Remember last month, when I confidently predicted that March would bring a more interesting crop of saints in the little medieval calendar I’m following?  Ah, how my hubris has laid me low once again.  For the first half of March we have 1) David, but not the cool one, 2) a Mercian ecclesiastical administrator, 3) two mothers with seriously pathetic miracles to their claim, 4) a goody-two-shoes pope, and 5) a teen-aged king who got stabbed in the bowels.

March 1 is the Feast of St. David, though in Wales it’s just plain old St. David’s Day on account of him being their patron saint and all.  Outside of Wales, David is less important, which is probably why the English artist for my calendar mistakenly depicted the more famous David, you know, the giant-slaying shepherd boy who went on to become the King of Israel.  Ooops.

March 2 marks the Feast of St. Chad of Mercia.  While I hear that the name Chad is one of the few Anglo-Saxon personal names that remain in use today, the idea of a St. Chad just jars with me for some reason. Chad is the guy who says he’ll be taking care of you tonight at the Outback where tonight our drink specials include the $5 Bonzarita and can I start you guys off with a Bloomin Onion? But St. Chad?  It’s like St. Billy or St. Jeff.

Anyway, the Venerable Bede is the only major source for St. Chad’s life, which is a pity, because that means mostly what we know about him concerns his role in the ongoing dispute with Rome over the apostolic legitimacy of the early British church. Zzzzzz.

March 7 celebrates the martyrdom of Ss. Perpetua & Felicity, a vastly popular pair of third-century Christian martyrs who nevertheless got the short end of the miracle stick if you ask me. Perpetua was a young mother and still nursing her child when she was sentenced to death for her beliefs, yet according to her Passion her breasts miraculously did not ache or swell from lack of nursing while in jail.  Felicity, on the other hand, was Perpetua’s slave and eight months pregnant herself when she was sentenced, yet miraculously she delivered her child one month early so that she could be allowed to be martyred with her mistress (the Romans wouldn’t put a pregnant woman to death, you see).  And that’s it: unachey breasts and a premature birth.  No angels with flaming swords that smite men who think impure thoughts about you, no miraculous ability to continue preaching after your head’s been cut off, no nothing, not even St. Agnes-style rapid hair growth.  For their trouble, they get to be patrons of mothers and expectant mothers, but Mary and Anne usually steal their glory in that department.

On March 12, the Feast of Pope St. Gregory I (the Great) arrives.  Gregory The Great sounds promising, right?  Wrong.  You get surnamed “the Great” for having actual demonstrable real world accomplishments to boast about.  So if you’re a big fan of liturgical reform or the consolidation of papal power, this is your guy.  The rest of us, the ones who want to hear about how a saint smote down a talking seal with holy fire for stealing his asparagus, Gregory is “The Rather Unimpressive” at best.  Hell, Gregory is so unobjectionable that evil Calvin gave him a free pass as “the last good pope.”

This brings us at last to March 18, The Feast of St. Edward the Martyr which is technically in the second half of March, but I’m not ending a post on Gregory, so suck it up.

Edward was King of England for all of three years, sandwiched between Edgar the Peaceable and Aethelred the Unready.  After Edward’s coronation, it is said that a comet appeared in the sky, foretelling the woe that would be visited upon his reign.  Some astronomers in the early twentieth century argued that this was the selfsame comet that appeared in 1248 and 1556, the latter of which coinciding with the abdication of Emperor Charles V,* he whose empire the sun never set upon.**

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Edward was stabbed in the bowels on March 18th, 975, by an assassin that snuck up behind him while he was enjoying a glass of mead.  The lesson here is clear and particularly poignant this year, as St. Patrick’s Day falls on Wednesday the 17th, just before St. Edward’s feast.  It’s best you stop drinking by Thursday,*** lest you be disembowled by hidden assassins. 

