I just want to nominate the concluding line of a crappy conservative radio personality’s* anti-Hitchens editorial** for some sort of sarcastically named prize, the name of which I will determine later***:

Whether you supported the war in Iraq or not, if you are honest about history, you have to acknowledge that in a very real historical sense the closing of Iraq’s rape rooms began in the opening of the Virgin’s womb.

I am honest about my history, and I either did or did not support the war, so indeed I must acknowledge that President Bush did once sign an executive order relocating troops from the Virgin Mary’s magical parts to Baghdad. I can neither confirm nor deny that resulting friction from all those boots on the ground may or may not have caused ragadiae.

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*Readers of my last post will hopefully be wary. Do I mean he’s a crap at being a conservative or crap at being a radio personality? Or something far more insidious?
**Don’t get me wrong. I hate Hitchens, myself, with a deep, fiery, vague sort of occasional passion.
***Given my track record, don’t hold your breath for that name.

I think that the reason that I’ve not posted much lately is that blogs require rage, and I’ve just not felt very ragey. What’s that? Dan Brown’s got a new book about flesh-eating Cistercians? *shrug* Somebody called a toaster oven’s lack of a self-cleaning mode “medieval”? *meh*

So I’ve been left trying to rekindle the rage on small tinder, lest I finally throw in the towel and admit that I’m actually an ex-blogger. Indeed, I almost wrote an entire post nitpicking a nitpick in a seven-month-old editorial about the terrorist agenda in the UK–but at last, the internet gods offered up this travelogue from the Times Online: The Medieval Lesbians of Tallinn. Finally, something worthy of my full attention.

To properly understand this article, I had to do some research.

Research item #1: There is at least one man employed by a major newspaper to go get drunk in exotic locations and then to write about it. I’m not much of a heavy drinker, but for the right salary and benefits package, I’m sure I could learn. My hat’s off to you, Tom Chesshyre.

Research item #2: The UK’s supply of locations for carousing and public drunkenness is critically low, so low that conservation-minded British drunks have begun seeking out the services of destination drinking binge companies.* One of these companies, Tallinn Pissup Tours, is featured in the article.**

Research item #3: Medieval lesbians wear string-bikinis and fake snakeskin high-heeled boots.

This final item gave me pause and caused me to worry that perhaps these weren’t medieval lesbians at all. The official name for Tallinn Pissup’s service is the “Medieval Lesbian Strip Show and Meal.” This could mean that these are practitioners of medieval-style lesbianism stripping in a modern fashion. It could also be a show of modern lesbians stripping in a style that dates to the middle ages.*** Or, worst of all, it could be actual lesbians from the middle ages, stripping in either a medieval or a modern style. Though, to be fair, judging by their pictures, they are remarkably well-preserved if that’s the case. Oh, English language, you are a cruel mistress.

After taking another long look at the pictures on the website–for purely scholarly reasons, of course–I was forced to conclude that the service offered is actually for some modern girl/girl stripping that merely takes place near some medieval architecture. Ah well. You could always fire a rocket launcher at a live cow, instead.****

Now, it occurs to me that I need to add something to this post to salvage my scholarly cred, lest my readers come to believe that I’m just an overly literate frat boy. So, concerning the topic of medieval lesbians, it turns out that there is something to learn that is more interesting than the fact that ₤25 will buy you a pair of strippers and a meal near some medieval towers.

By and large, the Middle Ages was not overly concerned with homosexuality–and even less with the female variety. But there was a medical condition recognized by medieval authorities that might cause normally heterosexual women to become lesbians. It was called ragadiae. According to Carolyn Dinshaw, who is your go-to scholar for weird medieval sexuality, William of Saliceto’s 1285 Summa conservationis et curationis or “Bumper Book of Treatments and Cures” defines ragadiae as fleshy growths, often in the shape of a penis, caused by difficult childbirth, other abscesses of the womb, or sometimes friction from excessive sexual intercourse. Women who found themselves in possession of these growths would sometimes subsequently develop a desire to use them to have sex with other women.*****

No problem, you’re probably saying. Weren’t medieval women supposed to have as little sex as possible? Technically, yes–but on this matter the Middle Ages offered your basic damned if you do, damned if you don’t conundrum. According to Brundage and Bullough’s Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, medieval women were also in danger of becoming lesbians through prolonged abstinence from sex. Any woman so afflicted was to go immediately to bed, put a hot compress on her unused parts, and induce an orgasm, post-haste.

