I’m still on vacation in Italy, but that doesn’t mean I can’t pop in with a little Monday Medieval Marginalia for you all.  OK, make that a special Friday* edition of Monday Medieval Marginalia.**  Yesterday we touristed the hell out of the Vatican, which is a roiling sea of guided tour groups this time of year bumping into the art and each other as if having tacitly agreed to help demonstrate Brownian motion to people hiding on the ceiling.  At the head of each jostling, meandering group is a guide holding aloft an umbrella, or a colored scarf, or a plastic rose, or a fern, or (most often by in my recent experience) just a dirty faded rag on a stick.  And that reminded me of this gem from the lower margin of a MS held at the British Library (MS Royal 10 E IV):

And we’re walking, walking, walking, stop!***  Now, look here, you can see the Pope’s medicine cabinet.  Pope Lando had this built originally for to take a bath inside, but it turned out too small and Sixtus the Second had it made into a place for medicines because he was incontinent.  Now you are to follow the head, yes?  We’re walking, walking, walking, walking, and stop! Helloooo, my group, look where the head is!  This is where you are to be, follow the severed head on the pole.  Yes, we are all here.  Now, you see.  You see this is where the Michelangelo painted for the Pope a much fancier medicine cabinet.  The figure on the left, eh, in the blue, you see, yes, the bottle of mouthwash, that is Michelangelo self-portrait!

And so on.

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*Friday was the plan, then I hit my hotel’s overly-restrictive firewall which I finally realized how to get around.  (Hooray for .edu VPNs!)
**Late is the new on time.
***I realize the people in this image are on horseback.  Clearly, when medievals visited the Vatican as part of their one-week package tour of historical Rome they rode their horses.

Things will likely be quiet ’round the old blog for the next week, for I am now in Siena, Italy, in order to give a paper on the awesomeness of my blog to the New Chaucer Society.  Weep not, for they do appear to have the Internets here in Italy, so I will not be entirely absent.

My amazing luck at session times continues to hold, if you were wondering. The talk will be early Sunday morning, when most of the New Chaucerians are sleeping off the excesses of vino-fueled Saturday nights.  But at least JJC, JJ, and Stephanie Trigg* will be there, and the four of us will no doubt trade many quips and fine japes that one may only appreciate when one is a world-famous medieval blogger.


Those of you with clocks and an awareness of timezones and timestamps might note that it is late here. I am at liberty to confirm that I am indeed quite jetlagged.  For one in my state, there’s hardly no day and there’s hardly no night, just alternating periods of squinting against the sun while yawning and quoting Marry Poppins by the light of my bedside table.  But my hotel has kindly provided some individually-packaged sugar cookies, so all is well.

But still I wonder: how did we ever deal with jetlag before the Internets sprung fully formed from Al Gore’s forehead?**  How did we bear the weight of sleeplessness without the succor of the Swedish Chef delivered to our handheld video devices?

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*Whose name resists all my attempts at initializing.  For now.
**Or did the Internets arise from the foam that gathered near the remnant when Al Gore was castrated by his own son?  I cannot keep my mythology straight even without the jetlag.

July 20 – The Feast of St. Margaret

Our final chunk of sacred feasts kicks off with St. Margaret the Virgin, patroness of pregnant women, nurses and kidney disease. And, predictably, Margaret is yet another virgin martyred because she was too pious to marry an interested Roman suitor. But with Margaret’s torture, the Romans really went all out. According to some traditions, they fed her to a dragon (that happened to be Satan in disguise–long story) who swallowed her whole. But once in his gullet, the crucifix Margaret always carried with her (and which the Romans didn’t think to take off her) gave the dragon indigestion and she was spat out whole.  Naturally, she was later put to death by more conventional means.

Because of all this, St. Margaret is traditionally depicted as a woman leading a dragon around like a pet dog on a leash, but they have only themselves to blame for their humiliation.  Chew your food, people!  How many dragons have been laid low by failure to follow every diet book’s most basic advice?

July 22 – The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene

You may have heard of Mary Magdalene from the Dan Brown books.  She’s kind of a big deal.

If you’re one of those who bristles at the claim that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, you can than the Middle Ages for that, specifically Pope St. Gregory the Great.  In fact, the Middle Ages had several flavors of lusty Mary Magdalene to choose from.  The Golden Legend, for instance describes her first as a rich girl àla Paris Hilton who gets up to sexy naughtiness because she has too much money and too much free time; then later it offers the alternate story that she was originally St. John’s first wife, and when Jesus called John away from her she was so upset that she decided to give herself over completely to mindless hedonism. Of course, regardless of why she was such a lady-about-town, once Jesus shows up she’s set on the straight and narrow.

