On May 19 it’s time to “check in” with St. Dunstan, the 10th-century Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury responsible for keeping watch over goldsmiths, silversmiths, blacksmiths, locksmiths and, well, pretty much any smith except those who hang around with Morrissey.

According to legend, Dunstan is the medieval precursor to Johnny from “Devil Went Down to Georgia.”  In Dunstan’s version, though, when the Devil goes down to Dunstan’s forge in Somerset, looking for a soul to steal,* there’s no anvil of gold bet against his soul.  Rather, the Devil takes on the form of a beautiful woman and dances around the forge seductively. Dunstan is so intent on his smithing that he doesn’t look up (or, possibly, he suspects that girls randomly showing up to dance for monkish blacksmiths might be up to something untoward), causing the Devil to add more booty to his dance and more bump to his grind in a vain attempt to entice the saint-in-training.  But the poor Devil adds so much booty and bump that his skirts fly up, revealing hooves where girlie feet should be.** The jig up, Dunstan grabs the Devil by the nose with his red hot poker, holds him still, and shoes him like a horse. For this reason he’s generally shown holding a pair of tongs, as above. 

Next up is The Feast of St. Aldhelm , which rolls around on May 25.  Aldhelm, a late-seventh-century Anglo-Saxon bishop was exactly the kind of writer I hate the most: his Latin is obscure and full of difficult technical constructions that he busts out just to show that he’s the kind of writer who knows how those difficult and technical constructions are supposed to look.  Like I care that you know how to properly form the pluperfect passive subjunctive.

St. Augustine, yet another Archbishop of Canterbury, has his feast on May 26.  Well, I suppose it’s a little dismissive of me to call him “yet another” Archbishop–he was actually the first Archbishop of Canterbury and part of the first formal missionary delegation to the Angles and Saxons from the Roman Church.  As such, he was tasked with converting the British pagans, but also those pesky British Christians who’d had the audacity to be converted by Irish missionaries instead of proper Roman ones.  This involved arguing at great length about when Easter is supposed to be kept, mostly, as these Irish missionaries were the sort of backwards thinkers who thought that determining the date holiday pegged to the cycles of the full moon ought to require looking up to see if the moon was full instead of using out-of-date lunar charts.  Cretins!

Hip existentialists Satre and Simone de Beauvoir hailed from the neighborhood in Paris called St. German, named after the Parisian saint whose feast is celebrated on May 28.  As bishop, German is remembered mostly for his involvement with the various Merovingian Kings of Paris with names like Childebert and Charibert, the latter he excommunicated for marrying two sisters at the same time.

May 31 marks the Feast of St. Petronilla.  Originally, she was said to have been the daughter of St. Peter–yes, that St. Peter, the one with the keys and the papacy and the rock upon which the Church was built and all that.  Bet you didn’t know that Peter had a daughter so beautiful that he had to lock her up in a tower, or that he prayed to God to give her a fever that wouldn’t go away until she agreed to remain a virgin.***  That’s probably because later Catholics decided that Petronilla was only a “spiritual” daughter of Peter’s, a girl he converted to Christianity and not his flesh and blood. Whether or not she was Peter’s girl, she became a martyr to virginity by going on a hunger strike when a foreign potentate demanded her hand in marriage.  Girls in unwanted arranged marriages pray to her for intercession, but given her track record it seems to me like that’d just be a one-way ticket to starving fevered in a Rapunzel-style tower–but who am I to judge?

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*Whether he was in a bind and out of time and looking to make a deal is unrecorded.
**I imagine he didn’t change his feet because he’d already picked out the nice long swishy dress and they’d be hidden. And if he’d changed his feet, there would’ve been the issue of what shoes to wear, and if he’d gone with the open-toed pumps then he’d have had to spring for a pedicure–it’s just a lot easier to wear long skirts.
***If shotguns had been invented, surely he would’ve sat in a rocking chair on the porch of his tower cleaning one whenever suitors came over to see Petronilla.

The Ridley Scott Robin Hood movie comes out today, and in celebration I’ve invited Jennifer Lynn Jordan, blogtress of the blog Per Omnia Saecula, to come by for a special two-blog edition of her blog’s recurring feature Bad Medieval Movies.  Today, we’ll be looking at the 1991 be-coloned Kevin Costner Robin Hood, AKA Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. On the off chance that the name Bad Medieval Movies isn’t self-evident, let me turn it over to JLJ for a little explanation:

Per Omnia Saecula: Hi there, people. As you probably know, Hollywood loves making Bad Medieval Movies. So last summer I started making fun of them, to the approbation of most and the extreme irritation of some internet pedants. Then a while ago, Carl invited me to do it here with him.  That’s pretty much it. And now that we’re all on the same page, let’s get this thing started.

