Just as words like “terrific” and “awesome” lost their punch, linguistic erosion is working overtime on the word “medieval.” From Britain’s Evening Times comes this story: “Bank Teller Taunted By Cabbage.”

It seems that when young Darren Murray’s bosses at the Bank of Scotland wanted to motivate him to overcome his crappy sales numbers, they chose to send him a message the medieval way–by drawing his face on a cabbage and putting it on his desk.

Representatives of Murray’s union Amicus were quick to call a spade a medieval spade, decrying the motivational strategy as “medieval, unacceptable, and a smokescreen for bullies to hide behind.” John Nolan, the union’s national officer went further. “It is obscene that any organisation posting astronomical profits would allow management to resort to medieval tactics to squeeze every last penny out of vulnerable staff.”

Normally, I’m Mr. Wet Blanked Medievalist when I see such casual usage of the word “medieval.” But in this case, what can I say? There is nothing more medieval than a good cabbage effigy.

It is well known that when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel in 1066, he brought this foul custom with him to medieval England, which was known at the time as “Ye Olde Englande.” When taking stock of his new land for the Domesday book, William was known for taunting nobles whose properties weren’t worth enough by confiscating all their round vegetables and penning insults on them. In those days beets were preferred, of course, the cabbage not actually being attested until William’s son William Rufus was well into the tenth year of his rule. And actually drawing faces on cabbages instead of rhyming Latin insults did not really take hold until the rule of the master propagandist Edward I, the “Hammer of the Scots.” In the days of Longshanks, many a Scot did receive the terrible portent of a cabbage fashioned in their likeness. Truly, such terror has not been seen since mankind collectively clawed its way into the Renaissance.

Who wouldn’t want to be The Compleat Gentleman? (Women: don’t answer that question, it’s rhetorical.) Brad Miner’s book, The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man’s Guide to Chivalry, claims to be a guide to authentic masculinity–how we’ve lost it in modern American culture, and how we could regain it if we just acted more like people in the Middle Ages.

At first, I thought it was a relatively benign medievally themed self-help book, like Kingdomality or the Six Habits of Highly Effective 13th Century Franciscan Monks. I almost dismissed it as completely uninteresting, until I noticed that the website that I’d found selling it, some sort of off-brand Amazon.com , was offering one of those Buy Both and Save! deals: save 20% by buying The Compleat Gentleman with… Dick Morris’s anti-Hillary screed Rewriting History. [If this were an audio commentary, I’d splice in the sound of a record needle scratching in place of that elipsis.]

What the hell does Hillary Clinton have to do with the Middle Ages? Visiting the site a day later, I found the deal had become a twofer with The Swift Boat Vets’ book. Right now it’s selling with The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Looking it up at Amazon.com, I found that customers who bought this book also bought The Concise Conservative Encyclopedia also by [2nd record scratch] Brad Miner. Suddenly the book jacket blurb made much more sense, breaking up into convenient conservative buzz words (italics and snark mine):

In these days of astonishing confusion about what it means to be a man [damn you Queer Eye, Will, and possibly Grace!], Brad Miner has gone back into the riches of our Western cultural heritage [unlike liberals who hate America] to recover the oldest and best ideal of manhood: the gentleman. In The Compleat Gentleman, he revives a thousand-year tradition of chivalry, honor, and heroism, providing a model for modern masculinity that our fractious culture [rassenfrassen multicultural crap] needs more than ever [If you haven’t noticed, we’re in a cultural war here! Lions and tigers and blue-staters, oh my!].

Don’t get me wrong. I love our Western cultural heritage, and I hate diversity for diversity’s sake. But studying history at all should give you the perspective necessary to realize that we are not now at a uniquely perilous cultural crisis point. Every generation thinks that they are just barely holding back the tides of barbarism and social decay, and if it wasn’t for their worries life as we know it might very well end in the next ten years.* But they can’t all be right, and if so many of them were wrong, what makes you so sure you happen to belong to one of the few generations that are legitimately imperilled?

So, what does Mr. Miner think the Middle Ages has to tell us about modern masculinity? (Keep in mind that I don’t actually read the things I review, just their book jackets and back cover blurbs.) Apparently, there are three masculine archetypes: the knight, the monk, and the lover. Combining these three into one (possibly Voltron-style) creates the Compleat Gentleman. All three of these have their roots in their medieval counterparts according to Miner, but this seems more than a little problematic to me, since in the Middle Ages knights had their estate and monks had theirs, and society only worked smoothly, or so it was said, if all three estates did their own job and didn’t try doing the others. To borrow a common medieval analogy and horribly mangle it, the body needs a head, a stomach, and arms and legs. If the arms get mad at the stomach for eating all the time and stop feeding the stomach, the body will suffer. And if the arms try to combine with the head and stomach into a powerful arm-head-stomach hybrid, the body will suffer, too.

