Want to make sure you get mainstream press attention as a medievalist? I don’t, of course, being dedicated only to my own very important and ground breaking research, the betterment of my students, and scrupulous attendance at all faculty functions, but perhaps you do. Here’s how you do it: take a modern buzz word and say that something in the Middle Ages closely resembles it.

Did you know that medieval monarchs were sub-prime borrowers? They were, if by sub-prime you don’t mean that because of their official credit score they did not qualify for the best lending rates from banks, but instead just mean that medieval kings borrowed a lot, especially the unreliable English ones.

Did you know that medieval women had girl power? They did, if by girl you mean divorced women in their 30’s and by power you mean the ability to commission books and go on tours instead of… well, whatever it was the Spice Girls were shouting about. It was mainly the ability to shout ‘girl power!’ while karate-kicking and wearing a sparkly shirt, if I remember correctly.*

And finally, did you know that gay marriage goes back to the Middle Ages? It does, if by gay marriage you mean some sort of economic arrangement between men that allowed them to share the same household and by goes back to the Middle Ages you mean appears in a limited context in a region of late medieval France.**

Of course, this sort of behavior only earns my scorn. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go demonstrate my teaching effectiveness.

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*But I don’t remember correctly, because I spent the 90’s learning Latin and Old English, the latter of which I would be comfortable teaching to undergraduates and would you like to see my sample syllabus?
**Don’t get me wrong. The Middle Ages was not as obsessed with homosexuality as we are today. Some might even say more tolerant. But at the end of the day, I’m sure that your average Joe Cask-of-Mead would still say that men being with men was an abomination. But they wrote a lot more about the problem of nuns traveling to monasteries to play music and have sex than they did about men having sex with other men.

I just sent off my first packet of the job hunting season. Oh the deadlines, they loom. Now I turn back to my blog and wonder, just what will the head of a search committee think of Breastowulf or my site’s unofficial mascot Jaunty? Desperate measures are called for. That means anyone hungry for a Got Medieval update is in for an unsatisfyingly rushed meal of atypical entrees. It’ll take more posts than I write in a year to get Angelina Jolie and her hwaets off the front page of this blog, and in each, I must–I must!–resist the temptation to reference such prurient fare. No more Knight Rider digressions until I’m gainfully employed, people. Thems the breaks.

Luckily, as a medievalist, I know how to cover up for past sins. It’s retraction time! With apologies to that Dude What Hath a Blog:

Here the writer of this blog takes his leave:

I beseech you meekly, oh search committees of the world, that you look kindly on me and have mercy on me and forgive me all my academic sins, in particular, the excessive and egregious pop culture references and my dirty medieval stories, all of which I revoke in this retraction:
My review of Kingdom of Heaven, the fabulous prizes I got for the same, the book I reviewed without reading, that day month several years when I was obsessed with Dan Brown, Jaunty, my review of the 2004 King Arthur movie, and all those other articles I wrote that are likely to cause people to think that medievalists occasionally have fun or are real people. We aren’t real people. We sit all day in the library in sober contemplation, dedicated to the life of the mind, except when we’re teaching our students valuable lessons that will cause them to one day donate lots of money to their old departments when they are famous. Also, medievalists love being good departmental members and attending every faculty meeting not just the ones where there’s going to be refreshments. And I don’t just not have a TV, I’ve never even heard of a TV. Excuse me, I mean tee-vee. No, I mean a ‘tehvvv’. Or I would, if I knew what one is, which I don’t. I’m not even sure it’s not called a VT, that’s how committed to my research I am.

There. That ought to do.

They’ve posted a new Rated-R trailer for the new Beowulf movie. Find it here. How you can have a Rated-R trailer for a Rated-PG-13 movie, I don’t quite understand, but I guess it makes no less sense than having Angelina’s digitally scanned breasts in a Beowulf movie to begin with. Don’t worry, they’re covered with digitally produced mud, so it’s like hardly nudity at all. Indeed, given the amount of time the animator must have spent trying different mud textures, adjusting its reflectiveness and bloom, mapping the physics, etc. it’s almost art. And so that you don’t give yourself a headache trying to hit the freeze frame at exactly the right shot to see the art, here you go:

In celebration of these two new additions to the Beowulf corpus, enjoy this quote, taken from a preview/puff piece on the Beowulf video game that will be simultaneously released with the movie this fall.

