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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dance, my piglets, dance!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Important medieval dates in May include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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