It might seem weird to hear of a medieval doctor prescribing masturbation, but it makes a kind of sense. Theologically, sex was justified through its procreative function, so these doctors were just ordering their patients to keep everything in working order down there. It was almost God’s work. Think about that the next time you’re strolling down the “novelty item” aisle.

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*That sentence may seem overly condemnatory. This is only because of my great shame that I did not hit upon the idea first.
**It’s also possible that I have the supply and demand relationship wrong, and that rather than an underabundance of places to get propperly pissed, Britain now has an overabundance of men wishing to get pissed, forcing them to use binge-drinker export services.
***I also worry about the conjunction there before “meal”. Is the meal medieval at all? Does it feature big turkey legs like at the Renn Fest? Or is it a lesbian meal? And if it is, does that mean that the turkey legs you’re eating belonged to lesbian turkeys, or that the legs were prepared in the traditional lesbian style?
****Apparently, this is something else that drunk Brits are rumored to do in other locales during their bachelor’s parties. YouTube it, if you’re interested. Man, the US is tame by comparison. If we get a stripper in the place at all, we think we’re wild boys.
*****This information from Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern, p. 258. Also, just to head off any uncomfortable misunderstandings or disappointments with your medieval dating sites, ragadiae could also just mean hemorrhoids, according to Isadore of Seville.

I’m having a hard time parsing the intro to this Salon.com article:

Ever since 16th century pollsters and media consultants discovered Machiavelli, political handlers have been searching for the right strategic thinker to guide them in wooing voters. Sun Tzu on “The Art of War” has often been in vogue, especially among hawkish Republican operatives.

Wikipedia, the source of all that’s true on the Internet, tells me that professional pollsters didn’t exist until the nineteenth century, but maybe I’m being purposefully obtuse. The article in question is titled “The 2008 election, explained by Yogi Berra.” Perhaps this is some sort of homage.

As the thesis waters rise all around me, I’d like to head off any complaints about how rarely this thing gets updated. You can tune your RSS reader to http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. Don’t know what an RSS feed is for? I use Google Reader. They’ll explain it there. And for those of you who already RSS this blog, here’s a new ROMP (Random Occasional Medieval Proverb), so that you don’t feel cheated:

First the Latin version: Angelicus iuvenis senibus satanizat in annis.
And the Middle-Scots-English: Of yung sanctis growis auld feyndis but faill.

Or, as it was usually put: Young saint, old devil.

I suppose the rough modern equivalent is Billy Joel’s “Only the good die young,” but the medieval version has a certain pleasing edge to it that the modern lacks, doesn’t it?

Via Every Time a Synapse Fires:*

Part Monty Python,** part medieval artifact, part homage to Civilization II–and about 1000% more interesting than the sterile, dutiful display of the actual tapestry in that dingy little museum.

I suppose I should do my medievalist due diligence and note that the video does prune the Bayeux narrative a good bit. It leaves out Harold’s weird fishing expedition (or whatever it was) that leaves him stranded and captive, his misadventures with William on the continent, the uncertain oath scene–you know, the bits you’d leave out if you were going to make a Hollywood movie of the story.
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*I worry about posting YouTube videos after the fiasco of the “Introducing the Book” link. Here is a direct link to the video in question. If it doesn’t work, then go do a search for “Animated Bayeux Tapestry.” It’s not my job to make sure you can follow this link.
**Which part? The part Gilliam lifted*** directly from medieval art.
***And I mean lifted in a good way. Don’t worry, the Middle Ages wasn’t big on intellectual property restrictions.