The medieval knight figures heavily in the book, apparently, as several review sites mention how the book explains “elements of the gentlemanly character that would have been obvious to any medieval knight, but which men today must labor to recover.” Now, the medieval knight is not an uncomplicated figure. Surely, there was the reality of the man who kills by vocation, and the ideal of the courtly hero, and the reality and the ideal intermingled and blurred frequently. (Indeed, the ideal probably came about at least in part as an attempt at self-justification by bloody, dangerous knights.) But even in its purest expression, I don’t think we want to be looking to the ideal of the courtly knight as an example for modern behavior. Take Andreas Capellanus, who urged these knights in his courtly guide, On Love, that if a knight desires to sleep with a peasant woman, “praise her and rape her–peasants don’t respond to gentle wooing.”

I expect that Miner’s got his medieval rose colored glasses on, more a RennFest idea of what knights are like than what they really were like. He and the rest of the cultural Chickens Little ought to instead remember the words of the great court poet Billeigh of Joel: “The good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”

*Apparently there’s a weird cultural crossover point between the conservative social politics of hysterical crisis and medieval history. Again at Amazon, I find that people who bought Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths also bought books about the Jewish role in Christian salvation history, the terror of the Culture of Death, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization**. That last book appears to be a favorite of people who also buy books about Christians as persecuted minority in the United States. What’s more, The Compleat Gentleman is published by Spence Publishing, whose other titles include Seven Myths of Working Mothers and The Supremacists: The Tyranny Of Judges And How To Stop It, among other less savory titles.
**Western Civilization is in constant need of building and/or saving. As you may be already be aware, the Irish had to save it and the Scots had to invent the modern version of it. But did you know that homosexuals saved it, too? As did the Hungarians. And pug dogs?***
***For those of you who hate opening links just for random comedic effect, rest assured. All the links in the joke in footnote one lead to Amazon.com listings for books of the How XXX Saved Western Civilization variety. Really. If it weren’t for the pug dog, today’s Europeans would be speaking Eastern and saluting Godzilla.****
****This leads me to wonder where they hid the book on How King Kong Saved Civilization.

P.S. If you’re reading this and your name is Brad Miner and you’re upset that I reviewed your book without reading it, please see this as an opportunity to use the FBI to find out my address and send me a copy of your book, which I promise I will read as soon as I review last year’s King Arthur movie.

This isn’t exactly an intersection of pop culture and the medieval, so it doesn’t properly belong on this blog, but it’s reasonably interesting for people who either 1) want to know what academics actually do with their time or 2) hate the French.

This summer, as part of my summer fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I got to go to Paris for two weeks to study a particular manuscript, the Bibliotheque Nationale‘s MS Fr. 95, which is purported to be the first of a three volume set of Arthurian romances, the third volume of which is here at the Beinecke. The three volume set is lavishly illustrated, and my project this summer concerns the relationship between the images and text across the two different volumes. (The middle volume has been lost.)

As my oldest sister once said, “You mean they give you money to do that?” Indeed they do.

To see this 13th century manuscript at the Beinecke, all you have to do is register as a reader and fill out a little call slip. Registering as a reader is a five minute process that involves a letter of introduction*, some ID, and a small form. Both registering as a reader and paging the manuscript are done at the same desk.

Things don’t work that way in France. To register as a reader, you must first have an interview. You wait in line for an hour or so, sit down, and flash your elaborate translated letter of introduction, which they promptly file away without reading. Several forms and several questions follow, and lots of information is entered into a computer. Then you’re sent to another desk on the other side of the room, where a different person will pull up the information just entered into the computer, take your picture, and print an ID card. Then you must take the ID card down the hallway to have it validated and to pay your fees.

To see a manuscript, you now take your ID card to the reading room. There, a person will take your ID card, assign you a seat, and hand you a little green piece of plastic. You then must take this green piece of plastic across the room to another person, where you fill out a call form for the manuscript you want, and hand both the green plastic and the form to this person. Then they will exchange your green piece of plastic for an orange piece of plastic, which you take back with you to your seat, where you wait for your manuscript to be delivered by yet another person.

When you are finished with the manuscript, you take both it and the orange plastic back to the person who is holding your green plastic hostage. If you give him the manuscript, he gives you your green plastic. If you want to see another manuscript, you may shuffle plastic a few times, though if you thought to fill out more than one page slip at a time, you won’t have to.

It’s getting late, so you decide you’re done for the day. This means that you have to go to yet another person who is at a different desk in the middle of the room in order to get a form that will allow you to exit the room. For those of you keeping track, the only thing in your possession at this point is what you brought in (at most, a pencil and paper or a notebook computer) and a green piece of plastic. But the lady at the front door WILL NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES take your green piece of plastic and give you back your ID unless you have the form from the person at the middle desk.

