Egg-Laying Dude, the Dude What Lays Eggs (…for some reason), has been the official site mascot for over a week now, and yet I still haven’t changed the picture at the top of the page.  What’s up with that?  Well, remember when I said that my copy of the image is just a crappy old transparent gif I kludged together from a poor scan? That’s still true.  Now, we could spend all day arguing about whose fault that is,* or we could take constructive action.  And by we I mean you, plural, could take constructive action.

Indeed, two of you plural have already gotten the ball egg rolling by producing two amazing images of egg laying men–and completely without any prompting or begging from me whatsoever.  Those of you who are fans of this blog on Facebook have already seen one, made by Nanina D’Onofrio, which she posted there not eight hours after the official announcement of the mascot.  But in case you’re not a Facefan, here it is again:

That’s some fine historiation, I say.  (Oh, and if you’re not a fan of the blog on Facebook, it is your solemn duty to now become one.)

The second image arrived in my inbox care of Bethany Myers (its creator), and it is similarly impressive:

I know, I know, it’s like you’ve already lost the contest and you didn’t even know it was happening.  Wait, did I say contest?  Come to think of it, I didn’t, but I typed it.  Here, I’ll type it again and longer: Got Medieval is having a contest to create an image of Egg-Laying Dude, the Dude What Lays Eggs (…for some reason) suitable for gracing the top margin of this humble page.  Consider the gauntlet well and truly thrown, artists, by these two outstanding submissions.

I suppose it’s possible that some of you have been waiting until an actual contest was announced to submit your entries, and don’t you look stupid now.  But others, I imagine, are waiting because they want to know what they get in return for doing my work for me.  So a prize is in order. 

Remember how I got a free Dante action figure with my Gamestop pre-order of the most boobtastic game ever derived from a work of classic literature?**  Here he is again, from that triumphant midnight launch:

My wife told me when she first saw him that he would not be allowed to remain in our house.  (We’ve been on a whole decluttering trip since the nightmare move from New Haven and it still took us two further moves to convince me to get rid of my big popcorn tins of miscellaneous worthless Star Wars figures.***)  So this will let me kill two birds with one stone, getting rid of a useless piece of plastic while at the same time allowing me to avoid having to contact the Beinecke to beg for a high-quality scan.  It’s a win-win (by which I mean that I win twice!).

The contest will run for two weeks, ending at midnight EST on April 20th.  The determination of which image is the most awesome will be left solely up to me, and I will presumably use arbitrary and possibly dramatically unfair standards to calculate the awesomeness quotient of the submitted images.  All submissions should be sent to gotmedievalblog@gmail.com.  Or, if you hate email, you can post it directly to the Facebook page.  Include with the submission the name or alias by which you’d like to be identified when I post the image, but don’t include an address or anything–we’ll get to that once you’ve won.

Also, I’m not sure what legal mumbo jumbo I should put here to indicate this, but if you submit the image to the contest, you’re basically saying it’s OK for me to post it, talk about it, and if it’s picked as the winner use it however I want after that.*****

So let’s see us some eggs and dudes sitting upon them, people!  Chop chop!

—

*And there are lots more of you than there are of me.  I’m just sayin’.
**And yes, I’m including in my claim Super Moll Flanders Brothers (the embarrassing Commodore 64 Pitfall clone), Tiresias Topsy-Turvy (the short-lived pack-in game for the GBA tilt sensor accessory) and the Atari 2600 classic Custer’s Revenge (which, as you know, had a very limited console release solely to qualify for future Internet gaming websites’ sexy game top ten lists).
***Yet, ironically, selling the valuable half of my collection is what paid for our wedding rings.  But my wife says that irony is not a good excuse for hanging onto boxes of Yakfaces, Dengars, and Tatooine Flashback Tatooine Lukes.****
****OK, so she didn’t actually use their names when she told me to get rid of them.  She couldn’t tell a Flashback Tatooine Luke from an Antique Force Detail Tatooine Luke if her life depended on it.
*****Like, say I were to hypothetically write a screenplay starring a streetwise egg-laying cop who’s partnered with a rookie wise-cracking ambulatory vulva cop.  I could send George Lucas a copy of the winning image and say, “Make me a plastic this in 3/4″ scale, pronto, and make sure it fires missiles” and you’d just have to shrug and curse your poor judgment when you saw it warming a peg at Wal-Mart.