Got Medieval: What the hell is this crap, Jenn? I thought you said we’d be watching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, not William the Conqueror: Prince of… Conquerors.
POS: First, you realize we’re not actually watching the movie right now, right? We’re writing about a movie we’ve both already seen. This isn’t MST3K.
GM: And you realize that were not actually talking to each other in real time and that we’ve been emailing this post back and forth and editing it for a while now? So if we’re going to be playing pretend anyway, why can’t I pretend like I’ve never seen it before now?
POS: You can’t. No one who has ever seen this movie can pretend they haven’t. I know, I tried. Like, eight years of therapy tried. You’ve watched it. You can’t unwatch it.
GM: Fine. For the record, I was only pretending I was pretending.
POS: Is it always this meta around here?
GM: More or less, yeah.

POS: Alright, I’ll play your game, you rogue. Yes, we are “watching” Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and for some reason it begins with a montage of images from the Bayeux Tapestry.
GM: As the explanatory setting note will tell us soon,* the movie begins in Jerusalem, 1194 A.D., but the Bayeux Tapestry commemorates the Battle of Hastings, of 1066. It’d be like opening a movie about two streetwise New York Cops in present day NYC with a montage of grainy celluloid shots of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
POS: Or like opening Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with daguerreotypes of Martin Van Buren and William Henry Harrison.
GM: Two street-smart president cops, one only days from retirement, the other a loose cannon who plays by his own rules. Tippecanoe this, motherfu–
POS: Language! And focus. At this rate we’ll never get to Kevin Costner’s waterfall scene.
GM: Au contraire. We’re already there! Look in the upper right margin of the screen cap. It’s an embroidered naked guy’s ass. Deliberate foreshadowing?
POS: I’m constantly surprised, impressed, and disturbed by your skills at perceiving marginal butts from a great distance. You should try it with your hands tied behind your back and one eye closed.

GM: So, the movie starts with Robin as a Crusader prisoner of war–
POS: Who looks like the “It’s” man from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
GM: –who randomly decides to save the life of the film’s Token Moor, Morgan Freeman as Azeem–
POS: (whose entire character arc is based on made-up Islamic law)
GM: –who follows Robin home to England, where they land at the white cliffs of Dover and walk all the way to Nottingham in one night.
POS: It should be common knowledge at this point that Costner’s every move is aided by a flight of angels, who barely allow his feet to touch the ground. He can walk most places in one night.
GM: But before they get back, Costner’s dad, Brian Blessed–
POS: You mean BRIAN BLESSED!!!*****

GM: Yes, BRIAN BLESSED!!!!!, the original large ham. In a surprisingly muted role by his standards. He only shouts like a third of his lines.
POS: So Robin’s dad is just chilling in Castle Locksley******* writing a loving letter asking some noble for news of his son in a painstakingly rendered authentic medieval hand. I believe it’s called “Lucida Caligraphy pt. 12.”
GM: But before he can send the letter, the KKK shows up and kills him, led by Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in an Eyes Wide Shut mask that he apparently had made just so that he could terrorize Locksley in style.

POS: Rickman is so delightfully evil. He throws hissy fits, he exploits women, he consults the Dark Arts! He has a PERM IN THE MIDDLE AGES!
GM: Dark arts were behind that perm.
POS: For sure. Dark Arts he would later defend against at Hogwarts. Perms are really insidious.
GM: He sure does a lot in this movie. He kills people with dull spoons (because it’ll hurt more!), he casually rapes various servant girls, he cancels Christmas–
POS: He invented the digital wristwatch, he killed JR, and he wrote Twilight. He’s a mess of evil.
GM: A hot pagan mess, but basically the best thing about the movie.
POS: By far. He’s the real star of the film–no, wait, his HAIR is the real star of the film. That perm! And isn’t it significant that when Robin defeats him in the final battle, he has to cut off a lock of that perm first?
GM: Never thought of it. I always thought it was some pathetic tortured pun on Robin of LOCKsley.
POS: No, it’s his lifeforce!  The secret to all his powers! That, or his exposed chest.
GM: I didn’t notice the chest. When was it exposed?
POS: All. The. Time. Most explicitly in his first scene, when he’s storming around being lecherous and greedy and war-mongering. Right before seeing Mortianna.
GM: And this chest… it’s appealing?
POS: When compared to Costner’s wares, absolutely. Snape has got it going on.
GM: I’ll take your word on that. So, are we done talking about Rickman now?
POS: Almost. OMG RICKMAN I WANT YER BABIES. That is all.

