For the sixth day of Christmas,* Got Medieval gives to you six lions laying lying around (in the bottom margin):

The two-page spread above is from Bodleian Library MS Douce 185,*** a peculiar little fourteenth-century Cistercian Sermologium made in the border region between Germany and Switzerland. As you can see, the illuminator here has used borders along the top margin and columns to evoke the outline of a cathedral, turning the whole page into one compound decoration. At the bottom of the compound, holding everything up, are six little lions.  (They are a little hard to see at this resolution, so either click the above image to zoom, or keep on reading.)

Starting in the lower left corner, we have this bemused-looking lion whose tail provides a perch for a marginal violinist:

To his right, we find a lazy lion, curled up like a housecat, and to his right, another musician-supporting lion, this one with a flutist in tow.   

Because he’s in the crease between the two pages, it’s hard to make out without an extreme closeup, but this third lion is much less tolerant of his human parasite, his expression something along the lines of, “Good God, man, you do realize that that is my tail, don’t you?”  By contrast, the fourth lion on the page is completely obvlivious to his musical companion and instead seems to be contemplating taking a bite of the acanthus leaf decoration attached to the column on his back.  The lion to his right is hungry, too, but seems to be considering the words, instead.  

Or, possibly, he’s thirsty and preparing to “drink” the word ‘liquide‘ immediately above him and to the left. His tongue is hanging out, after all.

That leaves us with one final lion on the far right who has a dancing maiden on his tail:

I might be reading too much into his expression, but he seems to me a bit happier about his tail-borne companion than the lions with musicians, sort of a “Hey there, baby, check out the column on my back. Impressive, eh? Say, what are you doing once that monk out there flips the page? I know this charming little restaurant. The head waiter is a bishop with a rooster’s head where his private parts should be, but he’s totally cool. Let’s say I pick you up around eight?”

Incidentally, if you were wondering, the main historiated initial on the left hand page is of the Annunciation. That’s Mary on the right and the archangel Gabriel there on the left. The scroll he’s holding is the medieval-equivalent of a comic-strip dialogue balloon. It reads, “Ave gratia plena dominus tecum benedicta tu,” or “Hail (Mary), full of grace, God is with you, you are blessed.”

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*Oh, and by the way, you’re not allowed to read this post until December 31st, the sixth day of Christmas.**
**This is why you’ve got to check the footnotes, people.
***Why so many Douce manuscripts in Mmm… Marginalia? Mr. Douce was an avid collector of medieval illuminated manuscripts, possibly the most active and successful ever.  You could spend a career just studying manuscripts he bought.

Looks like Andrew Sullivan is getting medieval… in a good way. He recently posted an image from the Bodleian Library’s MS Ashmole 1431, apparently a late 11th/early 12th century manual of herbal medicinal use that includes canapus silvaticus, aka “dry hempe,” aka “The Assassin of Youth.” That’s right, I’m tallking about muggles, Indiana ditchweed, snop, vipe, Alice B. Toklas,* the infamous giggle smoke.

UPDATE 6-21-11: If you just arrived here from Cracked.com’s 8 Filthy Jokes Hidden in Ancient Works of Art, you might be interested in a bit of context on the article.

This week, I thought I’d write a bit about a more famous bit of marginalia than I usually tackle.  This guy:

A lot of scholarly ink has been spilled trying to explain what this naked guy is doing standing so brazenly in the lower margin of the famous Bayeux Tapestry, right underneath a woman and a clerk who are labeled “ubi unus clericus et Ælfgyva,” or (loosely translated) “Look here! It’s a clerk and Ælfgyva”:

Clearly, there’s something interesting going on here.  Ælfgyva is the only named woman in the entire Tapestry,* and there’s a naked guy standing right under her with his little naked guy standing out for all to see. But just what is going on is a question that has divided scholars for a long time.

It would help if we could figure out who Ælfgyva is supposed to be.  Her name means “Elf-Gift,” which is a pretty name used for lots of Anglo-Saxon women, including those who are also called something else.  I think it must have been the medieval equivalent of how hip dudes in the 1950s  used to call all attractive women “Kitten.”**  Some scholars with better eyesight than I can see a hint of a pink veil over her face, so many, many brides and bethrotheds of various Anglo-Saxon and Norman nobles have been suggested over the years.  None of these bridal candidates, however, quite explains the naked man under her.  So other scholars, looking for a lady a touch more naughty, have suggested various mistresses of other Anglo-Saxon and Norman nobles.