April’s here and spring has finally sprung: chirping birds and budding buds and so whatnot. What better way to celebrate than with three grinning reminders of the transience of all mortal delights?

This page above is found in Houghton Library MS Lat. 249, a late fifteenth-century Burgundian book of hours.  The text reads “Placebo [Domino]; dilexi quoniam exaudiet Dominus: vocem orationis [meae],” or roughly “I will please [the Lord]; I have loved, because the Lord will hear the voice of [my] prayer” which is the opening of the Office of the Dead. The man in the central illumination is Job on his dung heap speaking to the Lord, who is indicated by the single beam of gold light that stretches diagonally from the top right corner.

As if Job–you know, the guy whose family was killed, health was ruined, and home and all worldly possessions burned because God made a bet with the Devil–wasn’t depressing enough on his own, the illuminator populates the border with three corpses, one from each estate (clockwise from the top: those who work, who fight, and who pray).  Here, let me gather the gang all together you can see them better:

From a distance you might mistake them for monkeys, the way they seem to frolic and ape the different classes of men, but the hollow eye sockets, rotted away noses, and gaping holes in their abdomens (made by festering digestive acids [and bacterially produced gasses] after their deaths)** betray them on closer inspection.

Together with the three men (Job and his two friends) in the main illumination, the corpses create something of an ersatz Three Living and Three Dead, a popular incarnation of the memento mori [remember that you will die] theme that’s often found in later*** medieval art.  (Wikimedia Commons has several other versions of 3 men & 3 corpses available here.)

So, happy spring, everybody!  And remember, the millstone of time will inexorably grind away everything you hold dear!****

—

*Distinguished from the other two by his lack of distinguishing features.
**Which is what happens when you don’t have an embalmer to vacuum out the insides of the departed and sew them back up for you.
***For “later” read “after the plague that killed 1/3 of the population of Western Europe.”
****On the upside, you’ll be dead for most of the grinding.

Since April 1 has become a Schrodinger’s box of not-funny, I held back the feast calendar till today. Apologies are therefore in order to poor St. Mary of Egypt, who has the misfortune of sharing her feast with the feast of fools, so we’ve already and missed it. My bad.

According to her Vita, Mary lived her life between the ages 12 and 29 as one long orgy, casual sex both her vocation and avocation. Mindful of her looming 30th, I suppose, she declared she’d go on anti-pilgrimage to Jerusalem to sleep with the pilgrims celebrating the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross. But when she arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where the true cross was being shown, she found herself restrained by an invisible force, and this convinced her to pray, and one thing led to another, and she ended up stripping herself naked and running off to live in the desert as a a precognitive hermit like you do.

If you’re lacking for plans this weekend, you could always celebrate the Feast of St. Richard of Chichester, which comes on April 3. If you’ve never heard of him, that’s no big surprise. His main miraculous claim to fame is that he dropped the holy communion chalice during mass and yet not a drop sloshed out of the upended cup.  He ought to be the patron of scotch guarding for that, but I don’t think they’ve assigned one of those yet.

But if Richard doesn’t strike your fancy, you could wait until April 4 and the Feast of St. Ambrose. Ambrose is kind of a big deal, one of the four original doctors of the church.  According to legend Ambrose was naturally so holy and mild that when he was a baby a swarm of bees landed on his face while he slept in his cradle and didn’t sting him once, instead departing after leaving a single drop of honey on his lips.

This honey-tongued bishop is said to be the source of the proverb “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” a paraphrase of his response to St. Augustine when asked what to do about divergent liturgical practices.  Seems the Romans fasted on Saturday, but the Milanese did not, so when he was in Rome in a Saturday he didn’t eat, when he was in Milan he did.  In other words: Hakuna Matata.

April 11 marks the Feast of Pope St. Leo (the Great).  Leo was pope when Attila the Hun arrived at Rome and was part of the delegation that convinced Attila to spare the city.  Some say it was the large amount of gold that Leo brought with him, others that Attila’s supply lines were overstretched and he was looking for any excuse to stop, and still others (of a more hagiographical bent) claim an angel with a flaming sword visible only to the Hun had something to do with it.

