From the same manuscript as last week’s azz-tappers,* allow me to present another famous first, the first monkey superhero:

What’s this? Another monkey, so soon after the last? And no substantive posts between marginalia? I’m in danger of falling into a rut. A monkey shaped rut. If only I hadn’t talked about Matthew Paris, I could pretend I was doing a theme month. Ah, lost opportunities.

In the main illumination in the lower left corner, we have a medieval commonplace, King David pointing at his eye to illustrate the Psalm 26:1, “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” That’s God there, poking his head in through the clouds, and David indicating that he could not see without God’s light. This probably looked a bit less silly to the medievals, who were intimately acquainted with their psalms and who took the promise of God’s light a bit more literally than we might expect. You cannot see without light, so David is thanking God for allowing him to see.

Up above, a man in red appears to be trying to eat his way into the picture from the margin, but is soon to be thwarted by our intrepid monkey’s axe. He certainly cuts a dramatic figure there, his cape flying behind him in the breeze, doesn’t he? No theological content here, unless we are meant to think that God’s salvation might take the form of a be-caped monkey.

Someone should get DC and Marvel on the phone. They’ve been trying to trademark the word “super-hero” for some time. This qualifies as prior art, doesn’t it? Actually, on second thought, don’t. I’m putting the monkey up on my Cafe Press store, and I don’t want them sending any cease and desists my way.**

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*There are enough strange monkeys just in this one manuscript, that it should be called “The Monkey Psalter.”
**If you’ve not checked the store lately, you may be surprised to see I’ve added a few other monkey magnets.

For fans of really long recaps of movies (sort of MST3K in text), The Agony Booth has just posted its review/recap of the 1998 film animated film Quest for Camelot, a movie I’d never heard of until about ten minutes before I wrote the sentence you’re reading now.

The more I read about it, the more I want to see it. A movie where Steve Perry from Journey is Arthur’s singing voice? And it’s got characters voiced by Urkel, Eric Idle, Don Rickles, and Bronson Pinchot? And it features a gratuitous Riverdance sequence?*** I’m so there.

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*I’m not sure if this is the first time I’ve footnoted a post title before, but now that that song is stuck in my head on constant repeat, I am suddenly aware of how weird it is that there is such a pronounced pause in the cadence of the line. He sings “Don’t stop!” Then he stops before getting to the “Beleivin’!”**
**Also: Who are the streetlight people?
***Scientists believe it’s theoretically possible for a non-gratuitous Riverdance sequence to exist, but one has never been sighted. It’s like the Higgs boson of weird 90’s pop culture ephemera.

At this point, we’ve all gotten the email at least once. No, I don’t mean the one from the Nigerian male enhancement lottery asking us to validate our eBay account information, but, you know, the one titled something like “Famous Sayings Explained” or “You’re Quoting Shakespeare (even if you don’t know it).”* As a service to my readers, I’d like to share my own remarkable discovery that I have recently made regarding an increasingly common phrase and its unlikely medieval origins.

Did you know that tomato sales are still down in the wake of that whole salmonella thing?

Now is as good a time as any to come out of the closet as an Arthurian and plug my next great Internet venture: Quondam et Futurus: An Arthurian Wiki.*

Here’s my thinking. There’s a wiki on the Muppets that lists every appearance of the Amazing Mumford. There’s a wiki on Naruto that includes every plot arc, even the critically panned Sasuke Retrieval.**** And yet, King Arthur, the once and future king, hasn’t got squat. Not diddly. Not even diddly-squat. If I want to find out why Arthur’s battlecry is “Clarence!” I have to dig around the archives of the Arthurnet mailing list, but if I want to find out where Chewbacca died, it’s a wiki-link away. This imbalance must be redressed. And since they won’t let me nuke the Star Wars Expanded Universe from orbit, the best I can do is get a real Arthurian wiki rolling.

