all 151 names of the original pokemon are official English codexed words! But I don't have to likitung you that, right?
Conversliwise, the names of Pokemon 152-493 were codextricated by the official Codex Board of the English Language when it was determined that Pokemon was "kind of played out, really." If they had been left in, the 1,000,000th English word would have come twenty-three days earlier!
[word retired] is the only word that has been officially retired from the English language, barring its usage in all contexts. It still fills the slot for word #42, of course.
According to the GLM report, their calculations requisite the usage of the entire "core" of the English language, which includes "every word found in the historical codex of the language beginning with Beowulf, Chaucer, the Venerable Bede, on to the works of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the like." Since the Venerable Bede wrote in Latin,**** that means that nearly 30,000 of the words in the "core" of the English language are in another language!

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*IE, two. But two is a lot. We're talking hot medieval vampire chick levels of interest here.
**Incidentally, retroactivewise, this makes Beowulf's vaunted "word-hoard" much less impressive. He only knew, like, sixteen words. Adjusted for inflation, that's still not very multitudinacious.
***Postpiciously, the GLM's metric for measuring word aggrimition is very delicarish. I mean, the rate has to have sped up greatly in the last few years, otherwise, with 1400 years of words at 14.7 a day English would have a robustly embarrassing plentitude of 7.5 millie verbices. So my estimate should be toned back, irredoubtlessly. They likely had no more than 1,000 words in their available ondemand.
****Except for the wassail story and Caedmon's Hymn, which Bede quotes in English, natch. Also, I'm not ultrasure, but it seems from the order that GLM have distermined that Bede wrote after Chaucer. Not bad for a man who would've been 714 when the Canterbury Tales was written!

One More Misericord (Mmm... Marginalia and/or Misericords)

2009-06-08T17:41:00.001-04:00

Worry not, readers. I may have run out of time,* but not marginal images. Nevertheless, I'm really digging these misericord images I've been trolling out of Flickr over the last month or so. You find the most interesting things beneath the butts of medieval church-goers!

Why, look, here in Amsterdam's Oude Kerk, I just found the solution to the current worldwide financial crisis!

Sure, you may say that it's meant to illustrate the old medieval proverb, "It's not like money falls out of my ass," but I say it's a medieval how-to. Call me an optimist!

And by the by, I understand that the attention to detail on this carving is such that with a better shot of it you can make out the individual denominations on the coins.

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*I've run out of so much time, it's broken the time-space continuum, allowing my second post on misericords to magically come out before my first did!

Reynard Strikes Again (Mmmm... Marginalia)

2009-06-01T14:26:00.001-04:00

Remember Reynard the Fox, my co-blogger and frequent cable news talk show contributor?* I found this little snapshot of him doing what he does best down in the lower margin of MS Bodl. 264 (click to enlarge):

For those of you who haven't been reading my blog for years on end, a little explanation is in order. Reynard is the cute furry trickster character of French satirical romance. He's sort of the medieval version of Bugs Bunny, but not the nice Bugs who jams in space and only annoys people who deserve it; think the early Bugs who's just a jerk to Elmer for no reason whatsoever. Or, maybe it'd be more accurate to say that he's the medieval version of Scratchy (Of Itchy and... fame)--but that would only work if Scratchy were the star and hero of his own long-running show, instead of just a little one-off joke they throw into every sixth episode of the Simpsons.

Anyway, Reynard is a cute little fuzzy fox who is also a lascivious homicidal maniac who either rapes or devours most of his friends. I don't know all the Reynard stories,** but I think this one is a mash-up of the one where Reynard bites the head off of Chanticleer's daughter Coppen and all the animals have an elaborate funeral for her and the one where Reynard fakes his own death so that he can ambush his ~~enemies~~ ~~friends~~ frenemies after they've embarrassed themselves giving long and emotional eulogies for the bastard.

Here's a closeup of Reynard leaping out of a coffin with his latest victim in his jaws:

Since the bird in his mouth is clearly a rooster, perhaps this is a depiction of a different version of Coppen's funeral (than the one I know), one where Reynard jumps out of the dead chicken's coffin to ambush her grieving father. That sort of thing is just his style.

