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.

—

*IE, I like the pretty pictures.

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:

1. Affectus secti “Affection for the World”
2. Incontinentia or “Lack of Self-Control”
3. Inconsideratio or “Being Inconsiderate”
4. Odium Dei or “Hatred of God”
5. Petulatitia or “Petulance”
6. Amor Sui or “Love of Oneself”
7. Precipitatio or “Haste”
8. Instibilitas or “Instability”
9. 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:

1. Fornicacioun — by which he means sex between the unmarried
2. Birevynge a mayden of hir Maydenhede — or having sex with a virgin, also known as “stealing her hundred fruit” (centesimus fructus)
3. Avowtrie — or adultery, sex with someone who is married
4. Brekynge avow of chastitee — or having sex with priests, nuns, monks, subdeacons, deacons, or hospitaliers.
5. 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
6. 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…)
7. 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.

—

*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.

2009 seems to be the year that the mainstream media types finally discovered the existence of the San Diego International Comic-Con. What’s up with that?

And in further news to ponder the upness of, more details about the upcoming Dante’s Inferno game (Dante’s Inferno, naturally) have emerged. This just in: it’s not just a video game any more! Now there’s an animated feature based on the game based on the poem!! And the cartoon version of the game version of the epic will feature things that were deemed too shocking for inclusion in the game!!! Make sure your ears are in their upright and locked position, for you are about to have your mind blown:

“In the original game script we wrote that Cerberus was going to shove Dante up his ass…it was a crazy, crazy scene. We just couldn’t do it in the game for a lot of reasons. To have that moment that was in the game script that was cut from the game to show up in the animated feature is just really cool.”

I really wish I’d been there at the staff meeting where they finally broke the news to the guy who pitched the ass. Dude, it’s really excellent what you’ve done here, and the stuff you’ve been rendering is really top notch–I mean, the lens flare effect as you come over the curve of Cerberus’s left butt cheek is amazing, and the attack pattern you gave to those lost souls that have been turned into hemmorhoids is a blast to crack, but we’re already pushing the limits of the hardware as it is,* and we’re way over budget already, not to mention the strain it’ll put on our beta testers–look, there’s no way to sugar coat this, so I’m just going to have to come out and say it: we’re going to have to lose the three-headed dog’s ass, man.

Oh, and for those wondering, the guy on the left in the picture above is dressed up like the game’s protagonist, Dante. And the guy on the right is dressed as Kratos, the guy from the game that this game is ripping off.

—

*If only man had not lost the ancient technique of BLAST PROCESSING.

If you wish to study the Middle Ages, you must learn to steel yourself against loss, for everywhere you look you will be reminded of time’s relentlessly destructive hand. Cathedrals and castles crumble, manuscripts fade and molder, armor and swords rust away. More tragic still are the things that disappeared before we ever knew to look for them. Chaucer’s Book of the Lion is nowhere to be seen, and neither is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Book of Exiles, nor Chretien de Troyes’ Tristan and Isolde–and if these famous authors can be so easily lost, what hope is there for the not-so-famous?*

This week’s installment of everyone’s favorite obscurely named semi-recurring feature,** sadly, concerns itself with one of these all too frequent moments of loss. We can find the familiar tragedy unfolding in the margins of Morgan Library MS 358, a fifteenth-century French book of Hours. Its opening movement concerns a theme now well-known by Got Medieval readers: snail warfare. But this time, the combatant is no knight, but rather a naked lady emerging from a flower:

Sorry for the squint-inducing picture. For reasons I don’t understand, the Morgan Library has no good closeup of the snail online, but they do provide one of the nude combatant:

A few leaves later in the manuscript, the story continues. The snail, it seems, has fled his enemy, fled to the one place where he feels safe–between the legs of this naked guy:

Why do naked men love snails and naked women fear them? The manuscript was clearly poised to answer this question, once upon a time, but for some reason–possibly the death of the artist, possibly the death of his patron–the story is left frustratingly unfinished. A few pages later, we find the pencil sketch for the next chapter in this epic tale of erotic snail love:

I apologize once more for the squinty images, but your eyestrain here must be blamed on the manuscript and not the Morgan. Since the pictures were never completed, all we have is the much harder to make out underdrawing. Squint hard and ask yourself: Is that the woman from before, now riding a snail of her own? Has she, under the tutelage of the man from a few pages earlier, learned to embrace the special bond between naked man and snail? It’s hard to say. But the story was meant to continue, for just a little while later, we find the naked man and his snail have returned:

Where dost they ride? Why, to a woman emerging from a flower! Voila:

Has he found the magical land where the snail-hating women are born? Does he ride his snail on to vengeance against those who might brandish swords at his molusckin brother? Or did he discover his snail cheated on him with the lady earlier? The world, sadly–oh, the humanity!–will never know.

—

*What do you mean, Chaucer and Geoffrey were probably lying? Next thing, you’ll tell me that there was no certain very ancient book–or no Easter Wolfman!
**It’s a fact! Though the three M’s in “Mmm… Marginalia” are conventionally held to be an acronym for “Medieval Marginalia Monday,” in actuality the third M stands for “Maybe this Monday, maybe next Monday–who knows? I’m fickle that way.”

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:

—

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

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).

• 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.

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.