The problem with the mistress angle is that none of them have anything to do with the story being told on either side of the mysterious robed woman.  Immediately before Ælfgyva and her clerk we have William and Harold meeting at court after William secures Harold’s release from Guy of Ponthieu, a Norman noble who captured Harold after his ship was run aground in his territory.   On the other end, immediately after the mysterious lady, the Tapestry turns to William and Harold riding out together to scourge Conan (not the barbarian, sadly) and the rebels in Brittany, a Norman province.

It’s fairly clear to me that we are meant to take Ælfgyva as a part of the same narrative chunk as the meeting.  The scene is flanked on either side by castles, which, in the Tapestry-maker’s visual lingo, means that it’s all one piece.

So that brings us right back to where we started, our conspicuously naked marginal man.  Or, should I say “men”?  If we zoom out a little more in the picture, we can see that there’s another naked guy immediately before Ælfgyva’s, this one holding an adz (the image should expand if you click it–it’s kind of thin, I know):

And now let’s zoom in on our naked adz-wielding man:

In addition to being an excellent Scrabble word, an adz (or adze) is a tool for smoothing down wood.  According to Wikipedia, the user of an adz usually stands astride the wood being smoothed and pulls the adz towards him, exactly the sort of motion one would not want to make while naked, if you ask me.  The potential for self-Bobbiting is, I think, clear, and also suggests to me the beginnings of an interpretation of the two naked men in question that, to my knowlege, nobody else has suggested.***

I believe we are meant to see the man using medieval power-tools in close proximity to his junk as handy shorthand for Harold’s state of mind in the scene above.  At this point in the Tapestry’s story, Harold has pretty much jumped out of the proverbial frying pan and into the less proverbial sharp blade near one’s danglies.  Guy of Pothieu, the man who first captured Harold, was just a minor noble who had the good fortune to own the territory that Harold’s ship got shipwrecked upon.  When Willaim subsequently comes along and buys his freedom, Harold is suddenly beholden to a much more powerful man.  Negotiating his way out of that mess is going to be tricky.  Perhaps as tricky as woodworking while your willy is hanging out.

The second naked marginal man, on the other hand, has his legs parted and his willy on display, as if to say, “Hey, look at me! I managed to use that adz without becoming a castrado, thank you very much!”****  And what do you know, in the next scene, Harold has managed to talk his way out of his predicament.  He now rides out with William as an ally to fight Conan.

Explaining why Ælfgyva is relevant to this bit of fast-talking on Harold’s part is a little harder.  Maybe the veil-spotters are right, and Harold just betrothed one of his sisters to William (or betrothed himself to one of William’s sisters) in exchange for his freedom.

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*I suppose an optimist might say that clearly women are more important than men to the Tapestry’s architect, since a full 50% of them are named, as compared with the much smaller percentage of named men.  The only other woman depicted in the Tapestry is a mother leading her child away from the thatched-roof cottage that the looting Norman knights have just burninated.
**Or so Hollywood has led me to believe.
***That’s right, kids, this post is veering into “Actual Scholarship™” territory.  I apologize to the readers who come here exclusively for monkeys with trumpets on their butts. Hey, at least he’s naked, right?
****”Also, I have this smooth board, if anyone’s interested. And what do you mean you don’t want it if touched my Tom Johnson? Don’t be so square, daddio.”*****
*****Also, the naked guy is from the ’50s.  Weird, I know.

Remember those happy acorn-feasting swine from November?  I’m sad to say that their time is up.  According to medieval calendars, December is the time to slaughter your swine and to make your sausage with their innards.

Looking at the calendar today, I realized I’ve got a little under a month to finalize the readings for an interdisciplinary honors seminar I’m teaching next term.  Begin panic mode… now.

In the months since I opened my CafePress store, I have literally made tens of dollars providing the world with monkey-related paraphernalia, most of which I immediately invested back into CafePress by purchasing my own stuff.*  

I found this over at the Huffington Post in an editorial called “Why America Feels Like It’s Been Ruled by a Foreign Occupier“:

America fought a revolution to have its opinions represented by it’s government. That has faded in Bush’s term. America set up the UN after World War II to set up international law and put an end to military aggression and imperialism. That went out the window. Habeas Corpus was inherited from England where it originated in the 12th Century. Bush in that sense has embraced the morals of the middle ages.