Ss. Tibertius and Valerianus lay claim to some day or other in April (the calendar I’m working from puts it on April 14, but it varies quite a bit from calendar to calendar).   The two brothers are real slouches as second-century saints go, famous only for their association with the far more famous St. Cecilia. Valerian was her husband and his brother Tibertius her brother-in-law.  Both died by being beheaded after torture they were able to endure for a few extra days by thinking on Cecilia’s piety.  I guess even with saints it’s sometimes all about who you know.

Alas, my “Pre-Post-Future Phallomimetic Standard of Credibility” doesn’t seem to be catching on. Witness the continued resistance of Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life, Inc. to it here.* Seems he recently gave a talk called “Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for the Digital Age” for the SXSW lecture series, which means that people continue to pay him to still think it’s worth their time to gather round and listen to him† provide wisdom such as this (a direct quote):

[These] are the stages that our civilization has moved through in successive stages of media.  We went from people who just lived in a world that had rules that we don’t even know what they are.  Maybe it’s going to rain, maybe it’s not.  Maybe if I sacrifice my kid to Moloch I’ll get some plants this year, maybe I won’t–people just randomly trying to find some predictability. Then we get texts.  We get the 22-letter alphabet.  So now instead of relying on priests to read everything for us and hieroglyphs now we can make our own words.  Then we get the printing press which in theory lets us instead of depending on a few scribes now anyone can write.  And then we get the computer which of course means now anyone can program reality.

 And then a little bit later, he sums up with this provocative question.

Text gave us Judaism.  The printing press gave us Protestantism.  What does this one [programming? computers?] give us?

Presumably, this is the sort of work for which he won the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.‡

So according to this award-winning writer, public intellectual, and frequent NPR contributor, the main virtues of the alphabet were that it finally allowed us to read for ourselves instead of having the priests read everything to us and that it allowed us to make our own words.***  Then came the printing press which freed us from the tyranny of that secretive cabal of scribes**** who kept people from writing for themselves.  The final development, that computers were invented and now let us program reality, is surely a mistake of the moment–he was speaking off the cuff, without notes, it seems–but since the non-mistaken parts of his speech are so nonsensical, I can’t really speculate as to what he meant to say there.  (But computers are awesome, I think we can all agree there.)

There’s so much crazy here that I don’t really know where to begin.  Perhaps I’ll just point out that Judaism had been around for a long time before the Hebrew alphabet and that most of the intellectual heavy lifting in the Protestant Reformation was done years earlier by the humanists, many of whom were scribes by trade and lived well before the printing press*****–but that’s all minor quibbling.

But still, I do wonder why it is that scribes have such a terrible reputation these days.  Rushkoff is not the only person who uses references to medieval scribes to indicate the terrible state of human affairs pre-printing press or the only person to treat the printing press like a divine miracle that elevated mankind in one brilliant flash.

The printing press didn’t come into being ex nihilo.  Gutenberg was an entrepreneur (one who needed to make a quick buck to pay back some investors whose money he’d managed to lose in an ill-advised saints relic scam).  He invented the printing press (or, possibly, stole the idea from someone else) in order to satisfy the already-existing demand for books, a demand that had until that point been met by the work of scribes.  Without legions of scribes toiling diligently to produce books for people to read, there would’ve been no market for Gutenberg’s great invention. Why would anyone be interested in a device to make texts cheaper and quicker if they weren’t already interested in texts to begin with?

We should be celebrating those anonymous scribes.  It was because of their work, not in spite of it, that the modern world was made.

—

† My mistake corrected 4/1/10.  SXSW paid Rushkoff no money for his talk.[RETURN]
‡ Do I toss in this reference to Rushkoff’s award because I’m jealous? Hell yes. When people refer to my blog, they say things like, “You know, that place run by that crank who stares at monkeys’ asses all day.” I desperately want them to be forced to say, “You know, that award-winning web magazine run by that well-known public intellectual who stares at monkeys’ asses all day.”[RETURN]”

*Why do I link BoingBoing so often?  Am I hoping to start a whispering campaign to get myself a week of guest editorship over there? Surely not!**  Still, I was pretty pleased to see that when Xeni Jardin finally got around to posting a link to the Wansink Last Supper study, the first three comments by the BoingBoingkateers were direct references to my little takedown piece.
**But wait–maybe this is a rhetorical use of false modesty!
***I’ll bet the first new word invented was “alphabetastic,” coined in that first moment of euphoria when the masses realized their newfound freedom.
****Most people don’t realize it, but S.C.R.I.B.E. is actually an acronym for Society of Cruel Religious Ingrates Bent on Evildoing.
*****Indeed, it was probably because the humanists were so intimately familiar with scribal activity that they put such an emphasis on direct interaction with holy texts and were so concerned by the problem of having Official Interpretations handed down to them by corrupt hierarchies.  If anything, they wanted more people to be scribes.