Some may consider Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy classic literature, but you have to go quite a ways further back to get to what would be considered lore. In the same mystical, medieval ilk as LotR, but coming from a much more classical period of literature was Beowulf. Emerging from the middle ages and at over 3,000 lines long, Beowulf is the crown jewel of heroic English poetry. So heroic and famous, in fact, that Paramount is teaming up with Rob Zemeckis for a film featuring the hero with the strength of many men.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to the first Yale professor to compliment me on my blog at a party.* Anglo-Saxonist, Old Norser**, and always snappy dresser Roberta Frank was quoted in a news story about, of all things, a squirrel scampering up and down the foul pole at a Yankees game. Why would the New York Times be quoting an Anglo-Saxonist in a sports story?*** Here’s why:

Believe it or not, the squirrel’s actions closely resembled those of Ratatosk, or “gnawing tooth,” a squirrel in Norse mythology that climbed up and down a tree that represented the world. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic scholar and poet, recorded the story in his 13th-century work “Prose Edda.”

As the story goes, Ratatosk carried insults as it traveled to opposite ends of the tree, fueling a rivalry between the evil dragon residing at the bottom of the tree and the eagle perched at the top.

This proves the old adage, the Norse always win at Oh, You Think Your Mythology is Weird, Do You, Sonny? They’re the ones who made the Holy Grail into a sort of robot butler, after all.****

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*It was awkward, because I like to pretend that no one reads this. It saves me from feeling too embarrassed after my fourth gratuitous Mr. T reference in a post about Thomas Aquinas, or all those posts about medieval genitalia.
**Or is it Norsist? Norsian?
***The larger, non-mythological reason is, of course, that the New York Times acts like a tiny regional gazette when it comes to the anything Yankees.
****I am only slightly making that up.

It’s been a pretty dry spell for medieval media faux pas. But consider this paragraph from a recent Slate article on the use of the exclamation point in email:*

In truth, the exclamation point is an antidote not to the intrinsic dullness of the [email] medium (as Shipley and Schwalbe suggest) but to the vapid back-and-forths the medium facilitates. For centuries, the act of writing mandated a tremendous exertion of labor, so that scribes committed to the page only texts of supreme import. (Imagine a team of tonsured monks toiling for decades on an illuminated manuscript that read, “WTF … c u l8r?”)

Whatever you think of the author’s point here, the medieval metaphor is crap. It’s like saying…

For decades, the act of making cars mandated a tremendous exertion of labor, so that auto-workers created automobiles for only the most supremely important uses. (Imagine a team of auto-workers toiling for years building a special order custom-built DeLorean with a working replica Flux Capacitor to be used for a suburban mom to pick up lotto tickets.)***

or

For centuries, the act of growing food mandated a tremendous exertion of labor, so that farmers only planted crops for supremely important meals. (Imagine a team of farmers toiling for decades to cultivate a special line of ‘heirloom grapes’ to be used as the 10% juice in a juice box for a spoiled brat.)

or if you prefer the medieval

For centuries, the act of building mandated a tremendous exertion of labor, so that builders only built buildings for supremely important uses. (Imagine a construction crew toiling for decades to build a grand stone flying buttressed cathedral to be used to for a gambling den.)