GM: What the hell is this?
POS: Don’t be coy. That’s the foreshadowed ass you were talking about earlier. It’s only fair, to move from my obsession to yours.
GM: I’m not obsessed with Kevin Costner’s ass. It’s just the real real star of the film, that’s all.  It had its own agent, got its own trailer on the set, riders in its contract about the bottled water and hemorrhoid creams acceptable in its trailer, the whole nine yards. But we were–before you started squeeing like a school girl–relating the plot. What does this ass have to do with the plot?
POS: Well, after a little altercation with Guy of Gisborne, the Sherrif’s extra-growly cousin, Robin finds out everything from his father’s trusty servant Duncan, who was blinded and left to die by Rickman’s KKK boys, and goes to flirt with his childhood friend Marian, then he ends up in the woods and for no readily apparent reason gets made king of the Merry Men who are already living there, and then Marian goes looking for him and finds him swimming by a waterfall. And enter Costner’s ass, stage right.
GM: I think that’s stage left.
POS: Whatever. The important thing is that the fast-paced action grinds to a halt so that we can stare at Marian and her maid staring at Costner with barely controlled desire.
GM: It’s very feminist. Inversion of Hollywood’s “male gaze” and all that.
POS: Does the fact that he seems to have been tanning in his bicycle shorts add to the feminism?
GM: Bicycle shorts are very feminist. There’s an entire chapter on them in Our Bodies, Ourselves. And check this segue out: I’ll bet Azeem invented them.
POS: You want us to talk about the anachronisms now, I take it?

GM: Why not? I carefully screen-capped this shot of Costner standing in front of a glorious Die Hard-esque explosion, so we’d might as well use it. It wasn’t easy, I might add. There’s basically one frame here where Costner looks kind of cool, and the rest of the time he looks like a doughy pasty-skinned doofus.
POS: I applaud your devotion to glamor shotting Kevin Costner. I’m sure his agent appreciates all your work.
GM: Forget Costner and his glorious, glorious ass for just a second. I want to talk about how much crap Azeem or his Muslim relatives invented.
POS: Telescopes, gunpowder, quick-recovery emergency forest c-sections like the one they must’ve given Little John’s wife…
GM: The Sheriff of Nottingham’s digital watch.
POS: We keep coming back to this…
GM: It’s the most famous line in the film, isn’t it? After the bit about the spoon. The Sheriff points at one terrorized, weeping peasant girl and says “You, my room, 10:30 tonight.” Then to another: “You, 10:45, and bring a friend.”
POS: Oh, how I love a good rape joke.
GM: I guess all medieval movies have to figure out a way to work in an explosion somehow, and that’s hard since the Middle Ages were noticeably short on explosions. Enter the helpful Arab with secret Muslim recipes for napalm, gunpowder, and/or unmanned Predator drones.
POS: Usually it’s just the gunpowder though.
GM: Gunpowder is Hollywood’s famous anachronism, it’s true. Just once I’d like to see someone who tries to invent gunpowder in a period piece just plain fail. Or better yet try to invent, say, a toaster and succeed.

“What sort of demon magic have you wrought now, Moor?”
“Why, this device will allow you to select the darkness of your toast.”
“Dark toast, demon Moor? Toast ought to be lily white, like the ass of our fair leader, Robin of Locksley.”
“Allah, in his wisdom, allows for many shades of toasted bread.”

POS: Aaaaand scene.

You’ve reached the end of this part of the Bad Medieval Movie review, but fear not, there’s more! Please redirect your browsers to Per Omnia Saecula for the thrilling conclusion.

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*POS: I thought you hadn’t seen the movie. How do you know what the note’s going to say?**
**GM: Holy crap–who gave you access to the footnote machine?***
***POS: You think you’re the only one with an asterisk on their keyboard?****
****GM: Fine, fine, go ahead, footnote away. But you have to use daggers.†
†POS: Daggers are cooler anyway.
*****GM: You know, this would work better if you would stop interrupting me.††
††POS: If you don’t want to be interrupted, stop ending your sentences with two hyphens and sending them to me with space left for me to interject and instructions to do so.******
******GM: Give a girl a little meta…
*******GM: Played admirably by Wardour Castle, which, coincidentally, would’ve probably been within walking distance of Dover.  I’d keep adding helpful footnotes, as is my usual wont, but we wasted a lot of asterisk there with that exchange.