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*By the way, don't ever go up to Reynard and say, "Hey, do you work for Fox News? Because you should. You know, Fox News, Reynard the Fox, get it?" You should've seen the way he eviscerated the last guy who made that joke. It would have been funny, if the the guy's kids hadn't been watching. And if Reynard hadn't just finished doing the guy's wife, also in front of they guy's kids. And if he hadn't then sold the guy's intestines as saint's relics and convinced the king to wear the guy's bladder as a hat. On second thought, maybe not so funny. I forget, is spurting viscera funny or tragic?
**There's still no good translation of at least half of them. Someone, quick, get on that. We need a new edition, stat.

Welcome to June

2009-06-01T00:01:00.002-04:00

Welcome to the penultimate "Welcome to..."*

According to medieval calendars, June is the month for scything. Scything is a handy skill, and you'll want to make sure your scythe is sharp because--ah, oh god, what is that thing? Run! Run! A giant crawdad is attacking! Grab your scythes! Oh, dear God, the pincers, the horrible pincers! Oh, the humanity!

Important medieval dates in June include:

June 1, 1215 -- The Battle of Beijing ends; Genghis Khan captures the city and puts some serious smack down on Emperor Xuanzong of Jin.
June 1, 1495 -- Scotch Whiskey leaves its first trace in the surviving documentary record, appearing in the Rolls of the Exchequer for this day (though, presumably they didn't write those records until later--well after the hangover wore off, anyway).
June 3, 1141 -- Peter Abelard is convicted for heresy.
June 8, 793 -- The Vikings kick off their eponymous invasion with a rousing sack of Lindisfarne abbey.
June 9, 1190 -- Frederick I Barbarossa drowns while crossing the Sally River. Embarrassed, he slips off to Kyffhäuser for a good long sulk and develops an obsession with ravens.
June 14, 1381 -- Richard II meets with the revolting peasants (of the Peasants' Revolt fame!) at Blackheath. Meanwhile, other peasants (also revolting) storm the Tower of London.
June 15, 1215 -- Bad Old King John signs the Magna Carta, a document granting rights and privileges to a small group of angry 13th-century Anglo-Norman nobles but which apparently somehow gives 21st-century Americans the power today to call their own citizen grand juries.
June 17, 1462 -- Vlad the Impaler attacks by night and fails to assassinate Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire. This doesn't make it into the Dracula legend, but does spawn a collectible set of limited edition "Night Attack" plates.
June 18, 1178 -- According to Gervase of Canterbury, "two horns of light" appear on the moon. Possibly, the monks had just witnessed the meteor collision that formed the Giordano Bruno crater. But probably not.
June 18, 1429 -- Joan of Arc defeats Sir John Fastolf at the Battle of Patay. It's like God was writing Shakespeare fan fiction with history.
June 20, 1214 -- Oxford University is chartered.
June 26, 1284 -- The Pied Piper abducts 130 children from Hamelin, Germany, according to local records.

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*Any ideas for next year's monthly recurring feature? Feast days, maybe?

Lion-O Forever (Mmm... Marginalia)

2009-05-18T15:59:00.005-04:00

This week's edition of Mmm... Marginalia is found in The Hague MS MMW10 A14, a now incomplete missal made in the Netherlands in the 14th century. And here it is:

Why have these lions stuck their heads into a basket and a potted plant? Usually, when I ask such questions, they're less than rhetorical and just the setup for some lame joke. But this time there actually is a reason why these lions are acting weird, instead of just "it's a joke." And it's pretty much for the same reason Johnny Depp now has a tattoo reading "Wino Forever".*

Once they balanced on their noses the coats of arms of the original commissioner of the manuscript, Arnold of Oreye, who was the Lord of Rummen and Baron of Quaerbecke--which was all well and good until the Oreye family sold the manuscript. The new owner was not so keen on having someone else's coat of arms in the margins of his missal, so he called in an expert to rectify the problem.

Usually, the new owners would just have the old coat of arms scratched off, or painted over with their own coat of arms. But for whatever reason, this new owner hired an illuminator with a whimsical streak, and the result was two lions now demonstrating that curiosity is a problem for great cats as well as small.

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*Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time to get "Winona Forever" tattooed on his bicep, but once she was out of the picture, some adjustments had to be made.**
**Actually, I have an alternate theory that Johnny Depp meant to communicate his continued undying love for the first two syllables of Winona's name. Presumably, the last syllable was the cheating one.