I’ve been meaning to get around to commenting on the Joan of Arc relic testing story for a while now, because it’s a good example of the bizarre way that journalists dance around to avoid saying that something is demonstrably false.

A year or so ago, the remains of Joan of Arc were turned over to a forensic scientist for study. And by “remains of Joan of Arc,” I mean, “some burnt bones and rags found on a shelf in the nineteenth century that people insisted on pretending belonged to the famous historical figure even though no one could account for where the bones had been for the four hundred years in between.” Or maybe I just mean, “the fake remains of Joan of Arc.”

“But,” I can hear you saying, “weren’t those bones verified by the Vatican in 1909 as belonging to Joan?” I can hear this, because I know of your long-held interest in all things Joan. And I have a good imagination.

It’s true, the Vatican’s top scientists were on the case back in 1909. But they might have been just a wee bit biased, as 1909 was also the year that Joan was made into a Saint, Junior Grade.* They had every reason in the world to confirm the story–and even if they’d wanted to really put it to the test, what would they have done? The tools for bone-debunking available in 1909 were not extensive. Yet, for some reason, the AP story back in February about the initial results of the retesting of these fake bones didn’t even broach the idea that maybe the Vatican’s beatification in 1909 and the Vatican’s verification in 1909 were somehow connected in a more than coincidental way.

Still, the final findings of Dr. Charlier’s group won’t necessarily stymie those who want to continue to pretend that these are Joan’s bones. Even before he started work, it was known that one of the bones in the jar was actually a cat’s femur. Yet, instead of seeing this as evidence that these were just some random bones being passed off as relics, people claimed that it was actually evidence that they were relics. Cats, you see, sometimes were thrown onto the pyres of suspected witches. So the inclusion of a cat’s bone is perfectly consistent with it being Joan of Arc’s remains. Even though nobody mentioned throwing a cat onto Joan’s pyre in the contemporary account, and even though the inclusion of a cat’s bone is also perfectly consistent–indeed, more consistent–with the bones being fake.

And even before Charlier got on to the DNA testing of these bones**, his chemical tests had already proven that what looked like bits of char on the scrap of fabric with the bones was actually dye, and the bits of char on the bones themselves were actually plant matter like you’d get if you’d embalmed something, but not if you’d burned it.

The latest round of tests on the faked relics revealed something more interesting, though. Turns out, the bones are probably from a mummy. Carbon dating shows they’re actually from before Christ was born. And the chemicals in the resin are all consistent with Egyptian mummification preparations. And if that wasn’t interesting enough, part of the testing involved bringing in professional perfume sniffers, who determined that the bones smell like vanilla. Apparently, vanilla is produced when a body decomposes.***

So let’s recap. The bones in question 1) were found on a shelf, 2) have no certain provenance, 3) were first ‘verified’ by people with a very good reason for lying, 4) are partially feline, 5) came packaged with a rag dyed to look like it had been burnt, 6) are covered in vegetable resin, not ash, 7) date to 300-700 years before Christ, and 8) smell like vanilla. And yet, these are the headlines that accompany the story:

Analysis Shows Bone, Remains Not Likely to Be From Joan of Arc — The Washington Post
Scientist: Remains are not those of Joan of Arc — Forensic Magazine
Relics aren’t Joan of Arc’s, researchers in France say — The Mercury News
Scientists say supposed Joan of Arc relics came from a mummy — The Boston Globe

Not likely? Researchers say? Scientists say? And my favorite “scientists say supposed relics”–way to go on the double reverse weasel, Boston Globe editorial staff. To be fair, lots of news outlets just went ahead and said they were fakes in the headline. But the four I link above aren’t the only coy headlines out there. So, why are so many journalists afraid to call a fake a fake? Is there a huge Joan-of-Arc-relic-loving demographic out there in that must be appeased?