Hey, guys, have you heard about the new cool thing for academic bloggers? OK, maybe it’s not really that cool, but it is new: copping to the first two things you purchased from Amazon.com.  Even though it has little to do with the Middle Ages, and I’m not sure there’s much point to trumpeting your originary bourgeois ideotemporality, heck, why not?  I’ll play along:

According to my order history, the first thing I ever bought from Amazon was the second edition Mummy handbook for the World of Darkness tabletop RPG, back in 1997.* 

Then, apparently, I didn’t buy anything else until 1999, when I purchased a new Star Wars Episode I Electronic Naboo Royal Blockade Runner Playset.  I’ve already admitted a few times here on the blog that I used to collect Star Wars figures, so I can hyperlink to this purchase without shame.  Indeed, it looks like I got a pretty good deal on the toy at the time:  $40 bucks for something that retailed at around $120.  Too bad I would one day drop the thing off at the Salvation Army, after I tired of collecting and the bottom fell out of the collectibles market on eBay.**** C’est la vie.

So, there you go.  My Amazon records provide a record of the quick turnover in my (now long-discarded) hobbies.  What do your purchases say about you? 

Those of you without blogs, feel free to admit to your first two Amazon purchases in the comments here.  I promise not to judge you, and you’re certain to come off less geeky than me.

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*If this blog were a WoD sourcebook, I would follow that sentence with, “Or, did I…?”  because all affirmative statements in the World of Darkness must be immediately undercut by the hinting the opposite and trailing off into elipsis.**
**Though some suggest that on the first night of Gehenna, all elipsis will be undone–but, this, perhaps, is itself but a story fit only for a newly sired childe…***
***Or is it…?
****Though some say that the toy is still, even today, in the deepest reaches of the Umbra, waiting…

My little folding saints calendar picks up this month on May 1 with the Feast of Ss. Philip and James the Less, two apostles who went their separate ways after the Resurrection, Philip to Turkey and James to Jerusalem. They are celebrated together because their bodies were, it is claimed, moved to the Church of the Twelve Apostles in Rome and consecrated together after their deaths. Poor James got stuck with “the Less” because Jesus didn’t have the foresight to find twelve guys with different names for his merry band, and James, son of Zebedee, was either taller, older, or more awesome than James the Less, depending on who you ask.

Also, depending on who you ask, James the Less might have been Jesus’s brother, or alternately one of the six or so other Jameses who appear elsewhere in the New Testament. (It was a popular name.) According to later tradition, James–whichever James he was–was so given to kneeling in prayer that the skin on his knees became as callused and hard as some part of a camel or other (possibly the camel’s knees, but other people say camel’s horn, or hoof–something hard, that’s all we can really be sure of). He was also too holy to bathe or shave. This may or may not be why he was stoned to death.

Philip, too, is often confused with another Biblical figure, Philip the Evangelist, so May 1 is probably a good day to celebrate mistaken identities, confused recollections, and designer knockoffs. Tonight, go rent Transmorphers and friend people who have the same names as people you went to high school with while drinking Evan Williams and Dr. Thunder, I say.

May 3 marks the Feast of the Invention of the Cross, that is, the day on which St. Helena* discovered the True Cross. The discovery wasn’t happenstance. Her son, the Emperor Constantine (yes, that Constantine), had appointed her Augusta and given her unlimited access to the imperial treasury to fund expeditions to recover holy artifacts. She also brought back parts of the Burning Bush, the nails of the True Cross, the Holy Tunic worn by Jesus and some rope used to tie him to the cross. So she was sort of the Indiana Jones of the fourth century, I guess,** though history does not record whether she ever had to contend with an elaborate series of spinning blades and rolling boulder traps. (But let’s just say she did, K?)

May 6 is the Feast of St. John the Apostle, not to be confused with !SPOILER ALERT! St. John of Beverly, whose feast falls a day later on May 7,*** and also not to be confused with the roughly 200 other Catholic saints named John.  Truly, May is the month for people named the same as other people.

Now you might be saying, wait a minute, didn’t we already have a Feast of St. John back in December?  Yes, we did, but that feast celebrates John for his immunity to poison, while the May 6 feast, called more properly The Feast of St. John Before the Latin Gate, celebrates the time a Roman emperor tried to boil him alive in a cauldron of oil.  (!SPOILER ALERT! It didn’t work.)
John of Beverly, on the other hand, never did anything so interesting as not being boiled.  He’s just a minor English church-founding saint who makes it into this calendar because he’s English and so is the calendar maker.  Patriotic nepotism.

