Got Medieval

Medieval Culinary History at Medium Large

2009-11-23T17:50:00.006-05:00

From Medium Large's Illustrated and Admittedly Incomplete History of the Turducken:

Text:

Historians cite that the layering or--as it is known in Drake's Cakes Circles--"yodeling" of animals...

harkens back to the Middle Ages, when the church temporarily lifted the ban on combining different species to trick Jews into not eating kosher. (Balloon: Wait... do I taste dolphin?)

Back then farmers would hide livestock inside one another to avoid paying higher husbandry taxes, to conceal golden-egg-laying geese from brigands or to give them something to do besides dying, wishing they were dead, and watching with envy as others died before them.

If you're interested, there's more pre-medieval and post-medieval history in the panels above and below these. Check them out.

November Saints Calendar (Part 2)

2009-11-20T23:37:00.010-05:00

The best thing about splitting the saints calendar into two halves is that it gives me two opportunities to be late posting a calendar each month. So without further ado...

November 16 commemorates the death of St. Hugh of Lincoln--not to be confused with Little St. Hugh of Lincoln who Chaucer wrote about--a darn popular saint in England, but not really anywhere else. Since he lived in the late twelfth century, his Vita (saintly biography) is more concerned with his skill as an administrator than with anything interesting. Though, it should be noted, he did have an attack swan that guarded him as he slept. Pet swans that beat people up for you, you don't see that every day--unless you're St. Hugh of Lincoln, of course, but you're not.

The Feast of St. Edmund the Martyr rolls around* every November 20th. Lots of saints get the title "the Martyr" attached to their name, but St. Edmund clearly deserves it more than most. As King of the East Angles, Edmund was defeated and captured by Ivar the Boneless's marauding Danes. When Edmund refused to renounce his faith, his captors first beat him soundly with cudgels. When this produced no change, they tied him to a tree and scourged him with a whip for the rest of the day. When Edmund still wouldn't submit, they shot him with arrows until he bristled like a hedgehog, then had him beheaded and threw the head into the woods. After the Danes left, Edmund's friends scoured the woods looking for his head, which called to them, saying "here I am", until they found it nestled between the paws of a (wild but magically tamed) wolf. I'd like to believe that this was the medieval precursor to the modern game of Marco Polo.

For a while, Edmund was the patron saint of England, but he was eventually replaced by that glory hound St. George the dragonslayer.

November 23 is the Feast of Pope St. Clement of Rome, who was either the second, third, or fourth successor to the first Pope, St. Peter, depending on which unreliable list of early popes you consult. He was martyred by being tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea, which means as a saint he's cursed to carry an anchor with him when he sits for portraits (like the one at the top of the page).

St. Catherine, whose feast is celebrated on November 25 is the medieval art historian's favorite female saint, because she's easy to spot. Just look for the woman with a smug look about her standing next to a wheel. According to legend, Emperor Maximinus ordered her put to death on a wheel, but when she touched said wheel, it broke. This didn't get her off the hook, though; Maximinus just had her beheaded instead.

Catherine is the patron saint of damn near everybody with even a passing association with a wheel: potters, spinners, spinsters, milliners, knife sharpeners, mechanics, millers,wheelwrights, and so on. Seems a bit strange to me, people who need their wheels to work praying to a saint whose claim to fame is making wheels not work. Because she also had a habit of converting anyone sent to convince her of anything, she's also the patron of those who spin words: lawyers, philosophers, secretaries, teachers, etc.

Feminist scholars love Catherine, because of another part of the legend that says she refused to marry a man unless he could prove himself her better in every way. Predictably, no one ever could, so she stayed chaste for the rest of her life.

St. Linus is listed by all the ancient Christian records as the first successor to St. Peter. Some calendars (including MS. Rawl. D. 939, the poorly illustrated calendar I'm following) put his feast on November 25th, though these days it's celebrated in September. You'll be excused if you celebrated it last month, but really do make an effort to keep to my calendar from here on out. Other than his name and his place as Pope #2, next to nothing is known about Linus. The Liber Pontificalis*** says he's responsible for the now-ignored rule that says that women must cover their heads in church, and that's about it.

St. Andrew's feast closes out the month on November 30. He's sort of a big deal, being the first Apostle called by Christ and with his brother Peter one of the two fishermen asked to become "fishers of men." According to medieval accounts, Andrew was sentenced to be crucified, but demanded that he be tied to the cross instead of nailed and also that the cross by X-shaped instead of T-shaped, because he thought himself unworthy to be crucified in exactly the same way as the Savior. Thus, you can usually recognize Andrew as the guy strapped to the big X, as in the picture at the top of this post. Because of his original job, Andrew is the patron of nautical men of all types. He's also the patron saint of rope makers, because, apparently, rope makers always stop listening to the story of St. Andrew when he calls for the rope and just assume he must have used the rope to miraculously escape his captors and, possibly, to save Christmas.

Well, what do you know, that's the end of the saints for this month. Check back in mid-to-late December for the saints of early December, and, heck, probably some time in January for the late-December saints.

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*Like a severed head thrown into the woods. Confused?** Keep reading.
**Not confused? Stop waiting till the end to read all the footnotes so that I can properly confused you.
***In Latin: The Big Book of Saints.

The Staffordshire Beasties (Mmm... Marginalia)

2009-11-12T13:54:00.012-05:00

As you may have heard by now, a few months back a metal-detecting enthusiast hit the mother lode in Staffordshire. Instead of bottle caps and old nails, the urgent pinging of his detector signaled a buried cache of Anglo-Saxon gold consisting mostly of war booty--sword fittings, decorative armor clasps and panels, and some jewelry--probably from the end of the seventh or the beginning of the eighth centuries . This find was, to put it simply, seriously awesome, if not quite as revolutionary and convention-wisdom-upon-its-head-turning as the breathless copy at the website for the newly-dubbed "Staffordshire Hoard" might suggest.

Given my usual proclivities, it should come as no surprise that the chief point of interest for me are the weird stylized animals that decorate the items from the hoard. Like these guys, found around the edge of a golden dagger hilt:

Though to our eyes they probably look more like four-legged eels or duck-billed monsters, these synchronized leg-biting animals are probably wolves. Here, I've isolated one wolf* for you:

And with the body parts labeled:

(If I were better at Photoshop, this would be a more compelling demonstration.)

I single out the wolves for attention primarily because there's some discussion going on out there in the wider internet--particularly in the comments on the hoard's Flickr page--about this other image, which is found on a folded-up brooch in the hoard:

Some people see a person's crossed arms when they look at this, others a pair of fish or eels, still others ouroborusian serpents. There's even one hopeful commenter out there arguing that it's meant to represent Odin's two ravens Huginn and Muniin.

If you glance back up at the labeled picture above, it's clear what it is: a foreleg and paw attached directly to a snout that's chewing on an identical foreleg and paw attached directly to a snout that is chewing right back. In other words, it's a bit of visual nonsense made up out of isolated elements of the highly stylized seventh- and eighth-century decorative vocabulary.

Of course, when we're confronted with visual nonsense, our brains try to sort it into sense, which is probably why there are so many different explanations of what the brooch-images are meant to be. Indeed, that might be the reason migration era artists liked to created these mish-mashes of stylized body-parts, the stimulating mental dissonance of unresolvable visual puzzles and the accompanying pleasant "click" feeling when the brain (temporarily) resolves them.

Interestingly, what I'm calling "stylized visual nonsense" is a feature that characterizes earlier migration-era art. As time goes on, these clever bits of wonkiness fall out of fashion in favor of less-stylized, more realistic depictions of animals. I say it's interesting because hyper-stylized abstract play is something I've always (unreasonably, granted) associated with post-modern art--and I don't think I'm alone on this. It's easy to construct a satisfying narrative for it: first people drew what they saw (realism), then they started experimenting and got bolder and more experimental (cubism, surrealism, etc.), no longer bound by the tyranny of representationalism. But with the Anglo-Saxons and Celts of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, art gradually lost its experimental abstract character and slowly became, for lack of a better term, "square," even conservative.