After he was stabbed, the Chronicle tells us, Edward tried to ride away to safety but was weakened by loss of blood and fell from his horse, which dragged him by the stirrup across the ground and finally into a swampy bog where he drowned.  And yet, miraculously, a beam of light appeared and allowed his body to later be discovered, which I guess means that March is the month for saints with useless miracles.  I’m sure Edward would’ve preferred to have his bowels miraculously remain unharmed and the mead transmuted into acid which he could spit upon his foes or something.  Then he’d be giving St. Patrick a run for his money, I’m sure.  Pray to Edward for the invulnerable bowels you’ll need for the day after your St. Patrick’s benders!  It’s a tee-shirt waiting to happen–or rather, it would be waiting to happen, if God hadn’t let him be thrown in a bog and gone with the corpse-finding divine flashlight.

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*I’d like it if that were true, because it’d mean that the comet was sort of just practicing for its more important later appearance when it showed up in 975 to kick off Edward’s short and tumultuous reign, or just a hard-working little comet that did its time playing small gigs in little unimportant English royal circles before it hit it big and could land the big imperial stadium shows on the continent.
**Or, if you hate ending sentences with prepositions, try instead “he upon whose empire the sun never set”?
***Don’t let anyone tell you Thursday is the new Friday.  Tell them instead that Thursday is the new Day on Which You Get Disemboweled While Distracted By Drink.

Given the positive reactions to my recent posts, I’ve decided it’s time to make the jump from Internet Crank to Respected Mainstream Author. So here’s a pitch I’m working on:

What do you think?

Why does Step One of the futurist’s Radical New Idea always seem to involve turning the past into an easily dismissed caricature? Take Bruce Sterling’s “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” a speech originally given at Transmediale in Berlin, posted at Wired and linked today by BoingBoing. Here’s a representative sample:

Now, history is a story. And to write down the story of the fourteenth century, to just ask yourself – “what happened in the fourteenth century?” — Feynman style — is a very different matter from asking the atemporal question: “What does Google do when I input the search term ‘fourteenth century?’” I think we are over the brink of that. It’s a very, very different matter.

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you do is go to the operating system, without even thinking of it as a conscious choice.

Don’t you see, man?  Books are for squares.  Books are the tyranny of one word written after another on slips of dead trees.  Pity the people of the fourteenth century who had no way to compare multiple accounts of the past, and pity us just twenty years ago, before the internet liberated our minds, having only one Official History of the Fourteenth Century that dictated the past to us.  The idea that there might be multiple sources of information that might need to be weighed and evaluated, that idea came into being only last year, with widespread adoption of Twitter!

Futurists, hispsters, and assorted somethingpunks, let me refer you to the Malleus Maleficarum, aka The Hammer of Witches, a post-medieval witchfinder’s guide that, nonetheless, is sort of a summa of a lot of medieval beliefs, and more specifically, to said document’s discussion of whether it is possible for a witch to remove a man’s junk.*  The discussion is long and rewards a further look, but let me summarize the main points.

The question at hand is this: Is it possible for a witch to magic away a man’s private parts through demonic aid, or can she merely convince a man through illusion that she has stolen his junk?

To answer the question, the writer proceeds by examining the evidence and the major arguments systematically. 

First, the writer establishes that God has the power to take away a man’s junk:

1. If we read the glosses to Psalms, we know that God often punishes mankind with bad things, including bad things that happen to the body.  So a man’s junk would seem to be fair game.
2. And clearly, God has special power over genitalia, because of Original Sin.
3. If we read Genesis, we see God could turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt–not appear to be salt, but actually into salt.  Magicking away a man’s junk is clearly easier that turning a whole woman into salt.
4. And clearly, whoever creates a natural shape can take it away.  God created us all.

So could it be said that God, who has power over our junk, gives demons authority over our junk?

5. Demons can make natural shapes (see St. Augustine, Book LXXXIII).
5a. But they did not make our shapes, so nix that idea.
6. Further, skillful natural surgeons can remove a man’s junk.
6a. So perhaps demons can do unnaturally what man can do naturally.
6b. However, Augustine also teaches us that demons cannot turn a man into an animal, because command over the natural world is reserved for God only.