I secured the space at Wikia some time ago, but dissertating, moving, et al. have kept me from doing much of anything to it yet. My goal for the site is to create an encyclopedia of Arthurian knowledge accessible enough for the lay, non-academic audience (fanboyspeople included) and detailed enough to be useful for academics, too, a place where you can read about Malory’s changes to the story of Pelleas and Ettard, as well as about that episode of the Transformers where they pull a Conneticut Yankee.

So, if you know anything about the Arthurian legends, please drop by the King Arthur Wiki. Trade me a few footnotes worth of your cognitive surplus. And if you want to become an official administrator, contact me offblog.

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*After the medieval monkey Cafe Press merch shop, soon to feature multiple designs of monkey magnets and much, much more, thanks to the heroic purchasing prowess of medievalists like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.** This is my way of saying that I made enough on the first magnet to justify opening a for real store that can handle more than one magnet, one tee-shirt, or one pair of boxer shorts featuring the souls of lechers damned to eternal torment.
**I was on hiatus for the entire “The Medieval Muddle Kurfluffle 2008,” but let me say, for the record, that any scholar who buys stuff from me is my kind of scholar. I don’t think Mr. Muddle ever bought anything, the skinflint. But maybe he did–anonymity and all.***
***Speaking of things that I was on hiatus for, I apparently got some web awards from a couple of blogs. I think by now that meme is dead, but thanks for the praise.
****Calm down, Narutonians. I have no clue what a Sasuke Retrieval is, nor if it was ever critically panned, nor indeed whether there are even critics of Naruto’s ouevre. To any confused Naruto-googlers who find their way here, I apologize. I will not, however, be doing any Google Penancing about whether they had Sexy Jutsu in the Middle Ages.

This week’s marginal curiosity comes to us courtesy of Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century Benedictine monk, historian, and illuminator of no small talent. The following is from the Chronica Majora:

It depicts an elephant owned by Emperor Frederick II, a gift of the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Kamil, in 1229. Emperor Fred used the fearsome beastie as a show piece during parades, and it is often called “the Cremona elephant” because its existence is attested both in Paris’s account of the visit of Fred’s brother-in-law Richard of Cornwall to Cremona and in Cremona’s local city annals. It’s unlikely that Fred’s elephant could seat thirteen, as he’s depicted here, however. Imagine how much you could save on gas if twelve of your coworkers made your daily commute atop this sturdy mount.

Aside from its remarkable fuel efficiency, the most interesting thing for me about Matthew Paris’s Cremona elephant is that Paris knew full well that this was not what elephants looked like and chose to draw it that way anyway. Paris had earlier in his life been afforded the rare opportunity (for an artist in medieval England, anyway) of drawing an elephant from life at the court of Henry III of England, when the latter received the elephant as a gift from Loius IX of France.* Henry’s elephant, poor thing, survived four years of drafty accomodations at the Tower of London, reportedly fed a diet of red meat and red wine.

Paris’s sketch of the actual elephant looks like this:

Note the distinct lack of thirteen guys riding its back, and the realistic shape of its ears and trunk. So, why did Paris, when sketching Frederick’s elephant, depict it so apart from reality? The answer, I think, is the one-two punch of representational tradition and audience expectation. In the margins of the Chronica Majora, the elephant’s job is, as it was in Frederick’s parades, to demonstrate the majesty and grandeur of the monarch able to command such a behemoth. If there was one thing that medieval men and women who had never actually seen an elephant knew about elephants, it was that they were big enough to fit a castle on their backs, like so:

A realistic elephant, one that defied the established visual vocabulary, would hardly demonstrate Emperor Frederick’s imperial might for the readers of the Chronica Majora as well as an exotic, mobile battle fortress, so the castle elephant is the one that makes the cut for the margins.

BONUS: Because it wouldn’t be properly medieval if I didn’t mention signification, let me add that according to medieval bestiaries, elephants represent Adam and Eve, for just like Adam and Eve before the fall, they feel no sexual desire. When elephants want to mate, they go to the east, near Eden, and eat the mandrake plant in order to inspire lust, just as Adam and Eve were inspired to hanky and panky by the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle (against Satan for your immortal soul)!