Awesome Old [Medieval] Folklore

2009-05-16T17:54:00.010-04:00

So that I don't sound like a broken record,* this is the last plug I'll put in for the good folks over at Satisfactory Comics for a while.** Isaac whipped up a tee-shirt version of a recent Doodle Penance that you should all go buy right now. Mine is en route as ~~we speak~~ you read.

I am deeply jealous of those with the ability to draw stuff. My drawn stuff looks very unstufflike. Thus, all I can offer is this picture from the Aberdeen Bestiary of the awesome old folklore that inspired the shirt:

According to both Pliny the Elder and Isidore of Seville--medieval Europe's favorite sources for animal anecdotes--bear cubs are born as eyeless unformed lumps of flesh that have to be licked into shape by the mama bear. For Isidorian naturalists, a beast's Latin name tells you something important about it, and thus because their mothers have to use their ore (mouths) to make cubs into bears, bears are called orsus AKA ursus AKA bears. Learning is fun, right gang?

Click on the image of the Satisfactory shirt below to be whisked away by the magic of the internets to the place where you may procure this special bounty:

Or, if that link doesn't work, click here.

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*A broken record broken in such a way that it repeatedly plugs a friends' comics-based blog.
**But--note to my other readers--the Satisfactory boys know well that the way to my heart is free stuff. 1/2 of them spotted me a cool Abecedarium at Kalamazoo! So what are the rest of you waiting on?

Medieval Video Game Watch

2009-05-16T12:27:00.004-04:00

Video game magazine writing is a cushy job that I desperately desire. You get to spend your time writing sentences like this one I came across in last month's issue of Game Informer:

The game begins as Dante returns from years of war to finally marry his fiance Beatrice, only to find her murdered (one of the many understandable departures from the source material).

The game in question is Electronic Arts' upcoming Dante's Inferno, due out next year. If I had been writing the article, though, it probably would have read more like this:

The game begins as Dante returns from years of war to finally marry his fiance Beatrice, only to find her murdered (in one of many instances where the game designers understandably got confused and thought they were supposed to be making a game version of Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator).

But, hey, writers are allowed their own idiosyncrasies.* The previewer continues:

As Lucifer drags her soul to hell, Dante jumps in after them to begin his journey. Before entering the first ring of hell, Dante learns the ropes in a battle with Death in which he ends up stealing the Grim Reaper's scythe.

That sentence, too, needs a parenthetical '(one of the many understandable departures from the source material)'--as does every other in the article--but I guess the previewer had a word limit. Personally, I don't understand why they didn't just choose another protagonist. They could still call it Dante's Inferno without actually including Dante, since it's clearly set in a punchier and slicier version of Dante's hell. Just have the player control Shmante, Dante's younger, more attractive cousin and leave it at that.

Actually, come to think of it a bit more, Dante is the perfect protagonist for a combo-driven beat'em up game. Just take everything he wrote super literally. Like this bit from La Vita Nuova:

There appeared to be in my room a mist of the colour of fire, within the which I discerned the figure of a Lord of terrible aspect to such as should gaze upon him [...] Speaking he said many things, among the which I could understand but few; and of these, this: "I am thy Lord". In his arms it seemed to me that a person was sleeping, covered only with a crimson cloth; upon whom looking very attentively [...] And he who held her held also in his hand a thing that was burning in flames, and he said to me "Behold thy heart". But when he had remained with me a little while, I thought that he set himself to awaken her that slept; after the which he made her to eat that thing which flamed in his hand; and she ate as one fearing.

And that's from his autobiography, even. Magical demons appearing in puffs of red smoke, redolent chicks eating burning hearts--Kratos ain't got nothing on that.

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*Mine, for instance, involve forcing readers to repeatedly come down to the post's lower margin.**
**Often to no purpose!***
***But you knew that already.

You're Not Helping (Mmm... Marginalia)

2009-05-11T22:09:00.007-04:00

This week's marginal image is found in the bas-de-page* of the Bodleian Library's MS Douce 5. Incidentally, if someone comes up to you at a cocktail party** and asks you what your favorite fourteenth-century Flemish Psalter is, you'll look all smart and refined if you reply, "Why, Bodl. Lib. MS Douce 5 of course." Extra points if you can pronounce the periods at the end of the abbreviation.

Where was I? Ah, yes. This week's image:

You've heard of the phrase, "kicking a man when he's down"? The medieval equivalent, clearly, was, "poking an ape's butt when he's accidentally stuck his head into a dragon's mouth". At least among medieval rabbits.