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*Joan wasn’t canonized until 1920. Beatification is the next-to-last stage of the sainthood track.
**The DNA testing didn’t work. The embalming process that the bones went through–and that Joan of Arc’s bones wouldn’t have gone through–made the DNA unrecoverable.
***This possibly makes my wife’s chocolate chip cookies into a goth delicacy. Flavored just like human remains that have decomposed naturally! The Chips Ahoy people probably are considering this as a slogan as we speak.

I’m not really sure what the point of this Associated Press story, “King Arthur’s Legend Lives on at Tintagel” is. It’s being listed in the Travel section at USA Today and CNN.com, so I guess the point might be, “Hey, look at this castle. Maybe you’d like to go there,” but the story doesn’t really include the sorts of details that you’d need to plan a vacation there–like, what airport is nearby or who organizes tours of the area–so it can’t be that, exactly. The more pragmatic side of me suspects that the point is, “Hey, I have a brochure for Tintagel and a deadline. What a coincidence.”

Since I’m currently revising my chapter on Geoffrey of Monmouth, I was fully primed to unleash my inner medieval pedant on this fluff piece. Of the maybe six or so claims about the Arthurian legend, only maybe two are fully correct. But really, who wants to read me crowing about minor inconsistencies?* Instead, read me lamenting the cruel fate that has me chasing down footnotes hour upon hour when I could be phoning in articles like this for a major news organization.

And since I’m not going to make a full post about it, let me put it in here. The About.com guy really has to be stopped.** I can understand listing this blog as European History Blog of the Week. There are 52 weeks, and probably only 57 European History Blogs. But even my minor little two paragraph post about King Arthur managed to land on About.com’s Medieval History blog summary on April 4. April 4 must have been a real slow news days for the Middle Ages, what with their having been over for nearly six-hundred years.

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*For example: the article says that in Geoffrey’s Historia, Merlin demands Uther give him Arthur to raise in secret. But that doesn’t actually occur until Robert de Boron’s version of the story, about 50-60 years post-Geoffrey. Geoffrey tells us nothing about Arthur’s childhood. See how interesting that is? It’s definitely worth scrolling down to read this footnote.
**This just in: the About.com guy is a girl named Melissa Snell. For some reason, she always refers to me by my verboten real life name, instead of my mysterious internet handle, so I thought I’d return the favor.

And here’s another short thought before I go back to pretending to going back to working on my thesis. It’s a paragraph that doesn’t belong in my thesis, but I keep typing and revising because it’s more fun trying to think up bizarre analogies than it is to figure out why Geoffrey of Monmouth can’t keep Arthur’s sister and aunt straight.

You can consider this my long lost review of the 2004 King Arthur movie, if you want.

There is no such thing as a “real” or historical King Arthur, and anyone who tries to convince you that there was is probably going to try to steer the conversation towards selling you a commemorative silver-plated pewter letter opener shaped like the heroic king’s famed sword Excalibur, the perfect gift for any collector of fine things. The problem with looking for the “real” King Arthur is that the word “real” in that construction actually has no meaning. It’s a hollow signifier. Suppose I made a movie called “The Teddy Bear that Ate Cleveland.” If someone were to point out that the teddy bear was originally named after U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, it still wouldn’t be very sensible to go around saying, “Ah, so the real Teddy Bear that Ate Cleveland was Theodore Roosevelt.” But that sort of thing is all you’re going to end up with if you go looking for the “real” King Arthur.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled lack of regular updates to my blog.

I feel it is my job to spread the awesomeness of the Middle Ages to the masses, and to remind medievalists, of both the stuffy and non-stuffy species, of said awesomeness.* I know that I am often remiss in my duties, but these days, when I go to post something on my blog, I end up deciding mid-post that I probably ought to be working on my thesis. Then I stumble off in shame, leaving the half-written husk somewhere in my drafts folder to taunt me with my failure.