So let me get this straight. By throwing out something that originated in the 12th century, Bush embraced the morals of the Middle Ages? Shouldn’t that be “repudiated the morals of the Middle Ages?” Or was habeas corpus some sort of progressive anachronistic moral development that it took four-hundred years or so for society to catch up to?

And since Lincoln suspended habeas during the Civil War, shouldn’t that be the go-to historical epoch for habeas-corpus-based unflattering historical comparisons? I’m just saying.

The week of the election, I posted an image of two knights and their respective ladies.  Astute readers pointed out that the ladies were not ladies at all, but half-human hybrids, clearly some sort of draconic centaurs.  In general, I’m hesitant to ascribe any special meaning to these half-breeds.   The first time you see a bishop with a dog’s body or trumpets growing out of his ears, for example, you’re convinced you’ve found something shockingly sacriligeous, a clear indict of the corruption of the church.  But after you’ve seen that bishop’s head attached to roosters, donkeys, camels, dragons, gryphons, and, yes, even monkeys, you are forced to admit that sticking bishop’s heads on things was probably about as edgy as putting one of those pissing Calvin stickers in the back window of your pickup truck.

These days, it takes a really spectacularly weird hybrid for me to sit up and take notice.  Like this one, for instance, found in a thirteenth-century Beglain psalter (Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 155):

Ok, at first glance it’s just your average dragon with a gloved hand holding a chalice for a head. It’s only when we zoom out that the thing gets really weird:*

Look past the giant ornamental tail graft this beast has been given (again, ho hum stuff) and up at the normal dragon in the upper margin.  It’s almost like the illuminator is giving us a before and after shot, or a little tutorial on how grotesques are made.  Take a normal household dragon, he seems to say.  Any old dragon will do.  (In a pinch, you can use one of the dragons you’re using as line-filler in the main text.)  Now, chop off the dragon’s head and replace it with whatever you have lying around.  Do the same with his tail.  Voila: instant puzzle for people to ponder some seven hundred years from now.**

[UPDATE] Another astute reader (one named after a pasta product apparently) asked if this image had anything to do with the main text. In general, my answer to all such questions is “probably not.” There are scholars (Michael Camille, Lillian Randall, R. Howard Bloch) who have devoted lots of time to explaining how marginalia is deeply meaningful commentary to the text, but my own view is that the marginal images usually comment more on other images than on the text. This is not to say that there is never any editorial or critical comment going on–in fact, when they do comment, the illuminators are incisive and hilarious–just that these cases are the exception, not the rule.

But the psalm on the page here is Psalm 128, which goes like this:

I will praise you, O LORD, with all my heart; before the “gods” I will sing your praise. I will bow down toward your holy temple and will praise your name for your love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word. When I called, you answered me; you made me bold and stouthearted. May all the kings of the earth praise you, O LORD, when they hear the words of your mouth. May they sing of the ways of the LORD, for the glory of the LORD is great. Though the LORD is on high, he looks upon the lowly, but the proud he knows from afar. Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the anger of my foes, with your right hand you save me. The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O LORD, endures forever—-do not abandon the works of your hands.

As you can see, there’s a lot here about both hands and being made. So, at the least, this illuminator probably caught the word hand in the main text and decided to build a grotesque around a hand, or add one to a grotesque he’d already started.***  And perhaps this may even confirm my initial reading of the two images. This illuminator sees a passage praising God’s creation of man and decided to put on a clinic demonstrating his own creative process.

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*My apologies for the resolution of the second image. The Pierpont Morgan Library is a bit stingy with image size.
**Or, possibly, this is evidence of the shoddiness of medieval matter transporter technology. You never know what’s going to step off the pad when medieval Scotty beams you up.

There’s a news story making the rounds about the disovery of a fourth-century* “direct ancestor” of Monty Python’s most famous sketch–you know, the one that features the line “THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!”

Apparently, the joke, which is found in a Greek book of 256 jokes called the Philolegus (loosely, The Joke-Lover), goes something like this:

Slave Owner: The slave you sold me yesterday died.

Former Slave Owner: By the gods! When he was with me, he never did any such thing.