I also should point out that transition is not mine; Bernhard Salin formally classified the stages back in the nineteen aughts and teens. Weird stylized animal he calls "Style I" animal art, which lasts from the fifth-century to the beginning of the seventh or so. "Style II" follows and lasts until middle of the eighth or so; it's characterized by figures that become more realistic and which are counterpoised in symmetrical arrangements.

The Sutton Hoo ship burial contains pieces that were made during the transition between Styles I and II. Like this purse lid:

Up top and in the middle you still have stylized interlocked wolfy figures, but down below and on either side, you get more realistic looking animals posed in balanced arrangements. And as time goes on, the animals get more and more realistic until the abstract character drops away entirely and you basically have figural carvings decorating things (which Salin calls, predictable, "Style III").

So, essentially, during the Anglo-Saxon era in England, there came a point where hyper-stylized abstract art became "old-fashioned"--the sort of thing old men might still have on their swords, or old ladies on their brooches, but which the kids rolled their eyes at in favor of things that looked more like things (to borrow a line from Terry Pratchett). Kinda like how on the old Max Headroom TV show, set "twenty minutes in the future," all the punk rockers with mohawks and leather chaps and safety pins in their noses were old men.

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*Or, possibly a lion or a domesticated dog. But I'm going to keep saying "wolf" instead of "wolf or lion or dog" for the remainder of the post.

Daveheart

2009-11-08T12:16:00.005-05:00

Yes, yes, for the love of God, I've seen this:

You can all stop forwarding the link to me now. I mean, yeah, I get it, I've got something of a Mel Gibson fetish--what medievalist doesn't?--but this isn't Got Braveheart.

And the joke here isn't really medieval. It's actually just "Wow, the SNL writers really didn't know much about Gerard Butler." I can see them in the writer's room now. Crap! This Butler guy who's hosting this week, he's Scottish, right? We've got a lot of old Mike Myers material laying around, I suppose we could dust off some of that, but we're going to need to work in a topical reference, something for the kids, you know. Hey, Braveheart, that's a movie about Scottish people, right? And it might be fifteen years old, but it was still in the New Release section at Blockbuster last time I checked, so that counts, right? It's better that then Trainspotting, and that's the only other Scotch movie I can think of.

Oh, and I know that many of my readers are international types that can't be bothered to learn how to use a proxy server, so my Hulu embed above won't work. For you, I offer instead this picture of me nearly eight years ago* at the William Wallace Monument in Stirling:

Looks like they've scrubbed all evidence of the blocky Mel Gibson tribute from the official website. I wonder, is that hastily constructed 1995 movie tie in still at the base of the monument? Anyone know?

--

*Man, I miss that bulky jacket. Fun fact: I got caught in a Welsh hailstorm on that same trip and it completely ruined the leather. And yet I continued to wear it for another three years. The reason? I don't know, probably some sort of tribute to all the brave ~~Scotsmen~~ Irishmen who ~~died~~ caught colds filming Braveheart.

More Edible Saints

2009-11-04T01:07:00.005-05:00

While working on this month's saints calendar, I stumbled across this:

It's a cake celebrating the encounter between the Loch Ness Monster and St Columba, the sixth-century Irish saint who converted the Picts. (More on him in the December calendar.)

The baker responsible for this sugar-crafted cuteness, Lucy Shaw, made the cake for her son Columba's christening party. And while edible hagiography isn't the only thing she does, she does do it awesomely. Here's her Joan of Arc, for instance:

And here's her St. Francis of Assisi:

Anyone have a kid named Bartholomew who needs christening? I'd love to see a cute little marzipan saint carrying his own flayed (marzipan) skin in his arms.

Novembers Saints Calendar (Part 1)

2009-11-01T23:42:00.001-05:00

For the medieval faithful, November gets started with two feasts that jointly celebrate every Christian who has ever died. All Saints Day (November 1), AKA All Hallows,* commemorates all the capital-S Saints, even the ones who've already had a day during the year, as well as all the Christians who have worked off their venial sins in Purgatory and thus completely purified their souls. The unpurified but still Heaven-bound Christians have to wait until the next day, All Souls (November 2) to get their props.

The illuminator of the calendar I'm following for these posts chose to follow a standard medieval visual model and depict the souls of the faithful departed as birds in a tree. For All Saints, he got a little creative, and went with a little composition I'm going to call "a bathtub full of decapitated heads and Jesus." Observe:

If you click the picture, it should zoom in enough so that you can see the nameless (and bodiless) saints' eyes, many of which seem to be focused on the three identical saints to their right with a clear air of "oh, crap, I'm totally blanking on those guys names, let's hope they don't come over to the bathtub..." Poor medieval bathtub saints, they lacked the Internet, and thus access to my blog, upon which now will be inscribed the names of the identical ones.

But first we must discuss the gentleman in red, St. Leonard, whose feast day comes on November 6. Leonard is the patron saint of women in labor, because his prayers safely delivered a son to Clovis I's wife. Afterward, Clovis granted him as much land as he (Leonard) could cover on donkeyback over one day.** He's also the patron of prisoners, because for some reason, locks would open spontaneously near him and chains would refuse to bind.

So then, the three identical gentlemen. The first is St. Martin, the second St. Brice, and last (and arguably least) St. Edmund Rich of Canterbury.

St. Martin of Tours is important enough that his feast day, November 11, gets a fancy name in English, Martinmas. Martin is famous for cutting his cloak in half, giving one half to a beggar, and then (after dreaming of Christ) finding his cloak magically restored--kind of like a sartorial Everlasting Gobstopper, but 50% less delicious.

Actually, Martin is famous for a lot of things. In the low countries, for instance, they eat goose on Martinmas, because they say Martin hid in a goose pen when he heard they wanted to make him a bishop. In parts of France they stuff themselves with croissants on St. Martin's Day, presumably because Martin hid in a croissant cupboard after they found him in the goose pen. The illuminator of our calendar above depicts him with an axe, which is probably an allusion to a battle Martin had against a demonically possessed tree. Long story.***

November 13 sees the Feast of St. Brice, a saint who's mostly famous for having been near St. Martin. Brice succeeded Martin as bishop after the more famous saint died, but those who opposed his election started spreading rumors that he'd gotten a nun pregnant after a nun in his household had a baby. In order to silence his accusers, Brice walked all the way to Martin's grave carrying a hot coal ~~in his pants~~ in his robe. Miraculously, the robe was unburnt. The people of his bishopric were not impressed and forced him to go do penance in front of the Pope anyway. It's just like I'm always telling people: no matter how bad the problem, putting a hot coal down your pants rarely makes it any better.

St. Martin of Canterbury has his feast on November 16, but he was a particularly pious saint who lived in the thirteenth century and so is dull as dishwater. The most interesting thing about him is that he pledged his chastity by marrying a statue of the Virgin Mary. Well, by putting a ring on the finger of a state of the Virgin Mary, anyway. No wonder the artist of our manuscript just drew St. Brice twice.

[Oh, by the way, I've decided that these saints calendar posts are getting way too long, so I'm splitting November in half. We'll see how that works out. Tune back in on the 15th or so to see the rest of the month's sanctified feasts.]

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*Of which Halloween is it's E'en.
**Usually when kings grant such a rash boon, the recipient does something clever like strap a jetpack to the donkey's back or burn the donkey and spread his ashes over the land, but not here. Leonard took a leisurely trip around the woods on his donkey, thanked the king for his gift, and built a monastery on the reasonably-sized tract he'd been left with.
***Actually, it's not that long a story. See, there was this demonically possessed tree that some pagans were worshiping, and Martin told them they had to cut it down. So they said they would, but they made Martin lay down where it was clear the tree would fall if they cut it. After the tree was cut, it did fall toward Martin, but the saint made the sign of the cross, and the tree spun away and landed inches from the clever people who'd cut it down.