Not sure why, but phantom Read More…s are appearing at the bottom of posts that have no more to be read.  Must’ve broken the template (again).  Sorry for the inconvenience.

In the comments thread on the poll I put up to help select my new mascot, some wag suggested I just find an image of “an egg-laying monkey with a vagina” and let that be the mascot, combining the Egg-Laying Dude, Jaunty, and the Cannon Monkey into one glorious gestalt. This week’s image, which comes from perennial blog favorite Bodleian MS Douce 6 (AKA “The Bumper Book of Medieval Monkeys”), is as close as I could get:

It’s 2/3 of the way there, at least!  As you can see, here we have E.L.D.T.D.W.L.E.(…f.s.r.), laying his eggs for a pair of monkeys. Why does one monkey wear a robe while the other goes naked?  Does the Egg-Laying Dude realize that there’s another monkey behind him stealing his eggs while he’s busy talking to the robe-wearer?  And just where are the Egg-Laying Dude’s legs?  The world may never know.

Well, the poll’s been up for about a week now, so I figure everybody who’s going to vote on this site’s new mascot has already voted. Time to make this sucker official. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Got Medieval‘s new official mascot, Egg-Laying Dude, The Dude Who Lays Eggs (…for some reason):

Frankly, I’m pretty surprised by the result. The winner garnered 38% of the vote, outpacing odds-on favorite Jaunty by 13%, and leaving the old reliable place-holder monkey in the dust.

I’ve written about E.L.D.T.D.W.L.E(…f.s.r) here on the blog once before. This image of him is found in the very first manuscript with gothic marginalia I ever worked on, Yale MS 229, a gigantic book that was once the third member of an even-more-gigantic three-volume medieval compilation of the Old French Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian romances.  That kind of makes him the inspiration behind this whole recurring feature, so in that way, I suppose he really is the best choice for blog mascot.

Thanks, all who voted.  Now, I just need to get a better scan of him.  Unless anyone out there is particularly good at drawing egg-laying dudes and wants to help with a certain blog’s new banner…

I think most college towns have a place where you can buy burritos advertised as being “as big as your head!”  One opened up across the street from North Campus during the autumn of my undergrad days, and still today I can remember the disappointment I felt when they pushed one of those special burritos across the counter.  Yes, it was technically as big as my head, but only providing you measured the burrito along its longest axis and my head along its shortest, and regardless it was mostly just lettuce when you bit into it.

I felt that same sting of disappointment today when I read about this new study that purports to show (with the aid of new computerized analysis techniques) that portion sizes have been increasing in depictions of the Last Supper for the last thousand years.  You’ve seen them already, surely, but on the off chance you haven’t, here’s a representative example from Fox News: “Super-Sizing the Last Supper?“*

So as you all know (or having taken a detour to Fox now know), the study was put together by Brian Wansink of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and his brother Craig Wansink, a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College.  The two claim to have arrived at their conclusion by comparing the size of the heads of the apostles to the size of the various foodstuffs and plates on the table before them in “52 of the best-known paintings of the Last Supper.”**  Their research is set to be published in the International Journal of Obesity next month.

To put it simply, this study is a load of crap.  It’s a load of crap as big as your head.  With my head, Jesus’s head, the apostles’ heads, and the Brothers Wansinks’ heads thrown in for good measure.

Where to begin?  Perhaps with the claim that the authors studied “52 of the best-known paintings of the Last Supper”.  By “52 of the best known,” they mean that they consulted† got all their data from one book, Last Supper, put out by Phaidon Press.  And that’s it.  Just the one book.  And it’s not a particularly rigorous treatment of the Last Supper, either, more or less just a coffee table book, the sort you’d find marked down on the big random rack at the front of the Barnes and Noble, sandwiched between Dragonology and the thirteenth and fourteenth volumes of the complete collected Garfield. It’s like they literally grabbed the first book on the Last Supper they saw and decided to end their research there.