The best part, for me, is the dragon's reaction shot. "Do you mind?" he's clearly saying, "I'm kind of in the middle of something here."

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*I could have said "bottom of the page," but if I had, then what would I footnote?
**It should be noted that I got to like two cocktail parties a year, but for some reason they still remain my go-to context for oddball conversations.

Arianna Huffington is Good at History

2009-05-11T12:39:00.008-04:00

For reasons I really don't understand, Congress recently invited a bunch of famous people to testify before them regarding the New Media Revolution. There, Arianna Huffington, whose eponymous Post operates by giving celebrities with nothing to say a forum in which to not say it at great length, but primarily by ~~stealing~~ ~~linking~~ ~~repackaging~~ stealing content from other sites, explained said revolution thusly:

"I was not around when the printing press was invented; but if I were around I would imagine that the people dealing with stone tablets would be making a similar argument. Saying, you know, if you just left us alone and just forgot about that printing press, who could really charge you for that."

I like how she needs to clarify that she was not personally present for the invention of the printing press, regardless of what her detractors might claim. No, she wasn't there, thank you very much, but through the power of imagination she can transport herself there, and whilst there look down her Greek nose at the foolish fifteenth-century stone-tablet lobby.

Now, I'll grant you that if I were in front of Congress* I'd probably babble incoherently, too. It's clearly too much to ask of someone who knows they're going to be testifying to work out their metaphors about technological backwardsness ahead of time. But if I were writing a book, like, say, the Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging,** I wouldn't have much excuse for writing something like this:

You see, printed books themselves were once a rather revolutionary idea. Six hundred years ago, if people wanted to share ideas, they had few options. We could shout our complains from the barn rafters. Maybe a few chickens would hear us. We could scrawl our musings and post them in the town square--but soon the elements would take their toll. Documents were preserved, of course--medieval monks specializing in hand-copying important texts--but to justify years of a monk's time, these documents had to be privileged indeed. Few normal people could spare five years to hand-write their stories.

Then, in mid-fifteenth century Germany, printer Johannes Gutenberg happened upon a discovery.

I also love the idea Gutenberg just "happened" upon the printing press--like, one day he was throwing some coffee grounds onto the compost heap and there it was beneath a half-eaten omelet.

I'm glad Congress called in an expert like Arianna for this one and not, say, a scholar of media history or anything. I'm so glad that I whipped up this little graphical timeline above to preserve her wisdom for the ages.

All kidding aside, though she probably doesn't realize it, the printing press is in one way a very good analogue for the Huffington Post, just in England rather than Germany. Take William Caxton, England's first printer. Like Arianna Huffington, he was not responsible for the invention of the technology he used. He just copied what the German Gutenberg had already pioneered. And if you look at the list of texts Caxton printed, almost all of them were the fifteenth-century equivalent of public domain texts--The Canterbury Tales, the Confessio Amantis, Aesop's Fables, The Consolation of Philosophy, etc.--i.e., Caxton rarely had to actually pay the writers whose works he printed and sold.

If you copy the technology pioneered by others and populate it with content you don't have to pay for, it's easy to make money, whether in the fifteenth or the twenty-first century!

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*Which I can be, through the power of my imagination. I'm there now, and Angelina Jolie is there, and she's French kissing Dan Brown for some reason. Bad imagination, bad!
**In her defense, it should be noted that Arianna Huffington didn't write that chapter. The 'editors' of the Huffington Post, of which she is one, did. She did, however, put her picture and name on the cover of the book containing that chapter.