Lucky for you, while working on my thesis, I stumbled over some medieval awesome in the middle of re-rereading R. Howard Bloch’s Etymologies and Genealogies.** Bloch describes a medieval manual of rhetoric and love, the Leys D’Amours. Apparently, the manual describes the results of an allegorical war between the three kings of bad writing: Barbarism, Misspelling, and Allebolus;**** and three queens of good writing: Diction, Oration, and Meaning. When the war is brought to a close by Lady Rhetoric, the kings and queens are married off and produce offspring.

Though my favorite rhetorical tool, Snarkiness, is not represented in the geneaology, Sarcasm and Irony are. As it turns out, Sarcasm and Irony are two of seven daughters born of Allegory and “Foreign Language”. Allegory is herself the daughter of Allebolus and Figure of Speech, who is the sister of Queen Meaning. What does all of this have to do with anything? Not much. But I think it’s definitely pretty awesome to spend your time mapping out which personifications of abstract linguistic concepts got it on to produce Sarcasm.

So the short answer to the question in my title is, “When Allegory and a Foreign Language love each other very much, Sarcasm is made. But you shouldn’t worry about that until you’re older, because it’s something that Figures of Speech do, and not children. Now go to bed.”

It’s hard to appreciate the full, glorious absurdity of the genealogy without seeing it sprawling across your page. Here’s the beginning of the breakdown given by Bloch (pp. 131-2), for those interested, translated even further for those who don’t know what a paranomasia (what people who want you to ask, “what’s paranomasia?” call a pun) is:

King Barbarism married “Mixing-up-and-deleting-letters,” the sister of Diction and produced fourteen daughters: “Adding-letters-to-the-front-of-words,” Rebuke, “Adding-a-syllable-to-a-word,” Augerese (no clue), Contractions, “Dropping-the-last-syllable-of-a-word,” Ecstasy, “Shortening-a-syllable,” and several others more obscure.*****

King Misspelling married Arranging-Things-Properly, the sister of Oration and produced twenty-two daughters: Summary, “Repeating-a-word-for-rhetorical-effect,” and lots of others.

I originally intended to type out the whole thing, but after spending far too much time looking up words like autonomasia****** (using a generic noun for a proper one, like saying how obnoxious Northeasterners say “We’re going to the city” to mean they’re going to New York City), I decided that even this post about how I never post because of my thesis was in danger of becoming one of the things I never post because of my thesis and decided to cut it short.

So instead, I’ll end with my own probable derivation of Snarkiness. I believe Snarkiness must be the daughter of Sarcasm and Faux Hipster Coolness, the latter being the offspring of Duke “Watching-bad-movies-because-they’re-so-bad-they’re-good” and the Duchess of Threadbare Pop Culture Reference, who is herself the illegitimate daughter of Classical Allusion and Gary Coleman’s father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.

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*I know that I’ve been giving the word “awesome” a bit of a workout lately. For me, the word “awesome” has finally reached that sweet spot between “funny because it’s lame” and “funny because it’s awesome.”
**This is no mean feat–way past finding a needle in a haystack. It’s like finding the awesome in the middle of “For the family, narrowed around its outer edges, temporalized and rendered vertical, also underwent a reorientation, an axial shift, such that its articulation of itself acquired the dimensions of a straight line… Implicit to the production of sufficient progeny to insure dynastic continuity without a surplus to deplete its wealth is a model of marriage essential to the transmission of the fief.”***
***Did you spot it? The awesome was hiding behind the l in “axial shift.” Thanks for playing along! Now try to find the eight everyday household objects hidden in the title of Bloch’s A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry. Hint: One of the eight has an eye, but cannot see the smile on the face of a child.
****Unfortunately, I can’t figure out what error “Allebolus” or “Alebolus” is supposed to be. The best fake etymology I can muster ends up with “A tendency to get bloated or pill-shaped,” a problem I find my writing always butts up against eventually.
*****Just think: there are six errors more obscure than adding a letter to the front of a word that the medievals had names for. And to think that some people only think of the middle ages in connection with grunting and burning witches. The medievals probably had seven different categories of witch-burning divided into fifteen species each.
******Not to be confused with antonomasia, or using an epithet for someone, like calling President Bush “the current occupant.”