Last Supper makes no attempt to be representative or thorough with respect to time period, region, medium, or style; it’s just 52 pretty pictures.*** It doesn’t take an expert to worry that 52 paintings might not be enough to cover 1000 years across all of Europe and America.  Even if the paintings were spread out evenly–and they’re not–that’s only one data point every twenty years.  And it requires assuming that all the cultures that fell under the heading “medieval”–from Syria to Scotland–developed at the same rate in both artistic representation and food-size preference, and that these preferences were likewise expressed in the same way in the cultures that developed from the medieval European ones–from Catalonia to California.

Now, before I go on, I don’t want to set myself up as an authority on all art of the last 1000 years or even all medieval art.  My degrees are in literature, not art history.****  I’m no expert, but I’ve dabbled, and I’ll constrain my comments to the period in which I’ve dabbled, which covers roughly the first 2/5ths of the thousand years discussed in the story.

We might call those 400 problematic years “the High and Late Middle Ages,” or we might call them them “the four-hundred years before linear perspective became popular” or we might even go so far as to call them “four-hundred years during which the size of objects in art was not meant to convey their relative dimensions but rather their symbolic importance.”   OK, those last two are a bit clunky, but accurate nonetheless.  To show what I mean, let me start with the picture that no doubt springs immediately to mind when I say “Last Supper,” da Vinci’s version, made circa 1495:

As anyone with an Art History 101 class under their belt could explain to you, da Vinci, through some clever geometric trickery developed by Brunelleschi, gave his two-dimensional image the appearance of three-dimensions,  partly by drawing objects in the foreground larger than those in the background and partly by lining up the straight edges  in the image so that if they were extended they’d converge on a single point at Jesus’s head. 

Now, take these examples of medieval Last Suppers, culled from various manuscripts (which will zoom if you click them):

Notice that there’s only a rough sense of three-dimensionality to any of the images.  And that’s not the only bit of proportional wonkiness:

1. Jesus is tall.  Real tall.  Like, half a head taller than any apostle in Douce 313, a head and a half in Douce 293, and in M. 360 he’s roughly twice as big as most of his buds.
2. While the tables are generally drawn in front of the participants, there’s no attempt made to fit the table to the apostles or vice versa.  In Douce 313 the table is roughly as wide across as Jesus’s legs and could fit in his lap if he wanted.
3. St. John, who sleeps in Jesus’s lap, is a tiny baby man.  Sure, anyone would look small next to Sasquatch Jesus, but his whole body is only a little bigger than Judas’s head in Egerton 2781.  He could use one of the pieces of bread on the table as a pillow. 
4. Everybody has freakishly long hands and feet.  Feet and hands as big as whole fish are the norm.

There are good reasons for all this other than “medieval people just couldn’t draw,” of course.  For instance:

1. Size is often relative to importance.  Jesus is so big because he’s the most important one in the scene. 
2. Furniture and architecture are just not interesting to medieval artists. The tables are present just to set the scene, to tell us where we’re at.
3. St. John is small because he’s there as an attribute.  It’s just like St. Catherine–who they tried to put to death on a wheel–is usually shown holding a wheel that’s way too small for her to fit on.  The wheel is there to remind us of the story of how she broke the wheel by touching it, not to provide comparative wheel/body ratios.  Tiny St. John is just reminding us of part of the story of the Last Supper.
4. The hands are huge because we need to see the gestures they’re making.  The gesture conveys information that medieval eyes could immediately read, even if it’s obscure to us.

In effect, the spatial proportions in these images serve the meaning behind the images.  They’re not meant to reflect physical reality. And that means that comparing the size of pieces of food to holy apostolic body parts is so much nonsense, at least for the first 400 years that the study claims to discuss. 

I don’t have a copy of Last Supper, so I can’t tell you if any of the images I pulled are in the study.  I rather doubt it.  If they were, you’d think there’d be at least a footnote in the paper mentioning that by the fourteenth century the apostles ate chickens and fish that were almost as big as their friend St. John and that Jesus could swallow all three whole if he wanted to.  But I do know a couple of images that appear in the book.  Here’s one, a carved wooden panel found in Notre Dame de Paris:

The human proportions in it are a bit more realistic, I’ll give you that.  St. John isn’t pocket-sized, and the food is all respectably smaller than the heads of the eaters.  But if you look at the left side of the image, you’ll see that the castle that the apostles are eating in is about the same height as they are, and it’s guarded by soldier that would only come up to their waists.  So while the bread is smaller than the apostles’ heads, that’s only because they’re castle-sized giants. Most things are smaller than their heads. Bakers working round the clock with ovens the size of city blocks must make their bread.