For obvious reasons, she’s the patron saint of reformed prostitutes, hairdressers, perfumers, glove-makers, people who are particularly tempted by the flesh, and women in general; for less obvious reasons she’s the patron of druggists, apothecaries, and tanners.**

July 25 – The Feast of St. James the Elder

James the Elder (AKA St James the Greater**) was one of the original twelve apostles, brother of John and son of Zebedee.  According to medieval tradition, he was responsible for carrying the church to Spain before being put to death by the Emperor.  And according to even later medieval tradition, James reappeared magically (several hundred years after his death) during the Battle of Clavijo to put the smack down on some Moors, earning him the nickname “the Moorslayer”.

The journey to visit St James’ grave at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela on the anniversary of his death remains one of Western Christendom’s most popular pilgrimages Since this year James’s feast falls on a Sunday, it’s an even bigger deal.  A couple hundred thousand pilgrims will probably make the trip next week.

July 26 – The Feast of St. Anne

St. Anne is the mother of the mother of Christ.  If you see a lady in red in green in medieval art holding a baby that is herself holding a baby, that’s St. Anne.  I’m all for recursive saints, but I wonder, why stop there?  Why no feast of the mother of the mother of the mother of Christ? Or Christ’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother?

July 27 – The Feast of St. Sampson the Hospitable


St. Sampson was a Roman physician who sunk his sizable inheritance into healing the poor without asking for any money in return.  After he opened a hospital and homeless shelter in Constantinople, the Lord so approved of his work that he also gave the power to heal through wonderworking as well.  As tends to happen in these stories, the emperor Justinian fell sick with a remedy that only Sampson could heal.  When Sampson obliged, he was offered by the emperor vast wealth which he refused, saying “My emperor, I have had all kinds of wealth in my life, but I left it for the sake of Christ, so that I might gain heavenly and eternal wealth.”  So instead, Justinian endowed a free clinic in Sampson’s name that operated for over 600 years.***

July 31 – The Feast of St. Germaine


A second feast for St Germaine, bishop of Paris?  Didn’t we have one of those back in May?  No, no, this is St Germaine, Bishop of Auxerre.  But don’t worry, he gets that all the time.  This St. Germaine, also called St. Germanus, was sent to England to preach against Pelagianism.  According to the Historia Brittonum, he vied against the mad, evil King Vortigern, who is the big villain in the Arthurian universe during the time of Arthur’s dad, Uther, a part that Germanus ultimately loses to the now much more famous Merlin when Geoffrey of Monmouth tidies up the tale.

Kind of a bummer for a last saint, eh?  But that’s all she wrote–the “she” there being whoever was responsible for the little poorly illuminated folding calendar that I’ve been following for this feature.  Remember, the saints that have appeared in these posts are not the only medieval saints.  Pretty much every day had a saint or three associated with it, and I’m sorry if I’ve not featured your particular favorite on the list. There’s always next year, right?

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*Those who tan leather, not people who frequent the tanning bed.  Tanners (the first kind) sure do have a lot of patron saints.
**Not to be confused with St. James the Lesser, who I have on good authority was a hamster-wheel powered clockwork automaton created by Leonardo Da Vinci.  You can easily tell them apart in medieval illuminations because James the Lesser carries a carpenter’s saw while James the Greater is usually dressed as a pilgrim.  Also, one is a robot.
***And yet many here in the USA self-identify as Christians but nevertheless oppose expanded government health care because of the cost.  WWSSD?

People around here seem to suddenly be interested in talking jousting for some reason, so let me add further fuel to the debate with this little suggestion for jousting reform from a bottom margin from an early sixteenth-century edition of the gospels Luke and John:

See, you don’t have to wear armor to be period-authentic.  All you need is a few wicker baskets and a pair of trusty rams (or are those cows, maybe?) and you’re good to go.  I think Pier One even has a special line of jousting baskets, come to think of it.  But with the ram’s you’re on your own.

Several of you have written in asking me to comment on the recent Times Magazine piece “Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?” so I guess I’d better.

So, is jousting the next extreme sport? In a word, “No.”  Not the way it’s described in the Times piece, anyway.

Look, I love the movie A Knight’s Tale, too, and at times it’s pretty much just a straight pitch for Jousting As Extreme Sport. In fact, one of the things that I like most about A Knight’s Tale is how it taps into the visual vocabulary of modern sport in order to make medieval knights look cool. But that’s just the thing: in order to make jousting knights cool, they had to make them essentially not-medieval. It all became just a football highlight reel with the word “football” crossed out and “guys in armor riding horses” written in in crayon.

And this is to be expected.  We just don’t have the built-in communal language or familiar reference points to elevate jousting to a popular sport once more. We’re too far removed from horses and lances to be able to tell what makes a skilled rider different than an adequate one or a good hit different than a loud one. Sure, we can appreciate a dude getting knocked off a horse, but that does not a sport make. If NASCAR really were just people waiting for a car crash to happen, it wouldn’t be popular enough to make building all those nice tracks worthy anyone’s while, and the TV networks would never show up, not even ESPN 32¾.