As near as I can tell, the person at the middle desk’s only job is to fill out and sign these exit forms. They do not inspect you to see if you’re stealing anything–which you couldn’t be doing anyway, since you have to hand your manuscripts back to the man at the far desk in order to get your green piece of plastic back.

Now, if you’re like me, your command of French is not the best, so the first time you have to undergo this form-based gauntlet, you’re going to stumble a lot. Fortunately, I was told ahead of time to wear a suit and tie to the library. When you’re dressed nicely, the staff will translate your confused looks into a request for them to slow down or to speak English. But what they’re explaining in English is insane requirements for forms, so your look of confusion won’t go away during the transaction, if ever.

One extra hurdle: When you’re granted entry and given the green piece of plastic, you’re also given a temporary leave form. This is a good thing, because it allows you to go to the bathroom or leave for lunch whenever you want without having to turn in your manuscript or your orange or green piece of plastic. (It also allows you to leave without seeing the man at the middle desk, which further adds to the insanity of his existence, because you can enter and leave all you want while you’ve got unfettered access to the valuable manuscripts without seeing him, but when you want to leave for the day and the valuable manuscripts are all locked safely away, you must go to him to get an exit form.) Now this magic temporary leave form is also a magic keep-you-trapped-in-the-library form, because you must also surrender it to the lady at the front desk who babysits your ID card when you leave, along with your form from the man in the middle desk.

The library staff gets very testy if you do not have your temporary leave form to give them when you want to go home for good. Now, you’re probably thinking that they’re taking these powerful forms up to keep them from being used by people who don’t have ID cards or green or orange pieces of plastic–but the only way to use these forms is if you’ve already given the lady at the front desk your ID card. They’re worthless for entering or leaving the secure area without the other bits; they’re there to let you leave once you’ve established your right to be there.

To sum up: to enter the manuscript room, you have to have seen at least four different people (interviewer, ID taker, cashier, and plastic distributer). In order to leave for the day, you have to have the right color plastic and two different forms to turn in, one of which is given to you by the same person you’re showing it to to leave, the other is given to you by someone whose job is to do nothing other than give the form to you.

Seven people** are doing the job that one person manages here at the Beinecke, and still, somehow, unemployment in France is above ten percent.

*Example — Dear so-and-so: This person has a good reason for wanting to see these manuscripts. Signed, some jerk with a fancy title.**
**On the off chance that either of the two people who wrote letters of recommendation for my BnF trip are reading this, I do not mean to imply that you’re jerks. You definitely are not. You even faxed me new letters when I lost your old ones. You rock. It’s a pop cultural reference.
***The Stupifying Seven: Captain Entrance Interview, ID card Dude, The Cashier, Green Plastic Lady, Doctor Orange Plastic Guy, Manuscript Delivery Boy, and inexplicable Middle Desk Lad. Those people who read this who know the Beinecke (ie none of you) may protest that there are several people who work the front desk there, and you’d be right. But each of these positions at the BnF had multiple people working it, too. There are many Middle Desk Lads and Lasses.

It’s weird enough when a colleague mentions that they found my blog, but this is somehow infinitely weirder. Said link is to a site called “Blogshares,” a fantasy stock market that uses blogs instead of companies.

As of this writing, Got Medieval is trading at $50 a share. This sounds impressive to me, but I’m sure it’s actually quite pathetic. My blog’s also 80% owned by two traders, neither of whom is me. I worry that this means they can force me out and install a new blogger if I don’t meet their goals for blog profitability–or if I don’t ever write that review of last year’s King Arthur movie.

Sitting in the manuscript library, looking for a crib for Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, I go to Yahoo’s search page and type in the first three words, “Arma virumque cano.”* Do I get a copy of the Aeneid in Latin?

• Link #1: A blog about the Iraq war
• Link #2: A blog that reviews Bad Boys II (last updated 2003)
• Link #3: A Harry Potter slash fanfic where Remus contemplates his “relationship” with Sirius
• Links #4&5: Link #3 at another site, and an individual post on Link #2
• Link #6: The BBC News compilation of other news organizations’ reviews of last year’s summer notbuster Troy**
• Link #7: A blog whose owner dresses like Jason Priestly’s character in Tombstone
• Link #8: Finally something about the Aeneid in Latin… oh, no, it’s actually someone’s Livejournal, and the link is to a poem they wrote inspired by Virgil.
• Link #9: The New Criterion’s weblog, which is at least titled Armavirumque.
• Link #10: A paper on International Security.

And several of these links don’t actually use the phrase I searched for! Someone has actually programmed Yahoo’s search so that it turns a Latin quote from one classical author into a hit for a movie about a book written by a different classical author who wrote in Greek. And do you think someone’s overly weighted their search algorithm toward blogs? My new theory on the internet: every search term you try will eventually bring up a blog about the Iraq war.