You’d think this would throw off the tidy steadily increasing curve they drew to accompany their findings, at least for the twenty years on either side of 1400.

One final note.  The actual paper that’s going to be published next month appears to be about five pages long, double spaced, bibliography included.  So that means that with this blog post I’ve officially written more on the subject than they have.  When’s CNN going to call and ask me to give my expert opinion on how many fish Jesus’s could fit in his freakishly oversized mitts?*****

—

† From reading some of the enthusiastic links to my piece out there (thanks, all!), I realized that I inadvertently gave the impression that the only book the authors of the study used at all was Last Supper.  I meant to indicate instead that they took all of their Last Supper images from this one book.  They do in fact cite other books about the Last Supper–maybe six or so more–but all their data comes from one very unrepresentative collection of Last Supper pictures. [RETURN]

*The link is meant as no sly dig at Fox’s reporting style.  There’s really nothing special about the way they’ve handled the story compared to other outlets.  Even the lame McDonalds reference is de rigueur.  You can find the same story and the same joke at NPR, the BBC News, and USA Today as well.
**This quote taken directly from the brothers’ website advertising the study.
***Actually, it’s more like 200 pretty pictures, but it includes sculptures and carvings, too.  And this is meant as no sly dig at the book itself.  It is what it is.  As the Director of the British Museum says in his review, it’s a nice series, with “well produced” images “from all over the world, supreme masterpieces rubbing shoulders with surprising and magnificently chosen obscurities.”  If you want a copy, you can pick it up for $5 used or $10 new at Amazon.
****Though, to be fair, neither of the study’s principles have degrees in art history, either.
*****I’m pretty free tomorrow.  Just throwing that out there.

This week’s marginal image is technically also a bleg, because I cannot for the life of me remember where I got it from.  So if you’ve seen this before, drop me a line in the comments and let me know where.  And here it be:

Normally I refrain from posting images that I don’t know the provenance of and images that are damaged, so this one should be doubly disqualified, but I like it for two reasons.  First, it’s a doppelganger of an image I’ve already posted, actually the first Mmm… Marginalia from way back in the day, which I called “To Arms, My Monkey Brethren.”

Recasting familiar scenes with an all-monkey cast is a joke that’s been going strong for at least a thousand years now,* and any time I can find an original motif and its simian parody I’m a happy medieval art scholar.

But back to the original scene.  Instead of monkeys defending their castle from foxes, it’s damsels and woodwoses–and that’s the second reason I’m fond of this image: I can’t get me enough of them woodwoses!  Woodwoses (aka wodewoses) are wild men who have been away from civilization so long that they have grown shaggy hair over their entire bodies.  You can think of them as the medieval answer to Bigfoot.  (And you might remember the woodwoses from their marginal battle against the monkeys during the monkey apocalypse.) Most woodwose are born, but it’s possible to have woodwositude thrust upon you, too.   You know how it is, you find out the girl you love is unavailable for some reason or another and the grief drives you mad and sends you out into the wilderness to live all naked and hairy for a few years.** Most famous medieval heroes go through a woodwose stage at some point.

You can also think of woodwoses as the poor man’s monkey.  If you’re having trouble telling them apart, the best bet is to look for the beard.  Monkeys are clean shaven, by and large, while woodwoses’ facial hair resembles Rip Van Winkle’s. And while they’re not as popular as monkeys, woodwoses do get up to a fair amount of mischief in the margins of manuscripts.  For some reason, they really catch on towards the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern era, so you see a lot more of them in the margins of books from the end of the fifteenth century on.

The antagonism between this week’s woodwoses and the damsels in the tower is a little atypical, though.  Usually, damsels and woodwoses get along smashingly, and who wouldn’t get along with a hairy naked bearded guy?***

—

*Manuscript illuminators would’ve been big fans of the sixties TV show Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp.
**And eventually you hear music, or you come upon some damsels out for a ride, or you smell cooking meat, or you catch sight of your beloved and you come to your senses.  Happens to the best of us and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
***Other than monkeys, of course.  Their antagonism is understandable, though, since they have to compete for the same marginal jobs aping famous medieval commonplaces.