So, we may safely conclude that demons have no actual power over a man’s junk.  And if demons have no power over it, they cannot grant that power to witches.  Therefore, clearly, witches do not have the power to steal our junk.

Now we must consider whether it is possible for a witch to use illusion to make a man think his junk is gone.

1. We all know the senses may be fooled.  For example, sweet wine tastes bitter when you have a fever.

So perhaps the devil casts an illusion of smooth, unbroken flesh over a man’s genitals.

2. St. Thomas’s writings show the Devil can cast illusions generally.
2b. And he quotes Augustine, who we already know to  be awesome.
3. Add to that what Aristotle says about dreams: appearances from one part of your memory can be transposed, making you “remember” things that never happened together as happening together.
4. So, clearly, the devil could falsely conjoin the feeling of smooth skin with one’s crotch.
5. Cf. St. Isadore’s writings on glamour, and Alexander of Hales’s writings about a prestige.
6. Humans themselves possess prestidigitatory arts.
6a. If men can fool with illusion, surely demons can.
6b. See what St. Thomas has to say about making men see rods turn into serpents through the smoke of certain herbs.**
7. And clearly God sometimes permits devils to have power over the world.  Indeed, there are five specific ways in which devils may create glamours:
…

I’ll end it there, but it goes on like this for pages and pages.

Now, obviously, many of the sources the slightly post-medieval writers of the Malleus Maleficarum are employing are ones we wouldn’t put much stock in, but still look how often they refer their reader to other texts!  There is nothing linear about this medieval approach to intellectual endeavor.  Even when the intellect is being put to such an absurd question, the medieval mind demands corroboration, multiple sources, and the weighing of the reliability and relevance of sources against one another.

It’s not enough to say, “Oh, yeah, demons could totally enchant your junk.” You’ve got to give a plausible explanation of how it might work, properly sourced and footnoted, so that others don’t have to just trust you on your claim.

And that’s ultimately the difference between the medieval and the post-post-post-modernist. They don’t just point out that there are multiple sources and go, “Wow, man, there’s all these sources, clearly there’s no truth.” They start with the assumption that the world is multiple and discordant and then proceed to build order and sense out of the multiple discord.

So, futurist wannabes, let me offer a new standard for your discussions. I call it the “Pre-Post-Future Phallomimetic Standard of Credibility”–please, start using it. In short, before saying things like, “Networked culture has forever altered the way we gain knowledge” or whatever awesomely outre thing you want to argue, you need to spend as much time thinking about and backing up your claim as the medievals spent thinking about whether the devil could magically remove their penises and give them to witches to keep in trees.

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*This is possibly relevant to the marginal image of the phallus-plucking nun from last week, by the by, even though it’s pretty clear that’s a nun and not a witch.
**That seems to imply exactly what you think it does.

If you’ve read Dante’s Divine Comedy, you know that there’s not much story to the Inferno. A middle-aged man gets chased by some animals and runs until he finds himself in the fire and brimstone section of the Christian afterlife. There, he meets an ancient-writer-turned-tour-guide who promptly takes him on a guided tour. Circle by circle Dante proceeds, Virgil patiently pointing out the inhabitants and finer theological points of each. At no point is there any real sense of urgency or suspense, it’s all just “for those of you on the right side of the boat, if you look out your porthole you’ll see the souls of those who hardly ever called their mothers in life, and those of you on the right, Sonny and Cher!”  Obviously, Visceral Studios, the makers of the new video game based on Dante’s Inferno had a lot to improve upon.

So, naturally, they chose to focus the plot instead on Beatrice’s breasts, making a game more accurately titled Dante’s Boobferno.

Now, before I go any further, I know I have a reputation for sometimes using “the sarcasm,” so I want to be real clear here:  I am making absolutely none of this up.  What follows is the story of the video game Dante’s Inferno, faithfully transcribed.