May 12 brings the Feast of St. Pancras, who according to my reasearch is a London Underground station.  Why they canonised that nest of tunnels and stairs is beyond me a victim of the Diocletian persecutions.  A young soldier who converted to Christianity, he refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods and was thrown to beasts in the gladiatorial pit.  According to the more interesting account of his martyrdom, the beasts would not devour him until he gave them permission.  Why, exactly, he gave them permission, is not recorded.  In Spain, he’s the patron saint of health, which for some reason means they get real creative with parsley on his day.  Go figure.

—

*St. Helena of Constantinople, not St. Helena of Troyes or St. Helena of Skövde or Mount St. Helens. I know I’m always confusing St. Helena of Skövda with the former fifth highest peak Washington.
**Don’t laugh. Lucas and Spielberg have already greenlit Indiana Jones and the Bits of Rope Use to Tie Jesus to the Cross. Coming Spring 2012!
***What’s the statute of limitations on spoilers, again?   Some people still haven’t seen Fight Club.  Clearly, I have to use a spoiler tag if I want to blog about how Tyler Durden turns out to be a ghost.  But that movie’s only ten years old.  John of Beverly was canonized in the eleventh century, so I think I’m in the clear, but you never can tell.

It never really occurred to me until this past week, but I guess it makes sense. We get the English word “Volcano” from the accusative form of Vulcan’s Latin name. With all those stranded European travelers hurling accusations at a certain volcano* of late, it should be an easy bit of etymology to remember.

In honor of said accused volcano, I offer you this image, taken from the Farnese Hours, a late sixteenth-century** book of hours currently held at the Morgan Library (MS M69):

The Index of Christian Art identifies the man with outstretched arm as Vulcan himself, igniting the fire within a smoking volcano (though if you ask me, it might just be a purple cloud near a mountain peak).  The nude man surfing down the smoke plume (or nearby mountain), however, has yet to be identified.  Here’s a closeup image.  Let me know if you have any ideas.

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*Sure, I could ctrl-c + ctrl-v the volcano’s name from a web news source and pretend I know how to spell it, but what would be the point?
**I hope you’ll forgive me for using a late sixteenth-century image for my Monday Marginalia post, but volcanoes don’t feature very heavily in medieval art, due to the decided lack of active volcanoes in continental Europe.

Should you find yourself kidnapped during the second half of this month, you could always pray to St. Alphege, whose feast is celebrated on April 19.  He handles kidnappings year round, of course, but it’d just be extra fitting this time of year.   St. Alphege was known in life as Ælfheah, or “High Elf”, though probably for no interesting reason (sorry, Tolkeinists–lots of Anglo-Saxons just had “elf” in their names). Whilst a bishop, old High Elf was captured by Danes but refused to give in to their terrorist demands and would not allow himself to be ransomed. In response, the Danes got drunk and threw cowbones at him for a while, and when they got tired of that, they popped him on the head with the butt end of an axe and he died, proving once again that you don’t have to be very good at the thing you become saint of.  Personally, if I were kidnapped, I’d pray to someone with a better track record.

April 23 marks the Feast of St. George the patron saint of frikkin’ everybody: England, Germany, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece, Georgia (natch), Serbia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macdemonia, Moscow, Genoa, Ljubljana, Beirut, Qormi, Victoria, et al.* Both Shakespeare and Cervantes died on St. George’s Day, so if you’re a famous canonical writer (and it’s 1616), be careful! These things come in threes.

On April 25, the Feast of St. Mark is celebrated. Mark is represented above, as expected, by a lion.**  According to tradition, Mark was a North African Christian who was killed by pagans in Alexandria.  His remains were later transferred from Alexandria to Venice by two brothers who had the clever idea of covering them completely with pork fat and skin, which rendered them untouchable by the Muslims (who had taken over Alexandria by the time of the move) who might have tried to stop them.  For this bit of Venetian culinary craftiness, Mark should be the patron saint of Baconaise, Bacon Bits, and the Baconator, but instead he’s the patron saint of Venice.  Catholics, there are some serious synergy opportunities out there for saintly patronage, and you’re just letting them slip through your fingers.***
  
April 28 marks the Feast of St. Vitalis, an early Christian martyr who was tortured on a rack and buried alive either by Nero or Marcus Aurelius–the dates for his life aren’t secure, so nobody can say for sure. There’s not much to his story other than the way he died, but he did come from a very saintly family.  Both his wife (Valeria) and his two sons (Gervasius and Protasius) made the canonization cut as well.  And for some reason I’ve not yet been able to discover (and am tired of looking for), he’s the patron saint of Thibodaux, Louisiana.  My guess is Thibodaux got its draft pick in the saintly fantasy lottery pretty late.

And there you have it, the rest of the saints for the month of April, at least according to Bodleian Library MS. Rawl D30.