How to Impress (or, possibly, frighten) Your Co-Workers

2009-10-11T21:30:00.004-04:00

Here's a little something awesome a reader sent me this weekend:

Just to be clear, she sent me the picture, not the cake. Said cake was made for her birthday, which happens to coincide with the Feast of St. Denis, he of headache-curing and preaching-whilst-decapitated fame. She learned of this august coincidence here, of all places. A little knowledge really is a dangerous thing.

Cake-wreckers beware. This was an intentional design choice, so I'd best not see it next time I'm wasting time over there.

Welcome Plimers

2009-10-09T13:23:00.004-04:00

After that last post, I was a little worried my blog might be flooded by Conservapedians hellbent on revenge. And when I checked my little site meter doodad the next morning, I did see a huge jump in the number of incoming readers. Turns out that the conservatives are pretty much ignoring me. But a years-old post about James A. Brundage's medieval safe sex flowchart got picked up by the "sex links" section of a new wikified links aggregator called "plime".

I assume it's because the guest blogger at BoingBoing recently rediscovered the chart (which they covered around the same time as I did before). Anyway, welcome, new readers!

Textual Analysts, I've Got the Conservapedia on Line 2

2009-10-06T23:44:00.019-04:00

There's a little news story bouncing around the blogs I read regularly. You've no doubt heard about the story by now from the blogs you read regularly in an a post titled something like "OMFG!!! Conservatives Declare War on the Bible!!!!!"

Now, there is some truth to my effusively-punctuated mock headline. Some conservatives* ~~(or professional internet trolls from 4chan posing as conservatives)~~ who ~~write for~~ founded the Conservapedia** have proposed creating a wiki-translation of the Bible that eliminates the "liberal bias" that has crept into the document over the years. And by over the years, they mean a lot of years. Like, hundreds of years.

Ostensibly, the Conservapedia's editors seem to think that they mean a little less than four-hundred years, or the years since 1611, as the entry on the Conservative Bible Project (AKA the Bible Retranslation Project) repeatedly praises the King James translation as a model for the proposed new conservatively constructed Bible. But if we take their project's stated guidelines at face value, it becomes distressingly apparent that they actually want to take down the "liberal bias" that's crept into the Bible since--well, since just after the Nicene Creed. You can read all ten guidelines for yourself if you'd like; I'm only going to focus on one. Oh, and if you're wondering what all this has to do with medieval studies, just bear with me. Ready? Here we go:

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story.

The person responsible for adding this criterion is, not surprisingly, the author of the Conservapedia's essay on said offending Adulteress Story, linked in the quote above and in the CBP's entry. And actually, as it turns out, this user, Aschlafly, AKA Andrew Schlafly, is the founder of the Conservapedia. He also holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Princeton and a J.D. from Harvard Law School and works as an adjunct law instructor and a homeschooling specialist. I mention this not to engage in any sort of academic shoe size comparisons, just to note that Aschlafly's educational background seems fairly unlikely to have given him much exposure to the discipline of textual analysis. And before you can start a Biblical translation and revision project that anyone else should take seriously, you need to know a bit about textual analysis.

In short, textual analysis is the process by which you go about reconstructing an original document from imperfect copies. Like, say some bloke named Geoff writes a poem about his vacation and hands it off to his servant Adam to copy for him so he can distribute it to his friends. Adam botches the job, because he doesn't quite understand what Geoff is describing because he's never been there himself, and besides Geoff is the sort of genius who sometimes just makes words up willy-nilly. Yet even with Adam's bungling, the little vacation story turns out to be popular, and other people want to read it, so they get their people to make them a copy of Adam's copy, and because years have passed and both Adam and Geoff are deceased and spoke a slightly different dialect than these new people (and from each other), and some of the copies are missing pages, and other copies are hard to read, further errors creep in. But the story's still popular, even with all the errors, and it stays popular for hundreds of years, and thus through many iterations of copying.

Eventually, parts of the vacation poem end up being meaningless, and lots of the words don't seem to rhyme right, or they rhyme too well, and parts of it seem like they might have actually been written by someone else, and there's not just one but a dozen different versions floating around, so someone says enough is enough and calls in the textual analysts. They sit down with all the copies of What Geoff Did on His Holiday that they can get their hands on and try to figure out what the original poem looked like when Geoff handed it to Adam so many years ago.***

Thus, if the editors at the Conservapedia want to revise the Bible back to its original authorial state, they're essentially going to be doing what we medievalists do when we make new editions of medieval books that exist in more than one manuscript. But before you can go rescuing a text from its imperfect copiers, you have to have a consistent system of principles to explain why you choose one divergent reading over another. And with a text like the Bible, you've got an extra problem to contend with, because the original author whose work you're trying to recover is not just some random fourteenth-century bureaucrat named Geoff, but the infallible Almighty God Himself. And to make matters worse, you're not recreating some funny story about pilgrims bumbling around on the road to Canterbury, but rather a document meant to guide the lives of the faithful to their eternal reward. A principle that might work for deciding what Geoff's friend from Bath said or didn't say might not apply to what the omnipotent creator meant to say about stoning adulteresses.

The adulteress in question appears in John 7:53-8:11. You've heard of her by reputation even if you've never read the Bible. She was going to be stoned to death, what with the adultery and all, but the scheming Pharisees saw the chance to kill two birds with one stone and put Jesus on the spot. Would he defy the old law and declare himself a heretic by not stoning her, or would he be a hypocrite and submit to the old law, which the Pharisees just so happened to be in charge of interpreting? But Jesus is wily and says instead, "Hey, sure, stone her, but let the person here who's never done something they knew was wrong throw the first stone. It's only fair." And the crowd breaks up, because, well, awkward!

According to Andrew Schlafly, this moment of mercy and rejection of the letter of the law is a later liberal addition to the Bible and should be removed. People even use it to oppose the death penalty, of all things! To back his claim up, Schlafly cites Bruce Metzger as an authority on Biblical textual analysis. Metzger writes (and Schlafly quotes):

The evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming. It is absent from such early and diverse manuscripts as Papyrus66.75 Aleph B L N T W X Y D Q Y 0141 0211 22 33 124 157 209 788 828 1230 1241 1242 1253 2193 al. Codices A and C are defective in this part of John, but it is highly probable that neither contained the pericope, for careful measurement discloses that there would not have been space enough on the missing leaves to include the section along with the rest of the text. In the East the passage is absent from the oldest form of the Syriac version (syrc.s. and the best manuscripts of syrp), as well as from the Sahidic and the sub-Achmimic versions and the older Bohairic manuscripts. Some Armenian manuscripts and the old Georgian version omit it. In the West the passage is absent from the Gothic version and from several Old Latin manuscripts (ita.l*.q). No Greek Church Father prior to Euthymius Zigabenus (twelfth century) comments on the passage, and Euthymius declares that the accurate copies of the Gospels do not contain it.

Metzger's academic credentials are sterling. Unimpeachable. He knew at least as much as anybody else about the transmission and content of the earliest Greek versions of the Bible, and anybody doing rigorous Biblical textual analysis is going to take his opinion seriously. It's possible that Schlafly even knew Metzger personally, since they were both in Princeton at the same time. So, case closed, right? Out with the adulteress! But hold on, there are two problems with that.

First, and more mundanely, take a look at some of those manuscript names: syrc.s, ital.l*.q, syrp. Huh? He should write that as syr^c.s., it^a.l*.q, and syr^p. Schlafly would know that the superscript is what makes those names legible if he knew much about Biblical textual studies. (And it's not like the wiki software doesn't know how to make superscripts.) Likely, Schlafly just cut and pasted something he read elsewhere online. Cut and paste is hell on text formatting. Now, this might seem like a minor quibble--the sort I'm always saying I'm above--but to me this particular moment of sloppiness says a lot. Schlafly is trying to impress his readers with a bunch of impenetrable technical jargon, but the jargon is impenetrable to him, too. He's just counting on you not to follow the footnote back to the internet source he's using.