When we, the gamer, first meet Beatrice’s breasts, they are spilling out of her top, which no doubt sounds titillating, but the titillation is muted somewhat by the fact that the breasts’ owner, the aforementioned Beatrice, has been only recently stabbed to death.  The breasts’ owner’s boyfriend, Dante, is quite put out by this sad state of breastly affairs, having just returned from the Third Crusade, during which he spent many a night longing for them.  Dante falls to his knees before the breasts, first anguished, then surprised, as Beatrice’s soul comes spilling out of her lips and forms into the shape of a naked glowing woman.  While this, too, might sound titillating, again the titillation is muted by the further abuses heaped upon Beatrice’s perfect breasts.  In the afterlife, it appears, her breasts have become riddled with dark black veins.  And to make matters worse, Satan appears in the form of a man made of smoke, gropes the breasts, and takes both Beatrice and her breasts to Hell.

Luckily, Dante has two magic artifacts to help him retrieve the breasts.  The first he found while on Crusade, when he just so happened to meet and murder the Grim Reaper and take his magic scythe as bounty. The second is far more powerful, a golden cross that Beatrice left for him, the selfsame cross she used to hold seductively next to her breasts when she and Dante (and her breasts) made love.

And so Dante is off.  He shortly arrives at the gate of Hell, where he is met by a glowing blue ghost with spikes coming out of his head–Virgil, the poet of antiquity–to whom Beatrice’s breasts recently appeared, glowing and veiny, and bid him guide Dante on his quest through Hell.  Virgil agrees to the breasts’ request, but, sadly, his only means to aid Dante is by quoting lines from a public domain translation of the original Inferno before disappearing into blue mist.  He does this periodically throughout the game, though you can skip him completely if you desire.

Dante journeys through the circles of Hell one-by-one, in the expected order, but before traveling into each, he falls to his knees, clutching his side, seized by the sudden realization that while alive he committed the sin that is punished in the coming circle.  Through these revelations, we eventually learn that while on Crusade, Dante was single-handedly responsible for the massacre of all 2,700 Arab captives that Richard the Lionheart took at Acre.  He then blamed the whole massacre on Beatrice’s brother and allowed him to be executed in his stead.  And to make matters worse, he betrayed his promise to stay true to Beatrice’s breasts by sleeping with an Arab woman in exchange for allowing her brother to go free.  Dante’s excuse for all this appears to be that he thought the bishop’s offer of forgiveness for sins in exchange for taking up the cross was a license to sin as much as you want while on Crusade.*

Breezing through Limbo, land of the unbaptized babies with scythes for arms, Dante arrives in the Circle of Lust, where he is heartbroken to learn that Beatrice and Satan are engaged to be married and that her breasts have been put into a new outfit whose decolletage resembles a spiky vaginal opening.  Satan gropes the breasts again and whisks them further into Hell.

Still, Dante follows the breasts.  But when he arrives outside the city of Dis, things go from bad to worse.  Satan reveals to Beatrice the Arab canoodling that Dante got up to on Crusade, which causes her to finally agree to the wedding.  She eats a magic pomegranate that Satan hands her, which causes her breasts to begin to glow like hot coals and burn with a fire that does not consume them.  Also, she gets a sort of skull-covered corset to hold them up.  Beatrice and Satan french kiss for a while, then he scoops her up and takes her further into Hell.  Dante is so incensed by this that he stabs his scythe into the head of a really, really big demon and rides the demon down after them.

More circles follow, until Dante arrives in the Circle of Fraud, where Beatrice now rules as a demonic, flaming queen.  Also, she has developed a stereotypically evil British accent since they last met.  She taunts Dante while he engages in an arena-style series of ten gimmicky challenges.  For some reason, jumping through Beatrice’s ten hoops causes her to forgive Dante, which allows her soul and her glowing boobs to ascend to heaven.