I understand the fun of reenactment for reenacting’s sake, but I don’t understand why anyone would think that people outside the immediate circle of reenactors and associated enthusiasts would much care. If jousting really wants to make the break to modern popularity, it probably needs to just drop the medievalism in anything other than name only. Sure, call the athletes knights and let them go by Sir This or Lady That if you want, name their teams or squads or whatever after medievalish things, but drop any pretense of reenacting. Leave the shiny plate mail and the fake British accents to your mascot on the sidelines. Gear up in ballistic nylon and kevlar and figure out a style of helmet that’ll protect while still letting people see some of your face. Devise new rules that have little to do with whatever the 13th-Century Sir Whatsisface would have called proper. Add electronic sensors and an elaborate point-scoring system if you can’t come up with any other way to judge who’s the best than who gets knocked off the horse first.

Frankly, the idea of jousting with several-hundred-year-old weapons and armor would probably be pretty insulting to any of the knights who actually made their living jousting in the Middle Ages. They didn’t technologically handicap themselves in order to meet some artificial standard of authenticity. If there had been some new affordable type of stirrup that kept them from breaking their ankles when dragged around by their horses after unseated by their opponents, they would have been queuing up around the block to get themselves one.

Of course, I realize that my sitting here in my standard issue blogger pajamas pontificating about what would make for a spectator-friendly full-contact equestrian sport is a bit presumptuous, but not half as presumptuous as expecting America, or even a small slice of it, to fall in love with an orphaned bit of medievalia any time soon.

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In a completely unrelated note, I understand from the Times article that there are female jousters out there.  If you know how to get in touch with one, or are one yourself, then please let me know.   I want to interview one or even a few of them to see if I can get Jezebel to throw a link my way. My groundbreaking work on gendered medieval monster body dysmorphism and Viking lingerie just doesn’t seem to have piqued their interest.

A plague of spam comments has finally forced my hand. Comments on posts older than 14 days now require approval.  I promise not to censor your stinging critiques.

That is all.  Carry on.

I think with my recent Mmm… Marginalia I’ve at long last located the medieval equivalent of the old “Honestly, Who Could Be Expected to Make the Right Decision?” (AKA The Internet vs Research Paper) cartoon that would probably be posted on every professor’s office door if professors who tend to post things on their office doors updated said doors more than once every six years.*  Behold!

If I were better at Photoshop, I’d make the sign on the left read “The Margin” and on the right “Historiated Initials”.**  But then nobody’d link this because only I’d care. So my poor Photoshop skills are for the best.

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*Or hadn’t moved on to blogging.
**Or, maybe, “Minstrelry” on the left and “Liturgy” on the right.

I haven’t been doing these* for a while now, but this one is to good to pass up:

“Yes, my device [the Rape-aXe]** may sound medieval, but it’s for a medieval deed that has been around for decades.”

–Dr. Sonnet Ehlers, a South African physician distributing barbed anti-rape condoms at the World Cup, as reported by Fox News, among others.

I’m not sure which is worse–using the word “medieval” to describe something that I’m pretty sure has been around since before humans were humans*** or following it by describing it as a problem that’s been with us for decades. It’s like she gets it wrong coming and going.

Or maybe she is just using a technically correct if unhelpful description. Things that happened centuries and millennia ago did, I suppose, technically also happen decades ago. Perhaps she tells friends “I’ll meet you for dinner in about ten million eight-hundred thousand milliseconds” all the time.

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*That is, posts in which I make fun of the way people use the word “medieval”.
**A female condom with barbs on the inside meant to deter rapists.
***I mean, ducks do it a lot, apparently.

I don’t know much about Charlotte of Savoy, Louis XI of France’s* queen and the mother of Charles VIII.**  But the Pierpont Morgan library owns a book of hours commissioned for her, and man she sure did enjoy a side order of naked people with her daily devotionals.  Oh, the naked people in these margins!  So many of them!  And so often… growing out of flowers for some reason.  Like so:

And so:

Not sure what it all means, except that she had very specific tastes.  Oh, and so my readers who swing the other way don’t feel left out, here you go.  It’s not just naked ladies:

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*Louis XI was apparently nicknamed “The Universal Spider” by his subjects, which I hereby declare the most awesome royal nickname ever devised.
**And the Internet is being unhelpful tonight, so the only fun fact I have to offer about Queen Charlotte is that the putrefaction residue from her bones was recently studied under a microscope by a team of forensic anthropologists and other specialists.  So if you were worried this post might be too sexy, that fact should balance it a little for you.