I say “apparently,” because none of the news outlets carrying the story give this purported  ancestor joke in full–likely because they’re all cribbing from the same press release for a new “multimedia version” of the Philolegus which doesn’t give the whole thing, either.**   I suspect that the joke is being selectively quoted in order to make the similarity more pronounced, especially given how poorly the release represents the Dead Parrot sketch itself, describing it like so:

In Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch, written 16 centuries later, a pet-shop salesman makes similar excuses when a customer complains that the parrot he has just bought from the shop has died. The seller adds that the parrot, a Norwegian blue, is “pining for the fjords”.

There are a lot of versions of the Parrot Sketch floating around–a medievalist might be tempted to say that it is extant in many recensions–but none of them feature a shopkeeper making an excuse similar to “he never did that when I had him,” because the basic premise that drives the sketch is not the parrot’s death, but that the shopkeeper refuses to admit he’s dead.  Indeed, the fact that the parrot is dead is pretty much irrelevant to the Pythons’ joke.  The humor comes from Palin’s slimy delivery of increasingly absurd excuses in the face of Cleese’s increasingly irate tirades.  You can replace the parrot with anything, and the joke stays the same.

In fact, the Pythons did just that, about twenty-five episodes later, in the Cheese Shop sketch.  Palin plays a slightly more good natured version of the shopkeeper, and Cleese goes for a quieter rage as the customer, but it’s pretty much the same sketch with the dead parrot replaced with an absence of cheese.

As it turns out, the Pythons have been interviewed many times about the Parrot Sketch’s origins. See this You Tube video for one such interview.  (The discussion starts at around 4:00.)  Here, they freely admit that the Dead Parrot Sketch was a revamped version of a sketch Palin had done for an earlier show, How to Irritate People,  which featured a car salesman instead of a pet shop owner.

If you want to trace the descent of the Dead Parrot back a bit further, Cleese and fellow Python Graham Chapman had worked on the earlier BBC sketch comedy special At Last the 1948 Show, which featured a Bookshop Sketch that is essentially the Dead Parrot Sketch in reverse.  There, Cleese plays a shopkeeper who tries to accommodate the increasingly absurd requests of a customer (Grate Expectations by Edmund Wells, Rarnaby Budge by Charles Dikkens  with two Ks, the well-known Dutch author, etc.), eventually building into full on “wakey-wakey this is your nine o’clock alarm call” mode by the sketch’s end.

Of course, I’m now fairly deep into a blog post and have only managed to trace the joke back about two and a half years,**** well short of the sixteen centuries the guys with the press release are claiming in order to hawk their brand new digital multimedia online downloadable web 2.0 super-absorbant individually-packaged editions of the ancient joke book, which is why, I guess, I am not in marketing.  However, to end on a medieval note, let me say that if you do happen to be in the market for a several-century-old analogue of the Dead Parrot sketch, I think the ending of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is close enough, and certainly much closer to the spirit of Python than the dead-slave joke.

In The Book of the Duchess, “Chaucer” has a dream vision in which he meets a Black Knight grieving over the death of his lady. Always the dolt, the “Chaucer”-dreamer proceeds to completely misunderstand what the knight is sad about. At first he thinks it must be a hart that the knight has lost in the woods. When he realizes it’s a lady, he assumes the knight must mean he lost her romantically–i.e., she broke up with him. This goes on for some time, until finally the knight loses it and says exasperatedly, “She’s dead!” After the climactic outburst, everything wraps up in a few short lines, just like in the Dead Parrot sketch.*****  Of course, the Knight’s speeches are far too long for back and forth rhythm of Cleese and Palin, but Palin’s oblivious confidence is a pretty good fit for the Chaucer dreamer.

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*Though the fourth century is a bit out of bounds for this blog, the Python angle puts it squarely under my purview.  1/5 of the on-air Pythons were, after all medievalists.  And didn’t one of them teach Latin…?  And yeah, I know this story’s a week old.
**The edition seems to combine a new translation with videos of the jokes being performed by a former British game show host (a steal at only £5.95!).
***The Cheese Shop sketch also reuses the joke of having Palin announce he’s going to “have a look around in back” while standing still.
****And Now the 1948 Show came out in 1967, its name a joke on how long the BBC kept shows in the can back then.
*****At least, like the version of the Parrot sketch that ends with the shopkeeper and the customer going back to his place. Like I said, multiple recensions.