The second problem is a bit bigger. Schlafly is quoting Metzger selectively, and the rest of Metzger's discussion of the adulteress seems to me to be at least somewhat relevant. Just a sentence later, he writes:

At the same time the account [of the adulteress] has all the earmarks of historical veracity. It is obviously a piece of oral tradition which circulated in certain parts of the Western church and which was subsequently incorporated into various manuscripts at various places.

Addition? Yes. Added by liberals to distort Jesus's true message? Well, Metzger, Schlafly's textual expert, says no. But Metzger's obviously biased by having a consistent theory of what the original Bible that Schlafly hopes to recreate might have originally looked like.

Metzger's work was predicated on the well-established belief that the Bible did not begin as a single unified uncorrupted correspondence from the divine that has since slowly accumulated errors that need correcting. Rather, because of the overwhelming preponderance of textual evidence, Metzger takes as a given that the early church was awash with many different competing accounts of the life and deeds of Jesus and of his followers which they had to sort through, making careful decisions about which of these documents ought to go into the Bible and what oughtn't. The majority of their work collecting texts together happened several hundred years after this Jesus was supposed to have lived.

One irony that Metzger is well aware of is that these men who put the Bible together in the third and fourth centuries do seem to favor texts that appeared to have been written by eye-witnesses to Jesus's life.**** But as every serious textual scholar of the Bible will also tell you, none of the gospels are actually eye-witness accounts. The book of John is certainly not; it was likely the last of the gospels written, probably within a decade of the year 100. So, while those church fathers did have a consistent principle for what they included or excluded, they were likely deluded as to the actual history of the documents they were dealing with.*****

Yet even operating under this preference for texts that appeared to be eye-witness accounts, and even though they thought that John was indeed such an account, and even though they could tell that this adulteress story wasn't original to John, the early church fathers still decided that the adulteress story was likely true and chose to include it when they decided what was canon. Metzger's explanation for this is perfectly reasonable. The church fathers thought that even though this story about the adulteress hadn't been written down by John, there was good reason to believe it was a historical account that had been transmitted through other means. Because it fit with what they knew about Jesus and his life.

Obviously, the real rub for Schlafly is that he does not believe that the story of the adulteress fits with what he knows to be true about Jesus and his life. It's too liberal to really be what God intended Christians to emulate, because he knows a priori that God is ultimately a card-carrying Republican. In order for the rest of us to take him seriously, though, Schlafly should provide some other compelling reason why we should take his Republican Jesus over the Jesus preferred by the original church fathers. To return to my original point about textual analysis, Schlafly needs to be able to give some account of what "the original Bible" he wants to recreate is and how he is able to distinguish it from the imperfect copies we're today left with, imperfect copies which include texts used and accepted as canonical since the fourth century. And he can't call on Metzger to bail him out, because Metzger actually believes the exact opposite of him.

The medievals, as it turns out, did not believe that the Bible was literally true, as Schlafly does. (Weird, I know, that someone who wants to edit the Bible down to a purer state can simultaneously believe it's literally true.) How could they? There were lots of bits that seemed to contradict what they knew to be true about their faith. The Song of Solomon appears to be a long love poem to a dusky naked chick, for Chrissake! You'd be a fool to read that literally, because everyone knows, God has very specific views about dusky naked chicks, and they're not exactly positive. Indeed, the medievals had elaborate jokes they told about the sort of morons who might read the Bible literally. (See Geoff's vacation story about his friend the Miller, for at least a partial example. Or, for a non-moron getting up to no good with literal meanings, talk to that certain lady from Bath.)

The medievals also didn't believe that God left the translation of the Bible up to chance, either. They chose mostly to gloss over the early church father's fights over which books were in and out, but they did remember the story of the Septuagint told by the Christians of late antiquity. Thus, they believed that seventy-two different translators had been locked in different rooms and told to translate the Bible from Hebrew into Greek and that when they compared their work, miraculously, it was exactly identical. The hand of God had moved their pens. Even after Jerome's revised Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible became the de facto text of Western Christianity, replacing the work that had went into the Septuagint, they still told the story of the seventy-two translators, because they knew that if it had been left in the hands of scribblers like Geoffrey's employee Adam, or even Jerome, there'd be no way the Bible was legit.

It strikes me that a wikified Bible is the exact opposite of the Septuagint beloved by the medievals. Instead of seventy-two people miraculously reduced to one agreement, you're going to have seventy-two hundred people all trying to change the one Bible to reflect their own personal tastes.

--

*Emphasis on the some. Calling this a "conservative effort" to rewrite the Bible is a little unfair to intelligent conservatives. The people at the Conservapedia are a subset of a subset of a subset, not the central figures of the conservative movement. Granted, I don't know who those central figures are these days, but I know these ain't them. And even if they were legitimate conservative figures, you wouldn't say that SETI is a "liberal boondogle" just because Jimmy Carter and Dennis Kucinich say they saw some weird lights in the sky once.
**Wikipedia + Stephen Colbert - Irony = Conservapedia.
***Obviously, I'm oversimplifying and completely ignoring problems like this.
****In this they're in good company. Paul insists that one good reason for believing that Jesus was the son of God is all the trustworthy people who say that they saw him after his crucifixion.
*****The ultimate irony, of course, is that if they had had all the facts when they used their principle, they'd have struck most of the texts that they decided were canonical and might even have accepted some that they tossed out.

Zombie Joan of Arc Wants You to Play Video Games

2009-10-03T11:40:00.006-04:00

It may not be an official PS3 ad,* but nevertheless, there's at least a few ad men working the Chilean market who think that this would be a good way to sell Playstations:

Let me make sure I've got the message right. It seems to be somewhere between "Playing a game on your PS3, a system well known for its virtual Joans of Arc, is just as much fun as being an organ donor in the years before anesthesia and antiseptics" and "Playstation 3: the most fun you can have without having open heart surgery" with maybe a dash of "PS3: Get Medieval on Your Heart (and Joan of Arc's heart [she's got a congenital heart defect that the chroniclers neglected to mention, you see...])"?

While I don't really dabble in the "lol that codpiece is actually 13th century FAIL!!!" school of medieval bloggery much anymore, I must admit that their vision of the 15th century is pretty odd. For one, it's clear that for the artists Joan's armor is just weird metal clothing, her greaves, cuisse and other such armorlogical whatchamacallits simply the medieval equivalent of aughties gamerdude's jeans.

From this clearly representative evidence, I deduce the following principle of modern medievalishness**:

In the Middle Ages, clothing was made of metal.

Also, seeing as this advertisement's surgical theater comes equipped with chest spacers, a bloody rag, a large metal key, a meat hook (?), chains, and stocks for your legs (but not your arms?!), I could add to that:

In the Middle Ages, they just used whatever the hell they had lying around when they had to do surgery.

But that would be being unfair. Frankly, even I've got no clue what doctors used for heart transplant surgery in the Middle Ages. My medieval medical knowledge goes no further than vein men and purgatives. Alas, that's the trouble with being a medieval pedant. You have to pretend to have all sorts of expertise you don't really have.

--

*For a few days last week, this ad (and another one featuring a modern gamer giving Rommel a blood transfusion) were thought to have been part of a new PS3 print ad campaign for Chile. Turns out, it was just a mock campaign produced as an attempt to get Sony's business.
**Before you get all St. Maurice on me, read on. Medievalishness: a word I coined just now to describe what we moderns do when we want to give the feel of the medieval era without caring much about accuracy. See also, ye olde stuffe.