That leaves only the matter of punishing Satan for his boobnapping.  To make a long story short, we discover that Satan is a little demon that lives inside a very large demon’s stomach (presumably controlling the large demon via a series of pulleys and wires).  Dante breaks Lil’ Lucifer out of the big demon shell and stabs him in the chest with Death’s scythe.  Hooray! 

But wait!  It turns out that this was all one big trick.  Satan always intended for Dante to get down to Hell.  As the wickedest man who ever lived, Dante possesses the power to break Satan free of his imprisonment and allow him to take over THE WORLD muahahahahahahaha!!!!! …somehow.  Satan’s kind of vague on the specifics. But our hero Dante will have none of that.  He explains matter-of-factly to Satan that on his long journey through Hell he has collected many souls. (Ooops.  Forgot to mention that every time Dante kills a demon or one of the damned, they explode like a piñata–a piñata that has souls inside instead of candy.  And since Dante kills a bajillion zillion enemies over the course of the game, he’s not bluffing.)  And those souls now give him the power to defeat Satan… somehow.  He’s kind of vague on the specifics, too.  But his chest starts glowing blue, and all the souls fly out like some sort of Care Bear Stare of God’s Holy Redemption and lock the little Satan back inside big Satan and then lock that Satan inside a prison of ice.

Beatrice’s boobs make their final appearance in the game when their owner appears and lifts Dante out of Hell and into a blinding white light**. When the light clears, we see Dante emerge victorious from Hell to the sight of Mount Purgatory.  No sooner than you can say ‘to be continued…’ a snake slithers by Dante’s foot and the words ‘to be continued…’ pop up on the screen.  Fade to black.

Thus, by the end of the game, you have spent six to eight hours staring at various incarnations of Beatrice’s boobs, with some light platforming and combo-based fighting to break up the monotony.  Hell, they even put her boobs on the loading screens and on the title card.  And all the save points in the game take the form of naked statues of Beatrice kneeling with a sword between her breasts. And this is not even yet considering Cleopatra, the boss of the Circle of Lust, a giant topless purple woman whose purple boobs have mouths for nipples, mouths which shoot out unbaptised Limbo babies, or the Lust demons, who appear throughout the game and pause in their attacks periodically to stroke their own naked boobs. 

You’ve heard of the proverbial devil who’s sick with sin?  After playing Dante’s Inferno, I’m a breast man sick of breasts.

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*Really, he should have wondered if maybe something was up when he saw that the bishop had fangs and a demonic laugh.  Seriously. [BACK]
**Oddly enough, Beatrice’s breasts remain all veiny during this scene, so we must presumably conclude that having dark black veins in your breasts is merely the natural side effect of being a soul that has left its body. Who knew? [BACK]

This week’s marginal image comes to us from the famous Macclesfield Psalter:

The Macclesfield Psalter has made a few appearances in Mmm.. Marginalia over the years. Remember our friends the Knight-Terrorizing Snail, the Man Who Rides a Giant Duck, the Dr. Monkey, M.D., Dog-Ass Man, and Piggyback Aristotle? Of course you do! Now, to their august ranks we may add Horrifically-Maimed Jousting Rabbit.

The image is as self-explanatory as it is gruesome, but two details jump out at me as noteworthy. First, while the green hill with black holes in it is a standard medieval way of representing a pastoral landscape, usually the holes have little rabbit heads poking out of them. The expected rabbits have clearly chosen to flee after they saw what happened to their friend. And second, take a look at the expression on the rightmost horse’s face. He’s apparently quite troubled by what his doggy master has made him a party to.

So, they made a video game out of Dante’s Inferno called Dante’s Inferno. You may have heard.

I’ve got no solid numbers to back me up on this, but I’m pretty sure I’m the best possible person to review this game, as I have degrees in both Medieval Studies and Being Kickass at Video Games,* and a working copy of the game for Xbox 360, which I have played through from beginning to end. Indeed, as you can see, my entire life may have been leading up to this review. Yet be that as it may, this is also one of those times where the mixed audience of my blog makes it difficult to know where to begin.