—

*Thank you, Wikipedia, and the man who invented ctrl-c and ctrl-v.
**Each of the four gospel-writers is represented by an animal symbol (corresponding to those four animals found by God’s throne in Revelations, and if you ask me Mark got the best of the four options.  John’s Eagle is alright, but poor Luke is stuck with an Ox, and Matthew a man.  That’s right, St. Matthew, who was–as far as we know–a man himself, gets represented symbolically by a man.*** I suppose nothing symbolizes a thing more accurately than the thing itself. 
***Sometimes the man has wings like an angel, though, which is admittedly somewhat cooler and less tautological.
****As though your fingers were coated in bacon grease.  Remember, Catholics, your religion is bacon friendly!

Is there an Internet meme that cannot be spruced up with a bit of Bayeux Tapestry photoshoppery?  I submit that there is not.  Whether it’s….

Oregon Trail parodies,

Kanye letting ya finish (or, rather, not letting you, but promising he will),

the continued resurgence of the back that your baby has,

thrust vectoring,

Photoshop-spotting,

Pokemans that must be showed,

or Will Smith tributes,

The Bayeux Tapestry has you covered.

Surely there’s a paper for next year’s PCA/ACA conference in this somewhere, no?

I’ve been thinking a lot about scribes, ever since my distasteful interaction with Douglas Rushkoff of some days back.  Scribes are such misunderstood figures in our intellectual history.  Outside of Variety headlines, the word “scribe” always seems to carry the faint whiff of censure, it seems to me, and undeservedly so.  When modern ears hear the word, it probably conjures up the image of an aged monk bent over a page under sputtering candle light, squinting, quill clutched between his fingers, his back cramped as he copies mechanically the words of others.  So to combat that, here’s my favorite medieval image of a scribe:

The image is found in Yale MS 229, the gigantic compilation of Vulgate Arthurian tales, the manuscript of butt-trumpet, arrows-in-butts, monkey doctor, and egg-laying man fame.  And not only is there no hunching or grueling toil, this young, happy scribe gets a place of honor in court right next to the king.  His seat even looks more comfortable than Arthur’s, if you ask me. 

Scribes feature prominently in the Vulgate Cycle (which includes The History of the Grail, Merlin and its continuations, Lancelot, and The Death of King Arthur), because the unifying fiction of the Arthurian story is that it all happened not just “once upon a time” but for real, and the way we know exactly what happened is that Merlin (and later Arthur) always had scribes on hand to record their every word.  Like The Office, sort of, but with quill pens and vellum.  In the image above, Arthur is having his knights dictate their various adventures in the search for Lancelot to the scribe.

The medievals didn’t have thought balloons, but I’m fairly certain that the image up in the upper margin is meant to reflect the inner workings of the mind of the scribe in the main image. Note the styling of Arthur’s throne, with its two lion’s heads carved on the arm rest, then follow the line of the scribe’s pen back up into the margin, where a monkey-fighting knight rides a hybrid grotesque composed of a horse and two lion-headed winged creatures roughly configured in the same way as Arthur’s throne.

No knight fights monkeys while astride a winged-lion-horse beast during the quest for Lancelot, so I’d like to think that the scribe is punching up the stories as he records them.  And, really, what story wouldn’t be better with a few homicidal monkeys added?

It’s also possible that the scribe is doodling a doodle in the margins of his own book inspired by the shape of Arthur’s throne while he listens to yet another knight explain in boring detail how he didn’t find Lancelot but did joust three knights of different colors one after the other and later found out that they were all brothers and he’d accidentally de-maidenized their sister… and so on and so on.  Anyone who’s read the Vulgate knows how ungodly boring and repetitive it can get at times.

Imagine you were interviewing for a job.* The interviewer shuffles through your application package one last time and then looks across the desk to say, “Your references are all top notch, you’ve got the experience we’re looking for, and so I’d really love to offer you a position, but before I can, I need you to memorize the following facts and pay someone $160 to verify that you have. Ready? Here they are: 1) 2 is the smallest prime number and the only one that’s even; 2) x% of y is the same as y% of x.” Confused, but game, you ask, “Is that all?” and are told, “Almost. I also need you to 3) learn how to make a factor tree and 4) memorize the decimal and percent equivalents of the simple fractions from 1/2 to 1/10.”

Sounds crazy, right? Yet that is precisely what graduate admissions committees tell thousands of applicants each year. Granted, they don’t put it in those exact words. Instead, they’ll note the surprisingly robust applicant pool** and the difficult time they had arriving at a decision, and they’ll wish the rejected all the best in their further endeavors, but what they’re avoiding saying outright is this: your application was cut in the early stages of our review because your GRE score was about 100 points below our school’s acceptable range.