No wonder that Yahoo’s getting its ass kicked by Google. I tried the same search on Google, and the first four links were split evenly between links to Latin texts of Virgil and links to people quoting Virgil’s line and saying (more or less), “Hey, look at me. That came from Virgil. Aren’t I pretentious?”

*In Dryden’s translation, “Arms, and the man, I sing”

[Yes, I know I’ve not posted in a while. Eventually, I’ll update with thrilling tales of one medievalist’s struggles with the French bureaucracy. I’ll leave you to guess which medievalist I mean.]

The Simpsons almost season finale had a nice intro bit about a medieval faire at Springfield Elementary, or as they called it, the “Medieval Faiyieyre.” Why the SCA and the RennFest people insist on adding extra vowels to everything, I don’t know. But if it’s not “Ye Olde,” it’s not authentic to them.

This is old news, but it’s taken me this long to download the episode to make sure I get the quotes right. My favorite bit:

Milhouse: My coat of arms is a Spider-Man couchant on a field vert.
Nelson: What’s couchant mean?
Milhouse: Lying down.
[Nelson knocks Milhouse down.]
Nelson: You mean, like you? Now, what’s vert mean? (whispered, prompting) Say it means punching.

The nitpicker in me has to point out that the Spider-Man isn’t technically couchant in the picture. Milhouse has Spider-Man in his classic crawling up a wall pose, and Milhouse is right: couchant mean lying down, not moving. I guess his Spider-Man would be passant, which various heraldric sites say means in motion, either walking or running, with the far foreleg raised and the far rear leg moved forward a bit. But it’s still a funny joke. If anyone’s wondering, a ‘field vert’ means a green background, not punching.

Aren’t jokes funnier when they’re explained pedantically by a stuffy know-it-all on the Internet? I think so.

The best part about the episode was how most of the kids had to play peasants and tradesmen and not lords and ladies. I hate going to the RennFest and having everyone call everyone else ‘m’lord’ or ‘m’lady.’ For one, I’m pretty sure that people in the middle ages could say ‘my’ just like you and me. And for two, most of the people at the RennFest wouldn’t be nobility, just trodden upon plebes.

Avoiding writing my thoughts on last year’s King Arthur movie is much more fun than actually doing it. But I realize there are those out there who really want to know: was that movie really “based on new archaeological evidence?”

I’ll get around to answering that question eventually. But in the meantime, read this webcomic. I discovered the comic, “Arthur, King of Time and Space” by Paul Gadzikowski, thanks to a thread on the Arthurnet mailing list about whether dwarves in Arthurian literature are supposed to be midgets (like Billy Barty) or magical beings (like Billy Barty).

I’ve read about seventy-five installments so far, and by and large I’m impressed–not really by the humor*, but by the depth of Gadzikowski’s Arthurian backstory knowledge. Anyone who casually mentions Bors and Ban of Benwick, Bagdemagus of Dorset, King Claudas, et al. is A-OK in my book.

*Get Fuzzy is really more my thing.

Thomas F. Madden’s review of Kingdom of Heaven, “Onward PC Soldiers,” is about right, though not so delightfully snarky as my own. Read it here, at the National Review Online. I defer to the noted Crusades scholar on the matter of the historical accuracy of the movie. I do wish he’d weigh in on the issue of Orlando Bloom’s dreaminess.

I’ve come to accept the word medieval in “get medieval on his ass” constructions, even though it’s turned into a horrible cliche.

But when you use it, please, people, make it worth it. Save it for serious ass whippings. Don’t use it to describe a geriatric actor fake slapping a reporter, as in “Burt Reynolds Gets Medieval on TV Producer.” If we use medieval now, what will we call it when Keanu Reeves slices open a reporter and wraps his entrails around a tree?

And if you’re referring to torture as being “medieval,” make sure you’re using it to describe something really, unquestionably, horribly brutal, not just something that is bad. Apparently, the Secretary General of Amnesty International Irene Khan is blasting the US and the UK for sanctioning torture in Iraq that pushes us “back to medieval ages.” Yes, yes, people in the middle ages were very good at torture, even though they can’t hold a candle to the Renaissance Inquisitors. But in the same speech, she outlines the specific abuses that she’s calling medieval. They include: “environmental manipulation,” “stress positions,” and “sensory manipulation.”

Come on. You know Americans have done worse in Iraq and Afghanistan than turning the lights on and off and making prisoners stand up. Why the wussy examples? If America is driving us back to the (inexplicably multiple) medieval ages, accuse us of something really heinous, not just a collection of vague euphemisms. You can’t “get medieval” and use PC sani-language at the same time.