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*What do you get the king who has everything? Nothing. But if you know a king who has everything but an elephant…

According to medieval calendars, September is the time for harvesting your grapes and stomping them into wine. Don’t be like the slacker on the left: no sampling the grapes as you stomp, please.

Got Medieval is officially back from its month long hiatus, but this week’s Medieval Marginalia Monday won’t come until Tuesday, on account of Labor Day. Yay, Labor Day! Celebrate working by not working! I’m not sure if you need to stomp grapes on Monday or not–maybe a few just to be safe.

Notable medieval events that went down in September include:

• September 3rd, 1189: Richard the Lionheart crowned at Westminster, two months after the death of Henry II.
• September 3th, 1260: The Ghibellines defeated the Ghelphs at the Battle of Montaperti, AKA The Hill of Death.
• September 7th, 1191: Richard the Lionheart (hey, that name sounds familiar…), defeats Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, AKA Saladin at Arsuf. Don’t feel too bad for Saladin. He lost the battle but won the war, and eventually Dante lets him hang with the virtuous pagans in Limbo.
• September 8th, 1264: The Statute of Kalisz issued by Boleslaw the Pious grants the Jews legal rights and protections in Poland.
• September 11th, 1297: The Battle of Stirling Bridge, depicted with 100% less bridge in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.
• September 16th, 1400: Owain Glendower crowned Prince of Wales, back when the title meant something.
• September 20, 1187: Saladin begins the Siege of Jerusalem. See, I told you things worked out for him in the long run.
• September 23, 1122: Calixtus II and Henry V agree to the Concordat of Worms.
• September 25th, 1066: Harold II of England ensures that 1066 is remembered for the Norman, not the Norwegian Conquest at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
• September 28th, 1066: William the Conqueror gets the conquering started properly.

According to medieval calendars, August is the time for harvesting, threshing and reaping your corn, so you’d best get on that. Got Medieval is going to be going on hiatus for the month of August, so that your humble bloggist can move (again), go to three weddings, and work up a western civ course for the fall. Oh yeah, and there’s that dissertation thing, too.

Notable medieval events that happened in August include:

• August 1st, 1492: The Jews are expelled from Spain.
• August 10th, 991: The Battle of Maldon, where Byrtnoth fell, his ofermod spawning a thousand subsequent scholarly skirmishes.
• August 12th, 1099: The Battle of Ascalon, the final major battle of the First Crusade.
• August 15th, 778: The Battle of Roncesvalles, where the shot heard round the world is made by Roland’s brains exiting his ears.
• August 15th, 1040: King Duncan I of Scotland killed by a fellow you may have heard of, goes by the name of Macbeth.
• August 22nd, 1485: The Battle of Bosworth Field, more fodder for that Shakeshaft guy.
• August 23rd, 1305: William Wallace, AKA Braveheart, is executed. Mel Gibson rejoices.
• August 24th, 410: The Visigoths sack Rome and everyone has to change their desk calendars over from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

See all of y’all when I’m back from my bloggervation, right after Labor Day.

Is everyone tired of all the monkeys I pull out of the margins and post on my blog? And is it fair to stereotype the Middle Ages with all this binge drinking? Well… how about both at the same time?

Pretty much speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

You may have noticed that a link has appeared recently in the upper right hand corner of the blog. If you click on through to Got Medieval’s Ye Olde Cafe Presse Shoppe, you can buy a magnet featuring these very drunken monkeys, for a limited time only.* I got mine in the mail Saturday, and I’m pretty pleased with it.

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*It costs money to have a Cafe Press shop with more than item of any given type available, so I plan to offer just one marginalia magnet at a time, rotating them periodically–at least, until I’ve bought all the ones I’d like to have, or the DMCA police come and try to enforce the intellectual property rights of thirteenth-century illuminators, whichever comes first. Or, I suppose, if I sell enough to justify paying the monthly shop fee, I’ll do that.