Kalamazoo by the Numbers

2009-05-09T12:55:00.006-04:00

# of papers attended: 15 1/2
# of papers delivered: 1
# of marginal illuminations used during the paper: 41
# of those which were pooping, peeing, or otherwise engaged in nastiness: 4 (less than 10%!)
# of images of Super Mario used during the paper: 2
# of people who came up to me after my paper to say they like my blog: 6
# of people who came up to me after my paper to say, 'Hey, you're from the Internet!': 1
# of people who told me that my they will not read my blog with their children in the room: 1
# of medieval bloggers I met at the medieval blogger meetup: 8
# of medieval bloggers I should have introduced myself to but was too lazy and/or socially maladjusted to: 17
# of different ways my name was spelled by people affiliated with K-Zoo in some official capacity: 5
# of times Scott Nokes mispronounced my name while introducing me to people at the blogger meetup: 3
# of people who recognized me as the Got Medieval Guy^TM (excluding paper and meetup): 9
threadcount of the sheets provided for conference participants who lodged in the dorms: 7
# of centimeters I held my laptop out the dorm window in order to snag a wireless signal: 10
# of times I arranged to grab coffee with a conference participant: 5
# of those coffee meetings that took place on Friday: 5
% of my blood, by volume, that had been replaced by caffeine as of Friday at 5:00: 22 1/9
# of times I found myself telling people how boring John Lydgate is: 8
# of times I found myself telling people how awesome Doodle Penance is: 4
# of discussions of Malory's narrative technique I had with conference participants: 1
# of times I was chided by tenured faculty for not having read Harry Potter volumes 5-7: 2
# of arguments I had with conference participants over which Disney Princess would win in a catfight: 3
# of people who tried to cheap out and go with Mulan: 2
# of people I spotted wearing drunken monkey shirts from my CafePress store: 1
# of $ made by my CafePress store during Kalamazoo: $0.00

This Post Carries Swine Flu (Mmm... Misericords)

2009-05-04T14:15:00.000-04:00

This blog has featured a lot of filled-in blank spaces over the last year, almost all of the manuscript variety. So, to switch it up, this week's Mmm... Marginalia is going to concern a different sort of decorated hidden spot--the space beneath a medieval parishioner's ass.*

Medieval Christians went to church a little bit less often than your modern Baptist, which is to say quite a lot. And during long parts of the service, as well as during some private devotional time, they were expected to stand. But because medieval Christians were nothing if not practical, they cheated and installed little shelves to discreetly sit upon when they were supposed to be standing. We call these shelves "misericords", or "mercy chairs."

Just as the medieval manuscript maker didn't like letting all that blank space around the text go to waste, the medieval church architect didn't like leaving all those discreet ass-shelves bare. So they decorated their misericords with little images--often as bizarre, sacrilegious, and/or scatalogical as those you've seen in manuscripts. In fact, they're often the same pictures, just carved instead of painted.

Now, this blog as been accused of having a simian fetish, so to break with the monkey-based monotony, today I'll concern myself with a thoroughly respectable subject: pigs.

There were basically two sorts of pigs that the savvy medieval church-goer wanted under his or her slightly elevated derriere. Some chose to go with the bloody but practical "Pig Being Slaughtered*". This little piggy comes from Ripple Church in England:

Be sure to note the pig on the left screaming in horror.

Those more squeamish about the source of their bacon might instead opt to rest their weary churched-out hind quarters on pig option #2: pigs playing musical instruments. Here are but a few of many. The first is a pig playing an organ (both pig and organ now housed at Paris's Museum of the Middle Ages):

Pigs make awesome organists, naturally, but their true love remains the bagpipes, as shown here, in a misericord from Ripon Cathedral:

Dance, my piglets, dance!

Sadly, there really is very little call for piggy bagpipe soloists,** so many times the misericord's porcine piper is forced to make ends meet by giving lessons, even to that ungrateful marginal scene stealer, the monkey***:

Apparently, however, pigs make poor bagpipe instructors, as evidenced by this monkey's technique:

Experts agree that the first step in playing the bagpipe is being able to distinguish a bagpipe from a dog.****

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*One of these cropped up in a medieval calendar a few months ago, if you'll recall.
**Basically just your occasional Renn Faire.
***Oh, yeah, I was supposed to be not talking about monkeys this week. I always get that confused with talking about monkeys. My bad.
****OK, OK, that's actually a bear in the picture, not a pig, and rather than giving lessons he's dancing. Both carvings appear at the same place, Beverly Minister Cathedral. That particular carver's bears look a lot like his pigs, though. Comparative anatomy, it wasn't his strong suit.

NOTE: Mmm... Marginalia has been running consistently half a week behind, I know, and some weeks there's been no marginalia at all. I'm really falling down on the job. This post was originally meant to run the week of Kalamazoo, but finishing my paper for K-Zoo got in the way. After a week of running on my blog's front page, I'll probably move it back to the K-Zoo week for purposes of historical inaccuracy.

FURTHER NOTE: See, I told you I'd do it.