Some of you reading this are medievalists yourselves, and thus like all medievalists who are not me, you have only a tenuous understanding of what I mean when I use the words “video” and “game” successively.** The rest of you, the ones who come here for the monkey and poop jokes (and you know who you are) are down with video games, but think that Dante is that chubby guy in the movies made by the other chubby guy who gets into fights with airplanes.

In general, my review of the game, which will be posted later today, (or possibly tomorrow, depending) will be pitched to the latter group, so I feel obligated to first take a moment to explain what a video game is for all those poncey academic types. I think it’s best to work by analogy:

A video game is like a book, one with many chapters.  When you get the book, you’re only allowed to read the first chapter, and if you don’t read it well enough, you have to read it again.  When you’ve finally read the first chapter correctly, you can go on to the next, and after that’s read well the next, and so on and so on.

Often it’ll just be one particular page that’s hard to read, and if you mess it up you’ll have to go back and read the whole chapter over from the beginning.

Scattered throughout any given chapter are optional pages, usually very boring and repetitive ones that you’re not compelled to read, but if you do read them, it makes it easier to read the later chapters.***

Sometimes the book will refuse to let you read the next chapter until you’ve done something else unrelated, like solve a crossword puzzle or write your name with excellent penmanship in the margins.

Sometimes the book will suddenly have much better vocabulary and sentence structure, and usually during those times the book reads itself for you.

If you need to stop reading the book altogether for a while and go do something else, you are only allowed to put your bookmark in between certain pages scattered at regular intervals throughout the book.

If you want to reread a particular passage of the book, you may only start at one of the bookmarks and read forward until you get to it.

These books all require very fancy bookcases to read, and periodically new, more advanced bookcases are released which will not hold the books you currently have any more, forcing you to buy (often inferior) sequels to the books you’ve already read, or occasionally updated versions of the original books with sharper text and fancier fonts.

Also, most of these books are about jumping.

There, now that we have that cleared up, we can proceed to the game proper, which I will post about in due time.****

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*And yes, they do give degrees in that. Where do you think Mario got his M.D.? Same place I got my PhD in BKAVG.
**Hint: It has nothing to do with me seeing things in Latin.
***Yahtzee Croshaw beat me to this point, and suggested, further, that perhaps the remaining pages somehow became easier to turn after you’ve done the optional ones.
****Or, possibly, overdue time, knowing me.

I talked to a friend this weekend who informed me that because of last week’s marginalia post–you know, the one with the tree-nesting willies and the women who love them–his workplace’s web filter now blocks Got Medieval as an inappropriate use of work resources and flags it as pornography. So, be warned, this blog is no longer SFW.

Apparently, it’s not the actual content of the post that’s triggering the filter, though, but the link to Trashy.com*, the place from whence I snagged the comparison shot of the modern version of a sexy nun.  So as it turns out, if I hadn’t attributed my source for the picture, the blog would probably be in the clear.

I’m not taking the post down or deleting the link, though.  If the man wants to try to silence me, let him try.  But I do worry what these filters are teaching our children.  Plagiarism preferable to sexiness? Perish the thought.

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*Which, as far as I’m concerned, is a pretty tame lingerie website.  There were many sexier and NSFWer pictures available elsewhere, from domains probably not blocked by this particular web filter.

I mentioned my hunt for a good digital copy of this week’s image back when I discussed the political implications of the mural at Massa Marittima, and now at long last, here it is.  From BnF MS Fr. 25526, a 14th-century copy of the Romance of the Rose:

Why is the nun out collecting male tackle?

 Well, it probably has nothing to do with witchcraft, even though the Malleus Maleficarum mentions that witches have the power to detach a man’s danglies. Rather, it’s probably just your run-of-the-mill joke about how lusty women (or, in this case, nuns) are.