Most schools don’t realize, of course, that the difference between a GRE score of 1000 and one of 1100*** boils down to acquiring some passing familiarity with those four simple facts. I only know it because I’ve worked (on the side) in the test prep industry for about eight years now, and in that time I’ve raised a lot of 1000’s to 1100’s, and while there are many roads to a 100 point increase, the road most traveled is paved with some version of these four. Some students travel the road alone, navigating it with $30 books bought at Barnes and Noble, others pay up to $120 an hour for someone like me to guide them down it.**** Those without the cash to spend on prep courses and materials can sometimes find their way down it, too, but that way usually requires a lot more work.

Obviously, most grad programs don’t care if their students are dab hands at calculating percentages without calculators, and why would they? But they care about GRE scores, even though they say they don’t. Your GRE score is always one of the first items on the application. Schools make decisions based on a set Mendoza line that varies from school to school, even though they say they don’t.

So why do they? Likely it’s due to a vague institutional memory of the time when U.S. News and World Report factored the average GRE score of the admitted students into the arcane proprietary formula they use to make their rankings. They haven’t been using GRE scores for some time now, though it might be hard to remember because undergraduate, business school and law school rankings all still do factor in test scores.

Luckily, the people who make the test have given us the perfect excuse for dropping the test sooner rather than later.  Next year, the GRE is changing. Beginning in Fall 2011, the testmakers are 1) dropping antonyms and analogies from the verbal section in favor of more reading comprehension, 2) scaling back geometry in the math section in favor of more data analysis (charts and graphs) questions, and 3) restructuring the score so that math and verbal are combined into one score pegged to a 130-170 range.  These changes might seem just like a minor superficial calibration, but they actually matter quite a lot.  They make an already suspect test even worse. Allow me explain.

Notice that there were no verbal tips in my 100 point facts. That’s because the verbal section–as it’s currently administered–is a lot harder to quickly prep a student to take. As a glance at the official scoring scale will show, the scores on the verbal section are lower than those in the math across the board. The top math score (800 on a scale of 200 to 800) puts you in the 92nd percentile of test takers. To be in the 92nd percentile in verbal, you only need a 650 (on the same scale of 200 to 800), and at a 740 verbal you’re in the 99th.

There are a couple of quick point boosters in the verbal section to be sure. Students usually don’t know that the analogies the testmaker is looking for must be definitional, for one. PERNICIOUS:LIE will never be found in a question on the test nor in the correct answer to a question, because lies are not always pernicious and not all pernicious things are lies. X is sometimes Y, often Y, occasionally Y, usually found with Y, and so on are all incorrect by the GRE’s metric–a metric they never explicitly state in the directions to the test.***** Likewise, students don’t know that when the testmaker uses the word “infer” they’re using it in the strictest sense, not to mean “something that’s reasonable and likely given the provided information” but rather “something that absolutely must be true given the provided information.”******

As it stands now, these verbal point boosters aren’t nearly as useful as the math ones because the verbal section includes one further challenge that can’t be easily coached away: vocabulary. Knowing how analogies work according to the testmaker is a useful thing, but even then you do still need to know the definitions of the twelve words used in the question and answers. I can tell you what the top 100 words used over the course of the GRE are, but there are still enough obscure words in the English language that memorizing those 100 is of but small help.

Now some of you might protest that knowing the definitions of any particular set of less-frequently encountered words is as irrelevant to graduate work as knowing how to calculate percentages in your head. You might also continue by pointing out that words like mercurial, aver, inveterate, eschew, restive, inchoate, or stentorian are cool and all, but knowledge or ignorance of them is likely not the best indicator of future success in graduate school. And you’d be right. A robust vocabulary is neither sufficient nor necessary for success in graduate school. But, having one tends to correlate with reading widely and attentively, and being well read is a very good indicator of graduate school success. By dropping analogies and antonyms from the test, you lose that (admittedly imperfect) correlation with an actually useful marker.

The testmakers would likely contend that skill at reading comprehension is far more important to graduate work, and they’d be right. Problem is, their version of reading comprehension actively discourages the sort of reading that you do in grad school. Take this sample paragraph from the official website of the testmaker:

Picture-taking is a technique both for annexing the
objective world and for expressing the singular self.
Photographs depict objective realities that already exist,
though only the camera can disclose them. And they
depict an individual photographer’s temperament, dis-
covering itself through the camera’s cropping of reality.
That is, photography has two antithetical ideals: in the
first, photography is about the world, and the photogra-
pher is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the
second, photography is the instrument of intrepid,
questing subjectivity and the photographer is all.