October Saints Calendar

2009-10-02T13:42:00.005-04:00

Happy Feast of St. Thomas de Cantelupe, everybody! Who is St. Thomas de Cantelupe? Why, he's only history's fourth most popular saint named Thomas!* And that's not all!! October 2nd is also the Feast of St. Leger (aka St. Leodegar), the bishop famous for aiding Childeric II's accession over his brother Theoderic to the throne of the Franks in 675!! Talk about your major saintly star power!!! As for the rest of the month, the hits just keep on coming...

St. Francis of Assisi's feast rolls in on October 4th. Earth Day ought to be celebrated on the same day, since Francis is the patron saint of animals, particularly cute and symbolic ones, and here lately he's become the patron saint of the environment in general. But do the environmentalists listen to me? Noooo. They chose The Feast of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, a second rate Scottish saint primarily famous for being used as a character in the earliest D&D books. Cretins.

October 6th is the Feast of St. Faith, aka St. Foy, a beautiful virgin who was stripped naked, cooked on a brazier, and then beheaded by Emperor Diocletian. For reasons I haven't been able to discover, Faith is depicted as a large disembodied hand by the (admittedly untalented) artist responsible for MS. Rawl D939 (the manuscript from which I'm taking these saints, excerpted above). Usually she's depicted as an attractive young lady, and fairly often an attractive naked young lady, as medieval artists knew a good excuse to slip a naked lady into a manuscript when they saw one. According to legend, after Faith was martyred God caused it to snow so that her naked dead body would be covered, which does make you wonder why the snow couldn't have fallen a bit earlier, say, when they were trying to cook her over coals. But, as we've established before, I'm no theologian.

On October 9th the Feast of St. Denis is celebrated. He's one of about a dozen saints who are occasionally mistaken for the Headless Horseman--that is, they're iconographically depicted holding their own severed heads in their hands. Denis is special amongst the beheaded, for he is the patron saint of headaches, probably because he managed to walk an additional two miles after he had been beheaded, preaching all the way. When you're looking for help coping with head pain, this is clearly the guy to call.

The saints for the middle of the month aren't that interesting: October 11 and 13th see a pair feats for extra-holy alliterating saints,* Ethelburga and Edward the Confessor.

The Feast of St. Luke falls on October 18th. Luke is one of the important apostles, as you're all no doubt aware, and for some reason he is also the patron saint of both butchers and surgeons. I suppose so that you don't have to switch who you're praying to if an operation goes awry halfway through.

St. Frideswide's feast falls on October 19. She's another one of those female saints who were famous for keeping their virginity in the face of overwhelming opposition. In Frideswide's case, she had to run to the forest, hide in a tub, then hang out with some swine. Hmmm, come to think of it, that's not really that overwhelming. I guess that's why Oxford chose her as their patron saint. She's chaste, sure, but it's not like she's going to throw herself off a cliff or anything. Very practical, that St. Frideswide.

By sheer volume of sanctity, October 21 is the holiest day on the calendar, for it celebrates the martyrdom of St. Ursula and 11,000 nameless virgins. Sadly, this day of 11,001 saints was also struck from the modern Catholic calendar during the 1969 reform, due to something called "a complete and total lack of any corroborating evidence"--whatever that is. According to legend, Ursula was a British princess meant to marry Conan Meriadoc of Brittany. When her father dispatched her to her husband (with her 11,000 virginal handmaidens in tow), a miraculous wind blew her ship so strongly that the journey took only a day. In recognition of the miracle, Ursula decided to go on a long pilgrimage across all the holy sites in Europe before getting married. This is precisely the sort of strange decision that medieval saints make all the time. "Oh, Heavenly Father, in thanks for how quickly you brought me to my husband, I will take a leisurely trip far, far away from him." It's like celebrating the $10 a month you saved canceling Cinemax by going out and buying 200 DVDs. Perhaps this is why she is the patron saint of students.** And wouldn't you know it, they only got as far as Cologne before the Huns beheaded all 11,001 of them.

Sts. Simon and Jude double up on October 28. They were apostles who were said to have went to Persia to spread the faith and died there, leaving no records of what they might have done whilst there. Neither gets much screen time in the Bible, either, which may be why they're forced to share a day--afterthoughts, like the Professor and Mary Ann in the opening credits of the first season of Gilligan's Island.

And finally, October 31, Halloween, shares its calendar date with The Feast of the Martyrdom of St Quintin. You'd think he'd be something awesome, like a vampire saint, or maybe a sanctified wolfman. But no, he's just your average beheaded missionary saint that the Carolingians were fond of for no readily apparent reason. Probably because very little was known about his life, even then, so you could celebrate whatever you wanted about it. Even more perplexing, Quintin gets three saints days--as many as John the Baptist! And like Johnny the B, the other two feasts commemorate the two different days on which his body was miraculously discovered: once in a bog, once in a hidden tomb built by the person who found him in a bog. Early Christians had a lot of trouble keeping track of their saints' bodies, you see.

Well, that's all the saints for October. Counting Sts. Oswald and Michael, who both get an extra feast in October due to differences of opinion between sects, that's a baker's dozen in all. I hope you're stocked up on festive plastic dinnerware.

--

*After St. "Doubting" Thomas, St. Thomas Beckett, and St. Thomas Aquinas. For a long time, Thomas the Canteloup was considered the fifth most popular St. Thomas, until medieval historians realized that the St. Thomas they had down as fourth was actually an island in the Caribbean--a U.S. Virgin Island, as a matter of fact. This just goes to show how foolish medieval historians can be. If you're going to count an island as a saint, clearly a virgin island would easily be more popular than Beckett, and arguably more popular than Aquinas.
**Awesome! The paper deadline got moved to Monday! Let's cut class for the next month and get really good at Halo!***
***Substitute "Civilization" for "Halo" in that last footnote and you basically have my academic career in a nutshell.

Happy Labor Day! (Mmm... Marginalia)

2009-09-07T15:06:00.005-04:00

If you're lucky enough to live in the US of A, then you've probably got the whole day off from your job* in order to celebrate how awesome it is to have a job.** So use today to celebrate your own peculiar passions. Just be you. Like this guy, from the 15th century BL MS Harley 4380, another chunk of Froissart's Chronicles:***

Ride on, creepy naked knight on a hobby horse. Ride on for labor!

--

*Providing you have a job, of course.
**Fun fact. Labor Day was first created in 1921, during a brief 'Ironic Legislation' movement in American politics.
***For those keeping score at home, apparently the guy who owned this edition of Froissart really loved jousting jokes.

September Feast Calendar (The Rest of It, Anyway)

2009-09-07T11:59:00.002-04:00

Bodleian Library MS Rawl. D 939

Well, well, will you look at the time? It's already September and the Feast of St. Cuthbert (September 4th) has come and gone. Whatever will you do with the rest of your time this month?

Well, there's just one shopping day left before the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, which takes place on September 8th. And not long after that, (September 13th-14th) comes The Exultation of the Cross. Who knew September was so theologically loaded?

Lambertusfest sounds like a second-rate touring metal concert series, but is actually just the name that the Germans give to the Feast of St. Lambert, which arrives on September 17th. They celebrate Lambert, a bishop of Maastricht (whose family had some soap-opera-worthy dealings with Charles Martel's family way back in the day) by building and decorating big wooden tripods they call Lambertus trees, which sounds like something I'd make up but isn't.