Welcome to May

2009-05-01T01:08:00.008-04:00

According to medieval calendars, May is the time for hawking, because apparently medieval calendar makers really only had ten good ideas for monthly chores and got desperate there at the end. A whole month for hawking? I challenge you to stay interested in the sport past May 7th or so.

Important medieval dates in May include:

May 1, 1328 -- The Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton is signed. The Scots buy their independence for £20,000.
May 4, 1256 -- The pope officially recognizes the Augustinian order of monks.
May 5, 1260 -- Kublai Khan becomes the ruler of the Mongol Empire and starts measuring the drapes for his stately pleasure dome.
May 7, 1429 -- Joan of Arc goes all Rambo, pulls an arrow out of her shoulder, returns to the battlefield, and leads the final charge that ends the Siege of Orleans. The Hundred Years War, she is finished.
May 11, 1310 -- The French make a fire using fifty-four Knights Templar.
May 15, 1252 -- Innocent IV issues the bull Ad extirpanda, authorizing torture against "murderers of the soul" and "robbers of God's sacraments".* IE, those wacky heretics.
May 18, 1152 -- Eleanor of Aquitaine takes this man, [the future] Henry II of England, as her lawful wedded husband.
May 18, 1268 -- The Crusader State of Antioch falls to the Baibars.
May 22, 1377 -- Gregory XI denounces the Wycliffites, everyone's second favorite pre-Reformation proto-Protestant movement. (In the lead for the four-hundredth year running: the Lollards! Better luck next year, Wycliffites.)
May 25, 1085 -- Alfonso VI of Castile kicks the Moors out of Toledo, giving rise to the phrase "Holy Toledo". Nine-hundred years later, some clever wag uses it to tweak the gullible at the Urban Dictionary.

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*For the record, waterboarding would have been permissible under the bull, but only if you had overwhelming evidence of guilt and you only got one shot at it. In theory, anyway.

Keeping it Classy (Mmm... Marginalia)

2009-04-30T03:29:00.001-04:00

Yes, yes, the final installment of the month-long blogmasmagoria of images from Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24 is late.* But I saved the best for last. And by best, I mean "most nakedest". We've already seen that this particular illuminator has a thing for public displays of nudity. Remember the guy who played the bagpipes with his backend? And the guy taking care of two calls of nature at once who kicked off the month? Well, meet their friend, naked guy with a tall hat:

OK, I know what you're thinking: *yawn* Nude guy with a tall hat is urinating into a jug, big deal. Come back when he's found a second jug and maybe I'll care. Hell, thanks to your marginalia posts he's probably going to need three jugs and a previously undiscovered orifice before I perk up...

Perhaps it might interest you to know that naked guy with a tall hat is like the Waldo of MS G24.** He's everywhere, and everywhere he is his clothes ain't:

Trying to find the naked guy in the margins of the manuscript is fun for the whole family. Is that him peeking out from behind the foliate border? Or is that him riding on the monkey's back?*** Why, it's hours of fun, I tell you.

Now, because I'm far too good to you, I'm going to close out this month's festivities with one last bonus image. Yes, yes, a naked bonus image:

Is this a naked man locked in mortal combat with a giant rabbit? Or is this a moment of cross-species passion? And most importantly, is that naked guy with a tall hat without his hat? I'm not going to stake my reputation on it, but he does have the same hairstyle and weak chin...

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*Turns out that writing a paper on marginalia (less than a week left till K-Zoo!) can distract you from goofing on marginalia on your blog.
**Members of Gen Y may wish to substitute 'Greased Up Deaf Guy' for Waldo in the referential joke above. Go ahead, I'll wait. Happy now?
***Nope, those are just two other naked guys. Waldo hides near stripy wallpaper or in the company of zebras. Naked guy with a tall hat hides around other naked guys.

A Surfeit of Monkeys (Mmm... Marginalia)

2009-04-20T13:06:00.006-04:00

This week's installment of my month-long blogasmicalfragicalamagoria of images taken from Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24 brings my lucky readers not one, not two, not the number that comes after two, but, indeed, the number that comes before five images of monkeys.