The medieval market for “illuminated manuscripts” ought not be confused with the market for “textual products.” And of illuminated manuscripts, only a tiny fraction would take decades to produce. Sure, the Book of Kells probably took decades to put together, but it’s hardly the typical manuscript production. Does this author really think that people in the Middle Ages would go to their local scriptorium and say, “Hey, can you do me up one of those sweet books of hours like Tom has? You know, with the picture of Noah’s wife carrying Satan onto the ark? Cool. I’ll be back in twenty years to pick it up.” Given the tonsure comment, the author probably doesn’t believe in local scriptoria–or even medieval books as status items usable for status within the buyer’s lifetime.***

Speaking of books of hours, Eamon Duffy put out a book on them not long ago, Marking the Hours. They’re a good example of a book every family needed, so they came in varieties ranging from “knocked off in a few hours and sold for a shilling” on up to “written in gold ink on golden pages bound with gold that is itself covered in gold.”

Yes, there are very few “WTF… cu l8r” notes extant from the Middle Ages, but not because the things written in the Middle Ages were more durable than today. If you had a Post-it note saying “Must buy milk,” are you likely to keep it? And what if it was your father’s Post-it that you found cleaning out his drawer? Chain the ‘left in a drawer and nobody wanted it’ on it through enough fathers and you end up with very few useless notes being kept.

Actually, come to think of it, the reason we have fewer toss-off notes from the Middle Ages may be because of the durability of the writing materials more than the durability of the things written. Very few people will scrupulously erase and reuse Post-its, but a sheet of parchment can take a few good rubbings and scrapings before it has to be tossed out. And even when it’s not fit for writing on any more, you can tear it up into strips and use it to bind other books. Parchment has lots of uses, e-parchment pretty much the one.

This is not to say that no “WTF… cu l8r” has survived. Those books of hours Duffy won’t stop going on about also include lots of little notes, recipes, family trees, inventory lists, and even the occasional, “God, this is so boring, want to knock off and fool around?” There was a shortage of disposable paper, so you wrote on what you had, where you had space. Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks have a reputation for writing things like, “Damn, it’s cold” or “Stopped here to take a piss” in the margins of their books. I often find myself longing for the gigantic margins that characterize medieval texts whenever I’m doing scholarly work with a printed book. Medieval books left room for notes, unlike my Norton Critical Edition of Malory, with its onion skin paper and 1/4 inch margins.

I oscillate between worrying that the Internet has made writing both too permanent and too transitory. Sure, I empathize with the writer of the Slate piece. I, too, get far too much ‘Hey r u busy?’ in my inbox. But oddball questions I made late one night in the mid-nineties on a Usenet group devoted to World of Darkness RPGs are also now forever imprisoned in the unforgetting archive of dejanews Google groups. And all the grammatical errors I fix minutes after posting an article here at this blog are nonetheless immediately preserved for all posterity by the RSS feeder. It’s just impossible to think of this unbroken continuum stretching back to any historical era, with ‘transitory’ on one end and ‘permanent’ on the other, especially where text is concerned.

And anyway, as frequent readers of this blog know, the real problem wasn’t that medieval people didn’t want to write inane babble, but rather that they lacked sufficient quantities of underwear until the urbanization that characterized the High Middle Ages.

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*Noticed how I avoided the cheap joke of ending that sentence with an exclamation point.**
**Further note how I didn’t avoid the dry Gen-X meta-joke.
***If you combine the old “the life expectancy in the Middle Ages was 30” meme with this one, you’d end up with people coming in as eight-year-olds to order books to read when they’re bedridden in old age.

No new original content, folks–that scary thing that begins with a t and ends with a hesis* is keeping me busy. But here are two humor links of a vaguely medieval nature.

#1 is a captioned photo that explains the medieval origins of blogging. (via adrift)
#2 comes from a British an Austrian an Australian show I’ve never heard of called, I think, The Chaser, titled, “What Have We Learned From History?” and features the Trojan horse. I know you probably think that the Trojans are classical, not medieval. Tell that to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Youtube embed follows:

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*Or possibly, ends with my nervous breakdown. We’ll see.

UPDATE 10/9/09: Here’s a scan of the original page, since the Flickr post is now private (and since so many people are coming here again):

I’ve been meaning to scan this chart myself, ever since I first saw it photocopied in the class packet for Lee Patterson’s Canterbury Tales class, but someone saved me the trouble (via BoingBoing). It’s a handy flowchart from James A. Brundage’s book Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe that summarizes when its safe (theologically speaking) for one to have sex in the Middle Ages. Here’s the link to the Flickr post.