On September 21st, you'll want to clear some room for the Feast of St. Matthew, who you may have heard is kind of a big deal. But only a day later comes the feast of the saint that some people call the space cowboy:*

September 22nd, St. Maurice

Maurice was the leader of Rome's only all-Christian legion in the fourth century, based out of Thebes. As you might expect, he was eventually ordered to use his legion to persecute some non-militarized Christians. The story from that point on makes a pretty good GRE question:

When Maurice would not do as Rome commanded, the emperor Maximian ordered every tenth man in his legion killed. Maurice continued to resist, and again every tenth man in the legion was killed. Maurice continued to resist, so the emperor rounded him and his troops up and had them all killed. When they buried the men killed in the final purge, they needed 5401 graves. Assuming that Maximian only killed whole men (and not fractions of men), and that each man was buried in his own grave, approximately how many men were in Maurice's legion to begin with?**

A) 6,000
B) 6,534
C) 6,535
D) 6,666
E) 66,666

St. Maurice protects against gout and cramps and is traditionally the patron saint of soldiers, armorers, swordsmiths, alpine infantrymen, clothmakers and dyers, among others. If I had anything to say about it, he'd be the patron saint of grammatical pedants, too. You know, the sort who hear you say "I could totally decimate a steak right about now" and go "Actually, decimate originally meant 'to reduce by a tenth', so you're really saying that you do not want to eat much steak at all."***

Maurice is usually depicted as a black man in armor--whatever armor is popular at the time the depiction is created. That means that if we worked like medieval Christian iconographers, today he'd be depicted wearing digital camouflage piloting an unmanned drone while drinking Horde Red Mountain Dew. Sometimes, he's depicted as a soldier flanked by eight men on each side (10 -1 -1), because iconographers don't understand how percents work.

People who can't get enough of John and Kate Plus Eight (Minus John), the Olsen Twins, or the acclaimed Disney Channel original documentary Twitches might be interested in...

September 27th, SS. Cosmas and Damian

Cosmas and Damian were martyred during the Diocletian Persecutions (303-311), which was sort of the persecution to get martyred during if you were thinking sainthood. In life, they were twins, surgeons who performed a miraculous leg transplant, attaching a black Ethiopian's leg to replace a white man's diseased one. And thus they are the patron saints of surgeons, dentists, and vets, as well as children, orphanages, and candy-sellers. They also protect against hernias and the plague.

They're extremely useful saints for art historians, too, as whenever you can't identify a pair of haloed men standing next to each other, you can always suggest they be tentatively identified as Cosmas and Damian.

Two days later, medieval Christians celebrated the feast of a saint who's very hard to mistake (iconographically-speaking) for any other saint:

September 29th, St. Michael

St. Michael's feast is so important it still has a fancy name in English: Michaelmas, or Michael's Mass. Michael is an archangel, the one will lead the host of heaven against the forces of evil during the apocalypse. He's traditionally depicted as a winged man with a sword putting some serious smack down on a demon or a dragon or some sort of monster. Basically, take your St. George and stick wings on his back and you've got St. Michael.

Michael is an important medieval saint, because he's the one who makes sure that pious souls end up in heaven. You might also think of him as the commander of the guardian angel corps. Personally, I think it's a little bit strange that angels also get to be saints, but nobody asked me when they set up the veneration rules. He's also the specific patron of soldiers, police officers, paratroopers, and fighter pilots and he's also useful in exorcisms.

Traditionally, you eat "stubble goose",**** carrots, and St. Michael's bannock on Michaelmas.

Rounding out the month, the Feast of St. Jerome falls on September 30th. Jerome is one of the four original Doctors of the Church and was responsible for tidying up the Latin Bible to make the Vulgate. Apparently, he also removed a thorn from a lion's paw, then made the lion repay his lifedebt by guarding his ass. His donkey, I mean. Using a lion to guard yourself would've made more sense, but maybe it was an important ass.

That's it for the feast calendar this month. So, be sure to make your grapes into wine soon so you'll have time for all those saints clustered at the end of the month.

--

*Confused Steve Miller fans, mostly.
**The answer, of course, is 6,666, which you would know if you hadn't wasted all that time in college taking linear algebra.
***To which I respond, "I said what I meant. I want to decimate a steak. But it's a very large steak." And they say, "How large?" And I say, "Your typical steak is around 12oz. The steak I had in mind was 180oz." And then, sheepishly, they say, "I see. If you wish to eat 18oz of steak, then you are truly very hungry. Our mistake." And then I smile witheringly.
****A goose killed when the wheat has been harvested, but before plowing, so that there's just "stubble" left in the fields.

Snails vs Monkeys: Gastropodcalypse Now (Mmm... Marginalia)

2009-08-31T13:17:00.007-04:00

A few summers ago, vs was all the rage: Jason vs Freddy, Aliens vs Predator, Jason vs Aliens, Freddy vs Aliens, Jason and Freddy vs Aliens vs Jason #2, Kramer vs Kramer vs Jason, Jason vs Board of Education, Jason² + 2(Jason) + 3 Men and a Little Lady vs (Aliens - Predators)(Aliens + Predators)*, and so on.

And as we all know, Hollywood loves recombinative movie making. Producers make the big bucks by coming up with explanations for projects like "It's just like Die Hard, but in an assisted living facility!" or "Sergio Leonie meets Meet the Parents" or "It's some random crappy D-list comedy meets a movie with Tyler Perry's name in front of it."

It may come as some surprise to learn that medieval illustrators also loved recombinative productions. Thus, witness the Tyler Perry's Good, Bad, and Ugly Ways to Die Most Hardest** of 1471:

It's a snail and a rabbit play-jousting piggyback on two monkeys. The image may be found in the British Library's MS Harley 4379, the Harley Froissart. It doesn't get more one-thing-plus-another-thing-and-then-another-thing-being than this.***

Oh yes, and I must thank my mysterious sources deep within the British Library for this one. Mysterious sources, you know who you are.

--

*The difference of two squares: Aliens² - Predators²
**In theaters this fall. Starring Robert Deniro as a sad shell of the actor he once was!
***Unless the snail is (as I suspect) strapped into a rocketpack. In that case, it does get more of that long hyphenated made up adjective. Like 100 times more.

Let's Not Sit and Argue about Who Consumed and Excreted Whom

2009-08-31T11:30:00.005-04:00

Everyone calm down.

The reports of my death were greatly exaggerated--by me, naturally, whilst pretending to be a naughty 13th-century fox.

If you were fooled by my little post, here's a helpful hint for the future. The person writing the post bragging about having killed and eaten me could not possibly have been the real Reynard, because the real Reynard would have 1) worked in a bit about how he'd just finished banging my wife; 2) relieved himself on my children--or possibly my wife--not on his garden; and 3) not given a damn about his own children being strong or healthy. It's the little details that always reveal a medieval forgery is what I'm saying.

However, if I do ever end the blog, it'll be just like that. The blog will die as it lived: a post that reasonable people will assume is a joke, then nothing.

In Search of Robin Hood (Sunday Funny)

2009-08-30T10:15:00.001-04:00

A reader sent me a link to this, a new comedy documentary (docucomedy?) that follows three young Britons seeking the truth behind the Robin Hood legend, mostly by wandering around present day Nottingham.

The Robin Hood Investigation from chris amblin on Vimeo.
This isn't hardcore comedy*, nor is it hardcore medievalism, but I certainly approve of it. As you may have noticed, I'm all for people being sort of snarky and vaguely disrespectful while being in the presence of something one could reasonably call "medieval history".

--

*Though some male genitalia is displayed at one point.

I Have Consumed and Excreted Your Blogger

2009-08-20T11:24:00.006-04:00

Hi everybody, Reynard here. You remember me, right? I'm the adorable talking fox who sometimes drops in to guest-blog on this little vanity project that Carl calls "Got Medieval". Aren't I adorable? My tail is naturally this bushy, I assure you.

Well, anyway, I'm just dropping in to say that your precious little funny man is not coming back. See, I kind of sort of ate him, then shat him out. His remains are currently fertilizing my garden, which will produce fine fruits and vegetables that I will feed to my whelps, making them strong enough to one day devour your children. It is the circle of life that you have heard so much about in the movies and the gay man's little songs.

