As I mentioned before, my recent spate of posts has finally knocked Angelina Jolie from her perch as the top Google search term that brings people here. What has replaced her? “Medieval Porn,” followed closely by “medieval sex.” A distant third is, bizarrely, the word “göt”–with “medieval cheese” and “medieval jokes” rounding out the top five.
So I give up.* This is the best I’ve göt:
Scandalous, I know. It’s an illumination of Lancelot and Guenevere getting ready to you know what from The British Library’s MS Add. 10293, f.312v,** a fourteenth-century manuscript of Le Livre de Lancelot del Lac, the short cyclic version of the romance. It reveals something that I’ve long suspected about the pair. They would have gotten away with it, if not for*** the fact that Joyeuse Guard, his castle, was built out of one gigantic window. Seriously, imagine the heating bills.
As an extra treat, here’s a closeup of the adulterous pair. Without the hat, I’d be hard pressed to say which was which. They both have little cupid’s bow lips and rosy red cheeks. And from this vantage, it looks like Lancelot’s got bigger breasts.
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*Avenue Q is right as always: “The Internet is for Porn.”
**You can see this and other images from the British Library’s collection of manuscripts by going to this site. Canny readers will notice that I have pirated this picture and removed the BL’s annoying watermark through clever cropping. I do not respect copyrights on images that are over seven hundred years old, give or take a decade.
***Also, those Meddling Kids, Aggravain and Mordred, and a pup named Scooby Doo.