Now, whenever I post an image like this, I tend to get incoming links from people shaking their heads at “those repressed medieval monks scribbling naughty things in the margins of manuscripts.”  And that always annoys me, because 1) these manuscripts weren’t usually made by monks.  Most of the images in my Mmm… Marginalia series were produced by professional commercial scriptoria staffed with secular illuminators who market these books to very rich laypeople.  And 2) even though some medieval monks might have been sexually repressed, don’t forget, we moderns trot out stuff like this every Halloween:

Mote, beam, eye, and all that.

Now, for those of you now convinced that this blog has no shame and the blog’s bloggist has no sense of propriety,* please note that I did not use the penis-plucking nun as my Valentine’s Day marginalia, instead opting for the much tamer King of Love.  I’m the very model of restraint, I am.

Oh, and as a bonus, here’s the same image from a contemporaneous wooden altar carving:

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*And no, this wasn’t all some clever ploy to try to up my Google rankings by bringing in all those people searching for “hot sexy nun porn!!!!” either.  I repeat, if you’re looking for “hot sexy nun porn” Got Medieval is not for you.  Please go elsewhere for all your “hot sexy nun porn” needs, for they will not be satisfied by this blog and its decidedly un-“hot sexy nun porn” focus.  Also, if you want to “get whiter teeth without expensive visits to the dentist” or “buy gold at cost” or “lose weight following one simple rule just like area mom,” this blog won’t be of much help there, either.  Just to be clear.

Manuscript image via Culture and Questions Qui Font Debats.

“Hey, February’s more than half over, so shouldn’t we have had part two of the feast calendar by now?” asks a thoughtful but misguided* reader.  I suppose so, dear reader, I suppose so.  But when you see what boring saints February has left, you probably won’t be so keen on prodding me into posting.

February 16 is the Feast of St Juliana, another virginal casualty of the Diocletian persecutions.  Stop me if you’ve heard this one already: beautiful chaste Christian girl is betrothed to a Roman pagan, refuses to marry him, and his beheaded for her trouble.  Same old same old.  Later legends claim that Beezelbub sent one of his sons to seduce her while she was imprisoned awaiting execution, but she managed to hold him spellbound with the power of her disputation.   This is why she’s often depicted leading a demon by a chain–but not by the artist of this calendar, oh no, that’d be too interesting.  So instead she holds a Bible, presumably because Bibles are easier to draw.

February 22 marks the Feast of the Cathedra of St. Peter.  Before you go proofreading me in the comments thread, I spelled that correctly.  It’s not the feast of the cathedral of St. Peter, but rather of his cathedra, or in English, his chair.  That’s right, the medieval Catholics had a feast to honor the chair that Peter sat on.  In fact, February 22 is the second feast on the liturgical calendar dedicated to a piece of furniture that Peter sat on–January 18 celebrates the chair of St. Peter kept in Rome, while the later feast is devoted to his chair in Antioch.**

February 24, or February 25 in leap years*** is reserved for St. Matthias, the apostle who the remaining eleven brought in to replace Judas after the crucifixion.  Matthias either died an old man or was stoned to death and beheaded by the Jews.  You decide.  (Hooray for alternate legends!)

February 28 sees the Feast of St. Oswald of Worcester, not to be confused with August’s St. Oswald of Northumbria.  He’s famous for building and refurbishing monasteries and died while washing the feet of the poor, as was his wont.

So there you go: a generic virgin, a chair, a second-string apostle, and a foot washer–that’s what you’ve got left for the remainder of February.  Let’s hope something better’s waiting in March.

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*As if anything here were ever on time.
**Modern Catholics might take offense at the hint of disdain in my description here, so I should add that, to their credit, the Catholics have dropped the first feast from their celebrations.  Since the 1960’s, there’s only been one holy day for Peter’s furniture.
***As his feast is fixed to the fifth day before the Calends of March.