All four of these rakish simian fellows are just looking for love. Some might say in all the wrong places.* Our first monkey is actually a monkey dyad, two happy chimps slipping one another the tongue:

It's hard to tell when a monkey is a girl monkey or a boy monkey--I tend to assume all monkeys are boys for some reason--so that image might even be more shocking still. But not nearly so shocking as this one, a monkey having a cutesy tea-party with a demon:

It's all very metrosexual, no? You just know that underneath that blurry smudge, the monkey is holding his chalice with his pinky held out. But perhaps you are one of those who is not scandalized by monkey raconteurs and their droll dinner conversation at tea. To you, I say, how about a monkey getting his ass kissed by a rabbit-headed grotesque?

Still not satisfied? Yes, it does get harder and harder to shock you week in and week out. But the illuminator behind MS G24 always has an extra trick up his sleeve. I submit for your approval (and shocked outrage) a monkey-lover kneeling before the moon.

Oh, did I forget to mention that the moon is someone's disembodied butt sticking out of the top of a woman's hood? I really need to try to pay more attention to detail when I write my blog posts.

Anyway, stay tuned for next week's installment of "It Came from MS G24 *cue spooky music* wooooOOOOooooOOOOOooo".

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*Others, doing Buckwheat impersonations last current in the early eighties might say they are "wookin for nub in all da bong paces."

The Ellesmere Chaucer Portrait: A Fifteenth-Century Photoshop Disaster

2009-04-19T22:24:00.005-04:00

Those of you who obsessively follow all the links I post in my blog's sidebar are by now longtime fans of the site Photoshop Disasters, a blog dedicated to tracking down and mocking egregious photoshop-based fail. But for those of you who ignore my erudite elseblog recommendations, it's Photoshop Disasters' job to catch people in the act of doing things like covering up for Christopher Lambert's tragic inability to grasp solid objects by using Photoshop to paste a sword on top of his hand for the DVD case art of that not-as-horrible-as-the-other-sequels-but-still-pretty-horrible Highlander sequel of a few years back. Like so:

It might come as some surprise to fans of Photoshop Disasters to learn that people have been failing at Photoshop since long before Photoshop was invented. Take the image at the top of this blog post. That's the famous portrait of Chaucer from the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. Now take a closer look, in particular, at the proportions of torso to horse. Here's a handy ghost-torso to make it easier:

The illuminator of the Ellesmere manuscript inadvertently gives the impression that Chaucer was either 1) a freakish giant with a torso nearly as tall as a horse, or 2) a midget with stumpy legs that rode around on similarly stumpy ponies.*

Now, given that medieval artists are not known for their skill at perspective and proportion, you might be tempted to think that this is just a bad artist who doesn't know how big horses are.*** But, actually, the problem is that the artist doing a bad copy and paste job from another famous image found in Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes:

Hoccleve was a poet who wrote in the wake of Chaucer and who styled himself as one of Chaucer's students and poetic successors. Whether he actually knew Chaucer or not is a subject of some debate, but nonetheless Hoccleve claims to have known Chaucer well enough that, writing several years after Chaucer's death, he was starting to worry that people would forget what Chaucer looked like in life. To remedy this, he commissioned a portrait of his "worthy master" and had it placed in the margin of a manuscript of his poem. When the Ellesmere illuminator went looking for visual references for his portrait of Chaucer, he seems to have found Hoccleve's version and decided to base his image on it. Here are the two images, side by side, with Hoccleve's portrait mirror-imaged:

The problem with the Ellesmere illuminator's plans is clearly that the original image was a 3/4 portrait, and at some point in the planning of the Ellesmere manuscript it had been decided that all the pilgrims, Chaucer included, would be depicted on horseback in the margin of their respective tales.**** So it fell to the illuminator to sketch a horse in underneath the famous picture. The result is poor compositing, fifteenth-century style. Though, to give credit where it's due, turning the rosary in the Hoccleve Chaucer's portrait into the reins of the horse in the Ellesmere is pretty inspired.