I know flowchart humor is all the rage lately, so you’ll want to see it its full glory, but here’s a transcription of the questions:

–Feeling Randy? Yes: continue. No: Stop! Sin!
–Are you married? Yes: continue. No: Stop! Sin!
–Is this your wife? Yes: continue. No: Stop! Sin!
–Married more than three days? Yes: continue. No: Stop! Sin!
–Is wife menstruating? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is wife pregnant? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is wife nursing a child? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it Lent? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it Advent? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it Whitsun week? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it Easter week? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it [any other] feast day? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it a fast day? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it Sunday? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it Wednesday? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it Friday? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it Saturday? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Is it daylight? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Are you naked? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Are you in church? No: continue. Yes: Stop! Sin!
–Do you want a child? No: Stop! Sin! Yes: GO AHEAD! But be careful: No fondling! No lewd kisses! No oral sex! No strange positions! Only once! Try not to enjoy it! Good luck! And wash afterwards!

It’s funny. I never considered James Brundage to be the sort of historian who’d use so many exclamation points so cavalierly. Those wacky canon law experts.

Also, I found a handy summary of the book from whence the flowchart was lifted here.

How many ways can you re-title the same AP Wire story and pass it off as journalism? At least fourteen, if my painstaking research is accurate.

Medieval Cross Turns up in Trash — Forbes, et al.
Medieval cross found in trash bin — Taipei Times
Medieval cross found in trash can — CBS News
Medieval cross found in garbage — Montreal Gazette
Medieval cross found in rubbish skip — News.com.au
Medieval cross found in Austrian rubbish skip — Stuff.co.nz
Medieval cross turns up in trash, could be worth $500G — Boston Herald
Medieval cross found in trash could be worth over $500000 — Chicago Tribune
£260,000 medieval cross found in bin by woman hunting crockery — The Independent (UK)
Medieval cross worth thousands of dollars turns up in trash — abc11tv.com
Medieval cross likely worth thousands of dollars turns up in trash — Hays Daily News (KS)
Relic in trash may be worth thousands — Chicago Sun-Times
$500K cross hidden from Nazis, found in trash — Rocky Mountain News
Missing 800-Year-Old Cross Surfaces in Rubbish Heap — ToTheCenter.com
‘Dumpster Diving’ Yields Treasure — Los Angeles Times

Isn’t it weird that stuff.co.nz, the New Zealand branch of Stuff magazine, is the only organization that thought that the location of the cross was headline-worthy?

My favorite headline comes from the Hays Daily News. They’re not comfortable claiming anything about the cross’s value. Folks, we’re not saying it’s definitely worth thousands here. It’s likely worth thousands, sure, but don’t call our office gloating if the thing sells for squat at auction. Hell, it’s allegedly worth thousands. Allegedly worth alleged thousands, if new allegations prove to be alleged for good reason.

The Independent goes the extra mile to let you know that the woman who discovered the cross had a good reason for being there, while the LA Times slanders her with those scare quotes. What exactly do scare quotes mean in a newspaper headline? We’re hip enough to know these words, but lame enough to be uncomfortable using them? More likely, we’re lame enough to think that these words are hip.

An honorable mention clearly belongs to the Rocky Mountain News for their use of the old dependable comma headline. I love a good comma headline. Grad Student Has Blog, Cat. Area Man Posts Headlines, Avoids Thesis. PhD Candidate makes jokes, pancakes.

Kids, read your Beowulf. Please. It’s getting embarassing. This from a recent Karl Rove interview on Fox News (via Salon):

“They’ll keep after me,” Rove said of the Democrats. “Let’s face it. I mean, I’m a myth, and they’re — you know, I’m Beowulf. You know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am. But they’re after me.”

UPDATE: As soon as I posted this, I saw this at Quillblog*, a list of other characters Rove could compare himself to.

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*Which, sadly, is not a blog devoted to porcupines.