Do not think me a cretin for eating your blogger. He was, let me tell you, the worst sort of filth. Why, just the other day, he was seen being led in chains to the king's throne to answer for the charge of [expletive deleted]* a chicken's corpse:

A noble chicken, I might add, who had never done anyone any wrong and that he had strangled himself earlier that morning with his own two paws. What's that, you say? This looks like a picture of me, Reynard the Fox, being led to jail? Yes, yes it does. For amongst his many crimes, this site's blogger also was known to impersonate me in public. But that is him and not me. You know this, because I, Reynard the Fox, would never be caught by foolish agents of the state. Truly, it was an imposter who was tried, convicted, and escaped from his jail cell by convincing his jailer (with the clever use of double entendres) to try to remove his own skin and have it dry cleaned professionally, necessitating the jailer's immediate hospitalization.

So you see why I had to kill and eat your blogger. It was justice of the highest order. For no one may impersonate the great Reynard!

--

*What the [expletive for copulation] deleted? Why am I not able to say [expletive deleted] on this [expletive (gerund) for copulating with a donkey] blog?
**[AUTOMATED NOTE: The parental controls for this blog have been enabled.]***
***[Vulgar euphemism for awakening to find oneself covered with one's own excrement deleted.]!!!!!! I, Reynard, will not put up with this [expletive deleted]. What, I cannot say [expletive deleted], either? That is such [expletive for sexual positions only possible when one is double-jointed]. I named my first child Mademoiselle [expletive deleted]-y Mc[vulgar euphemism for a woman's sexual organs], for Chrissake!****
****What, I can take the Lord's name in vain, but I can't say [expletive begun, cut off midway, but deleted nonetheless]--forget it. Goddamn American censors.

Senor What the F**k are You Talking about?

2009-08-05T22:23:00.004-04:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Chuck Grassley's Debt and Deficit Dragon

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Spinal Tap Performance

As those of you who watched last night's Daily Show--and those of you who clicked play on the embed above--know, John Stewart recently horned in on my shtick by pointing out that Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's recent medieval free association ramblings about the "Debt & Deficit Dragon" and "Sur Taxalot" were, to use the technical term, "kind of dumb".

All I can add is that "fire-breathing deficit dragon" has been kicking around as a dumb metaphor for a long time now, at least since the Reagan administration. Sur Taxalot and the Golden Goose, that's all Grassley, though.

(Fake) Medieval UFO Sighting (Mmm... Not Really Marginalia)

2009-08-04T15:01:00.006-04:00

Instead of marginalia, this week I offer you a medieval mystery.

A while back a colleague contacted me on behalf of a fellow working for the History Channel. Sadly, they were not interested in picking up my medieval detective miniseries,* but rather they wanted my help identifying the source of an image that some claim is a manuscript illustration of a medieval UFO sighting. This is that picture:

As I told the guy at the time, it's certainly not what it claims to be. Let me quote the caption so that you don't have to get eyestrain:

These images of two crusaders date from a 12th century manuscript "Annales Laurissense", and refer to a Ufo sighting in the year 776 A.D. during the siege on Sigiburg Castle, France, by the Saxons. Suddenly a group of discs (flaming shields) appeared and started hovering over the top of the church. The Saxons believed the French were protected by these objects and fled."

Another blogger helpfully sums up the truth of the matter much more ably than I would have,** like so:

The oldest manuscript known today which contains a copy of the Annales Laurissenses is known as the Lorsch Codex. This is where the Annales Laurissenses took their name, monasterium Laureshamense being the Latin name of the Lorsch monastery. The Lorsch Codex is indeed dated from the 12th century and is most probably the one referred to when talking about the provenance of the above illustrations. [...] Unfortunately, even if the Lorsch Codex does contain some miniatures for initials, it does not contain our beautiful world-wide-web illustrations. These must have come from elsewhere.

So, yes, there is a chronicle which describes glowing shields in the sky, but there is no illuminated copy of it that has images that even remotely look like those. They must have come from elsewhere, and it's the elsewhere that's been giving me fits over the last few months. As aforelinked blogger correctly points out elsewhere in his post, the image on the left is almost certainly a mislabled picture of one of the three magi being led by the star of Bethlehem, a recurring motif in medieval iconography. The knight [there weren't any crusaders in 776 --ed.] who seems to be saying "Gooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaal!!!!!!" is harder to place, especially as his armor is so generically vague.

My theory is that someone took two originally separate images, one of a magi and the star, another of a knight with his hands over his head, and redrew them with modern paint and ink, making the star look more like a UFO and adding the UFO over the knight. But I hold out hope that someone, somewhere, has seen the original images in their proper context and knows where the fraudulent-UFO-captioner took them from.

So, anyone? You were all so crackerjack with the snails that I expect you'll be able to have the mystery solved by lunchtime tomorrow. In which case, I will definitely pass your hard work off as my own and use their high esteem of me to get the monkey-loving medieval detective series off the ground.

--

*It follows a fictional deodand examiner who investigates wrongful deaths in the margins of gothic manuscripts. His sidekick is a cynocephalus who hides his condition with a variety of clever headbands. Oh, and his love interest is a girl with the hindquarters of a monkey. Hmm, come to think of it, I should lead with the monkey-hybrid girl. Animal/human romance is so hot right now.
**With far fewer non sequitur-laden footnotes, I might add.***
***In a non-sequitur-laden footnote, natch.

Historical Sackboys Incoming

2009-08-03T15:53:00.002-04:00

I don't have a PS3, so I don't have any clue how Little Big Planet actually works, but apparently you can purchase little outfits for your adorable hero to wear while doing... whatever it is he does. Coming soon, a pack of outfits featuring everyone's favorite medieval sacker of cities, ~~Chengis~~ Genghis Khan, as well as three other historical personages:

Their inscrutable hypercuteness and overall knittedness remind me of the medieval amigurumi and how nobody ever made me one, even though I dropped 10-Ton Hints. Oh, the sadness.

150/1000

2009-08-03T13:14:00.004-04:00

I'm not one to toot my own horn. I tend to leave that to the monkeys. But nonetheless, while I've been busy moving, Got Medieval passed two minor milestones. There are now consistently over 1000 people* subscribed to this blog via some sort of RSS reader, and there are over 150 people following the blog through Google.

In terms of the wider intertubes, these numbers are pretty paltry. But for a medieval specialist blog, they're through the roof, and I thank all my loyal readers. In honor of your support, I promise to 1) actually finish video game week and 2) actually review King Arthur before August is out.

Even if every one of the 150 followers is also a RSS subscriber, that means I still consistently teach about a thousand people each week a little something (some weeks a very little something) about the Middle Ages. To reach that many sets of eyes in my Real Job, I'd need to teach a 4/4 teaching load of packed classes (with no recidivists) for a little over four years.

--

*The numbers tend to fluctuate a bit every Sunday when it's reindexed, but it the number hasn't dipped back into triple digits for several weeks now.

Penny Arcade on Greed (Sunday Funny)

2009-08-02T17:32:00.003-04:00

A quick bit of funny for you to enjoy on Sunday:

This week, Penny Arcade suggests that, logically, the next six phases of Electronic Arts' Sin to Win contest will feature the six deadly sins that aren't lust, one by one; and, further, that greed is the sin that covers re-enacting urban legends about ice baths and kidneys. I'm not so sure about that last suggestion, though.

Click through to the original comic if the text is too hard on the eyes here (and it should be, as I fear their copyright ninjas descending on my poor blog).

August Feast Calendar

2009-08-01T17:35:00.007-04:00

Welcome to August! And welcome, as well, to my new monthly feature, a month-by-month look at medieval feast calendars.* Without further ado, here's a sampling of five of the many saints whose feasts you ought to be celebrating this month:

August 5th: St. Oswald of Northumbria

Oswald was a warrior-king with a penchant for giving to the poor. According to Bede, St. Aidan witnessed his charity and blessed his right hand so that it would always be strong, and apparently, even after death, it remained whole and uncorrupted. According to Reginald of Durham, a bird--possibly a raven--carried his arm off. The tree where the bird lived also became incorruptible, and when the arm fell out and on the ground, a spring sprung. His body was held at Bamburg, but the magic arm was later stolen by monks and taken to Peterborough. Still later, at least four different churches that missed the memo about the magic arm claimed to have possession of his magic head.