Now, one corollary of this botched medieval photoshopping is that the Ellesmere manuscript has got to be later than Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (circa 1411 or so, last I heard). So those of you trying to push Ellesmere back to 1405 or so need to lay off. Yes, it's a pretty manuscript, but pretty does not authority make. Though, I suppose if you wanted to, you could argue that Hoccleve's artist swiped from Ellesmere (especially since lots of people don't believe Hoccleve knew Chaucer), but if that is the case then we really have to wonder why the Ellesmere artist went with Chaucer the overweight stumpy midget in the first place, and why Hoccleve's artist knew enough to fix it.*****

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*Paul Bettany, who played Chaucer in the tragically under-appreciated A Knight's Tale, seems to subscribe to the second theory. In preparation for the role he was given a selection of Chaucer paraphernalia that included the Ellesmere portrait, causing him to remark on the commentary track to the effect that "Chaucer was apparently some sort of overweight dwarf. I decided to go another way with the character, but I think you can see the inner dwarf shining through."**
**I'll get the exact quote later.
***And it must be noted that several of the other Ellesmere portraits have too-large people atop them, but none so disproportionate as Chaucer.
****This, in itself, is an odd choice, since not all the pilgrims appear to ride horses in General Prologue. It would certainly be weird for some of the poorer pilgrims to be mounted.
*****One final note. For the record, this whole composting thing is not my personal discovery or anything. I first learned of it in a class taught by Derek Pearsall. That it's essentially a case of bad photoshop, that's my only contribution.

Obama's Dog a Crypto-Muslim?

2009-04-17T09:21:00.005-04:00

I don't go in much for conspiracy theories, but there's something troubling about the new First Dog. As you may have heard, it's a Portuguese Water Dog, a breed that you probably hadn't heard of until Bo Obama landed on the public stage. If you read news reports about the dog, down around the third paragraph or so you will almost certainly see a sentence like this one below used to explain the origins of the breed:

The Portuguese Water Dog found its way into recorded history in 1297, showing up in a monk’s report of a drowning sailor who had been pulled from the sea by a dog with a “black coat, the hair long and rough, cut to the first rib and with a tail tuft.”

I've been trying for the past week to verify the claim, and I can't. I'll admit to being no expert on Iberian peninsula medieval history, but can't track down the purported chronicle account, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually exist.

Even were I to find it, I don't see why this monk's report is taken as a definite reference to the Portuguese Water Dog. Porties aren't the only long-coated water dogs from the Iberian peninsula. There's also the Spanish Water Dog, a poor neglected breed whose Wikipedia page is suffering a serious case of non-Obama-first-dog-having-itis.*

The earliest reference to the monk's account that I've been able to track down is found in the 1986 book, The Complete Portuguese Water Dog. It is this book that is cited as the source for the official Portuguese breed web page, and from there it's been carried to Wikipedia and then on to the third paragraphs mentioned above--usually almost verbatim. But the original book never mentions the name of the chronicle the account is supposedly taken from, nor does it even indicate where the chronicle was written or its original language.**

It is fun, however, watching how news stories garble this 1986 factoid. They know there's a monk, a sailor, a dog and a chronicle, but from telling to telling the word "Portuguese" (and sometimes "Spanish") migrates from one to the other. People just can't decide whether it's a Portuguese monk, a Portuguese chronicle, a Portuguese dog, or a Portuguese sailor that they're talking about.

At any rate, I remain suspicious. Why would a medieval pedigree suddenly appear in a book published in 1986? If I were to indulge my inner tinfoil hat wearing self, I might suspect that it has something to do with the Spanish Water Dog's first official recognition by the Spanish Kennel Club, which came about in 1985. Faced with the threat of another water dog, Portuguese enthusiasts could have doubled-down on the special uniqueness of their breed. Dog club people are very territorial that way.***

In today's political climate, the distinction between the Portuguese and Spanish Water Dogs is probably of particular importance, since the other name for the Spanish Water Dog is the Andalusian Turk, and as we all know, al-Andalus is the name that the Muslims called Iberia when it was under their dominion. It is quite possible that the Obamas bought a Muslim dog and the whole Portuguese thing is a smokescreen. This is just further proof of the liberal bias of the MSM. If the Bushes had bought a Portie, you know that Keith Olbermann would have been demanding to see the dog's kennel club registration from day one.

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*Seriously, the Portuguese page is about four times as long and has recently received a thorough expansion.
**The only Portuguese chronicles I'm aware of were written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While I might trust them about royal chronologies--who was king when, etc.--I'd be pretty skeptical of the accuracy and authenticity of shaggy dog stories contained within.
***Full disclosure: one of my wife's grandmothers is a Portuguese Water Dog breeder--at one point breeder of the year according to some trade magazine or other. [These are her hands holding one of her dogs, when it was entered at Westminster.] Incidentally, the Portie breeders have known for months that Obama was getting a PWD. A dog breed that rare doesn't just show up at the kennel one day.