If you were to read something like this in graduate school, one would hope you’d take a moment to consider what the author means by objective and subjective and whether the author’s definitions line up with the other literature you’ve read.  You might take issue with the use of the word “mere” to describe observers and “intrepid” and “questing” for the artist or at least consider what sorts of unconscious biases the author might be revealing through using them.  Perhaps you’d even begin preparing counterarguments for the class discussion, because surely nothing good could build off of such a simplistic dichotomy.

On the test, those thoughts would actively interfere with your ability to score points.  In other words, thinking like a grad student would make it harder for you to get into grad school.  As your expensive GRE tutor will tell you, it’s important to completely ignore the question of whether the author is correct or not, to isolate the passages from any context, really, and never to consider whether the author is being fair or biased.  Sadly, it’s usually the best students, the ones I’d most want to have in a grad class, that have the hardest time turning off the inquisitive, critical, and discerning parts of their brains in order to answer the sorts of questions the GRE asks.  Come Fall 2011, they’re going to have a rougher time of it.

Losing geometry in favor of “data analysis” might also seem like a good change to the test.  Few really need to know the characteristics of isosceles right triangles in grad school, but surely the ability to understand and manipulate data is important, right?  Certainly.  But the way the testmakers tend to test your ability at data analysis is by asking simple questions in bizarre ways.  They don’t care if you know in what sorts of situations a median measure is superior to an average, for instance, or whether a certain sample size is large enough to make claims about or not.  Instead, they’re just going to try to trip you up by writing the scale of one chart in centisomethings and another in decisomethings and hoping that you don’t notice.

And finally, if nothing else I’ve said above has convinced you that this test measures neither jack nor squat, the change to the scoring system ought to.  It’s not that there’s something inherently superior about a test that scores you between 400-1600 in ten point increments over one that operates on a 130-170 scale of one point increments.  Rather, it’s that both scales are designed primarily to obscure what they’re actually reporting.  Is a 150 a good score or a bad one?  And how much better is it than a 145?  And how does it compare to a 760 on the old test?   Why switch from a system with 141 distinct scores to one with 41? Beats me, but that’s the point.  It sounds more sciencey and legit when the system is opaque and off-putting, so they go out of their way to make it harder to understand.   Wouldn’t someone who cared about being understood go out of their way to use a familiar scale–say, 1-100?

If you’re wondering why they’re making all these changes in the first place, it’s probably because the GRE and the GMAT (the test used by business schools) are no longer administered by the same company.  ETS (the company that puts out the GRE) is trying to horn in on the GMAT’s market by making their test more palatable to business school admissions boards.******* I say, let the business schools have it.

P.S.  If anyone’s wondering it there’s some sour grapes behind this unprompted screed, there’s not.  Indeed, I’m one of those people who’s naturally good at tests.  My scores rocked and with them I got into the best program around.  And, as I said, I make a fair amount teaching people how to game the test.  It’s not fear or disappointment that has bred my contempt, but familiarity.  Since I know that some people who actually have some input in admissions read this blog, I figure it can’t hurt to bring the subject up, especially since we’re pretty much done with the admission and recruiting season for this year.

P.P.S. Also, if you’re worried that I might now be in trouble with my corporate overlords, don’t be.  No one should take my comments above as a signal that you shouldn’t take a prep class for the GRE if you’re considering grad school.  Indeed, knowing how easily gameable it really is should send you Kaplan- or Princeton Review-ward that much quicker.  Are their courses really worth $1100?  Absolutely.  Consider the difference in your job prospects graduating from a top 100 school vs a top 25, or a top 25 vs a top 10.  Consider the different financial aid packages an extra hundred or so points might put you in line for.  Grad school is a freaking expensive gamble. The cost of a prep class, a tutor, or some books is a drop in the bucket.

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*In this economic climate that might take a bit more imaginative oomph than normally, but play along.
**Year in, year out, the pool is always surprising.  Either we need committee members with longer memories or the pool must grow exponentially better each application cycle.
***And in the lower range, the difference between, say, a 600 and an 850, because the scale is not linear.
****Not what I personally charge, but rather my price plus the markup tacked on by the test prep company that employs me.
*****Instead, they bury this distinction in the secondary materials that accompany your enrollment ticket and in the preparation section of their website.
******If after reading that last sentence you patted yourself on the back and said, “duh, of course infer doesn’t mean ‘what’s likely’!” keep in mind that the most common way the testmaker phrases inference-based questions is by asking “Which of the following does the author most LIKELY believe…”
*******How exactly this appeals to business schools I don’t know, but that is the motive.