Since his right arm was magic, Oswald is represented in Christian iconography as a king who's missing his right arm, naturally. Celebrate Oswald's feast day by not using your right arm for the entire day.

August 10th: St. Lawrence of Rome

Lawrence was put to death on a gridiron, which is to say he was suspended between metal grills and roasted over a fire. According to legend, halfway through his ordeal he told his tormentors "Assum est, inquit, versa et manduca" or "This side's done; turn me over and take a bite."

Celebrate the martyrdom of the patron saint of prostitutes, comedians, librarians, and chefs with a backyard cookout.

August 19th: St. Magnus the King

St. Magnus the King was never actually king of anything but the Earldom of Orkney. He was chiefly famous for refusing to fight the Vikings out of Christian piety, instead staying in his ship and singing the Psalms. Later, he was sentenced to death by political rivals, but when it came time for his beheading, the executioner refused, out of respect for aforesaid Christian piety. So a cook was brought in to do the deed instead.

You should probably celebrate the Feast of St. Magnus the King by refusing to celebrate and instead staying home and singing the Psalms. Or possibly by having your cook inexpertly chop the head off of something.

August 24th: St. Bartholomew

One of the apostles, he traveled to India after the resurrection and was later flayed alive in Armenia. Thus, he appears in medieval art as a bloody corpse holding his own skin and the knife that flayed it off. Cripes, medieval Christians, could you be more gruesome? (That's him in the middle of the image above.)

Celebrate St. Bartholomew's Day by visiting the local abattoir, or by going to see whichever sequel to Saw is currently in the theaters, or, if you're squeamish, with a plate of TGI Friday's Loaded Potato Skins.

August 29th: The Decollation of St. John the Baptist

St. John is so important a saint that he gets multiple days, and oddly enough, the anniversary of his beheading is the least gruesome of them. On February 24th, you can celebrate the first and second discoveries of his severed head, which was hidden on the Mount of Olives after his death, buried, but later dug up, reburied, re-dug up, and re-re-buried. Then there's May 25th, which honors the re-re-digging up, or the third discovery of his severed head, which was afterward taken to Constantinople.

Since you've probably still got the head you had your cook chop off on the Feast of St. Magnus the King, round up a few more heads and have yourself a gruesome Easter Egg Hunt, only with decapitated heads instead of eggs. It'll be riotously good fun for the whole family.

Other saints to venerate in August include St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Sixtus II, St. Felix, St. Peter, St. Stephen, St. Tiburtius, and St. Hippolytus, as well as the Assumption of the Virgin.

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*Just a side note: I'll be relying pretty heavily on Bodleian Library MS Rawl. D 939 for the first few entries. Thus, the calendar will be very biased towards England in the 14th century, until I have time to hunt down a few more good calendars from elsewhere that are easily available on the web. If you know of any, send them my way.

A Nota Bene Pile-Up (Mmm... Marginalia)

2009-07-27T16:26:00.001-04:00

Usually, I feature images from sumptuously illustrated gothic manuscripts here at Got Medieval, mostly because I am an unrepentant medieval art snob.* This week, take a gander at the lower righthand margin of British Library MS Sloane 746, a much less ornate manuscript:

Even though the artist is working with simple pen and ink, the medieval tendency to fill every available space with weirdness is in full display. It looks to me like the scribe started by drawing a manicule, one of those helpful pointing hands that say "hey, pay attention to this," but his attention drifted until he'd produced a mish-mash of pictures that ensured that the last thing people would be paying any attention was the text.

Just a cursory inventory of things he drew to fill up the empty space on the page includes a pig playing the bagpigpes, a guy playing the flute, a jester playing with himself, a man with a dragon for a hat talking to a cow, a pygmie sitting on a miniature building (or a giant pygmie sitting on a normal-sized building), and a flower growing out of a nut.

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*IE, I like the pretty pictures.

Dante's Inferno: Comic-Con Update #2

2009-07-25T00:22:00.004-04:00

Did I mention that they're also holding a contest to promote the game/cartoon/eventual breakfast cereal based on Dante's Inferno? It's called "Sin to Win" and according to the official announcement that they tattooed across this lady's breasts

all you have to do is commit and "act of lust" with one of the Comic-Con's many sexily costumed attendees or ~~booth babes~~ official brand spokespeople, take a picture of it, and then twitter, facebook or email the picture to them. Judging by the entries submitted so far, the most popular "act of lust" at the Comic-Con is "posing in a blurry picture next to someone who seems like they may have breasts". Like so:

Thanks for keeping it classy, Dante Team.

Now, some of you reading along to that last sentence at home might suspect that I take a dim view of this sort of contest. Far from it! In fact, allow me to help out the contest hopefuls real quick.

You see, contest hopefuls, Lust is not as simple a sin as you might have imagined. It's not all about the boobage! According to the medieval Tree of Vices, Lust is in fact divided into at least nine species, or sub-sins. They are:

Affectus secti "Affection for the World"
Incontinentia or "Lack of Self-Control"
Inconsideratio or "Being Inconsiderate"
Odium Dei or "Hatred of God"
Petulatitia or "Petulance"
Amor Sui or "Love of Oneself"
Precipitatio or "Haste"
Instibilitas or "Instability"
Mentis Teritas or "Blindness of Mind"

So, yes, you could satisfy the contest's edict to do an "act of lust" by standing near boobs. That probably falls under both affection for the world and lack of self control, especially if you drool a bit. And taking out of focus pictures is technically a sort of blindness of mind, and very inconsiderate to your audience. So you're off to a good start, but that's only 4/9ths of the sin. You also need to do it quickly (precipitatio), while complaining bitterly about how you were promised a conference exclusive Soundwave figure but didn't get one (petulatitia), standing on one leg (instibilitas), and making devil horns with your free hand (odium dei and also metallum awesomorum).

Now, if you're more of a Chaucerian about your Lust, things get more complicated. Chaucer has the Parson in his Tale divide Lust into these species:

Fornicacioun -- by which he means sex between the unmarried
Birevynge a mayden of hir Maydenhede -- or having sex with a virgin, also known as "stealing her hundred fruit" (centesimus fructus)
Avowtrie -- or adultery, sex with someone who is married
Brekynge avow of chastitee -- or having sex with priests, nuns, monks, subdeacons, deacons, or hospitaliers.
Assemblee of hem that been of hire kynrede -- incest, whether between blood relatives or relatives by marriage, illegitimate relatives, one's own god-children or the god-children of those in the family
The abhomynable synne of which that no man unnethe oghte speke ne write -- the sin that's so horrible it can't be written down (c'mon, you know, that sin...)
Polucioun -- which is to say, the sin that comes in the night while you're sleeping when you go to bed with dirty thoughts and which has to be cleaned up afterward.

You can see why it'll be difficult to fit all those sins into the same picture. Here's my strategy: find a booth babe that you fancy, but make sure she's a virgin. Then, get her parents to simultaneously name you as her godfather and force her to take holy orders. Now, getting both adultery and fornication in the same picture might require there to be more than one babe present, but if you get a camera with fast enough shutter speed and a justice of the peace who can speedtalk,* you can make do with just the one babe, provided you can convince her to marry a bystander while you work your magic. Oh, and this'll all need to take place at night, and technically, you'll need to be sleepwalking. All that leaves is the sin that can't be named, which is awfully hard to capture on film, but since it can't be named, the judges likely won't have a spot on their scorecard for it, so you're probably good to go there.

I hope that helps.

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*Is the Micro-Machine Guy ordained? I seem to recall him dressing up like a captain once, and since the convention's in San Diego that'll probably be good enough.