Hey kids, remember, Valentine’s Day is less than a week away. In honor of that most romantic of holidays, I present you the most romantic of marginal images, the King of Love from the Maastricht Hours*:

According to Andreas the Chaplain (or Andreas Cappellanus, if you prefer), thirty-one rules have been handed down by the God of Love. They are as follows**:

1. Love is greedy.
2. Love is jealous.
3. Love is always growing or fading; it is never still.
4. If love fades, it dies quickly and rarely revives.
5. Jealousy makes love grow.
6. It should take nothing at all to cause you to suspect your love might leave.
7. If you could never suspect your lover of leaving you, then you are not in love.
8. To love is to be controlled by love.
9. Everything the lover does is done out of love.
10. The lover thinks nothing good that would not please their beloved.
11. Secret loves endure; the public rarely do.
12. Easy love fades easily; the more difficult the love, the sweeter.
13. If you desire another, then you are no longer in love.
14. There is no sweetness when love is forced.
15. No one should be denied love.
16. Good character alone makes a person worthy of love.
17. The young do not love, though they think they do.
18. No one can love two people at the same time.
19. A new love puts to flight the old.
20. And yet nothing prevents two people loving the same person.
21. Even married people may fall in love.
22. But unless you could marry your lover without shame, you are not in love.
23. It takes two years a widow to mourn a true love lost.
24. If you can see your beloved without going pale, you are no longer in love.
25. If you can see your beloved without your heart skipping, you are no longer in love.
26. If you do not fear losing your beloved, you are no longer in love.
27. True love makes you restless, kills your appetite, and keeps you up at night.
28. Love can deny nothing to love.
29. You can never get enough of your beloved, if love is true.
30. If loving too much worries you, you will rarely love.
31. If you are truly in love, you will think always of your love, without ceasing.

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*The same manuscript in which you may find “To Arms, My Monkey Brethren.”
**Paraphrased (in some cases substantially) and re-ordered for modern eyes and ears by moi.

Update [2/5/10]: It’s all good. The bodley server is behaving again and the saints are now safely returned.

A couple of people have already contacted me worried over the lack of the usual crudely drawn manuscript image from (Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 939) in this month’s feast calendar. I’d like to reassure you that everything’s going to be all right, but, alas, the Bodleian’s servers don’t seem to be cooperating, so I can’t grab the image just yet.*

But to tide you over, enjoy February from an Early Modern (ca. 1630ish) Norwegian folding calendar instead:

If the Bodleian keeps being difficult, I guess I’ll switch over to this one, which does have the benefit of fewer saints, even if it’s a little out of period. And such cute little drawings!

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*If I were on top of things, I’d have downloaded all the calendar scans for the remaining months some time ago. But, alas, I usually fly by the seat of my pants on this recurring feature.

From the 14th-Century Urban Dictionary* by way of the Luttrel Psalter:

Vomit Foxes	21 up, 118 down
To be so surprised/disgusted/annoyed that you spontaneously begin expelling members of the family vulpis from your mouth. “Oh my, what is that monkey doing with that trumpet? How dreadful. Pardon me, good sir, I must retire to my hereditary family estate and vomit foxes.”
[Related:] hurl beaver testicles signify the incarnation get all reynard on your ass

Or maybe you’ve got a better explanation for this, smart guy:

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Sorry this is late, everyone–I was busy saving humanity from the Collectors this week. Nothing I could do about it.*

The February feast calendar kicks off on February 1 with the Feast of St. Bridget of Kildare. Bridget, the patron saint of chicken farmers and bastard children, is one of three saints who stake a claim to being the patron saint of Ireland. Because Bridget (or Brigid or however you want to spell it) is also the generic name for Irish fairy goddesses, there’s a slew of miracles attributed to St. Bridget, lots of them involving food: she could magically replenish depleted butter stores, make fruit trees refuse to give fruit to the greedy, turn stones to salt, turn water to wine, and make a small quantity of beer miraculously satisfy the appetites of hundreds of people.

February 2 marks the Purification of the Virgin, also called Candlemas, the day that Mary’s ritual uncleanness was removed at the temple, though these days it’s more often celebrated as the day that Jesus was first presented at the temple instead. Ritual purification just doesn’t have the cultural cachet it once had. Heathens.

The Feast of St. Blaise is celebrated on the very next day, February 3. Blaise is one of the 14 Holy Helpers, medicinal saints who are thought to have special powers over various areas of the body. Blaise can be invoked against sore throats and other throat-related ailments, because (en route to his appointment to have his flesh torn by iron combs for his refusal to renounce his faith) he healed a boy who was choking on a fish bone.

While not one of the Holy Helpers proper, St. Agatha, whose feast falls on February 5, has special powers to heal ailments of the breasts, on account of having had hers cut off for refusing to worship pagan idols. Like Bartholomew, she is usually depicted in the unfortunate after state in iconography, carrying her severed breasts before her on a tray or plate. Because detached breasts sort of resemble bells, she’s the patron saint of bellfounders, and because they also kind of resemble dough, she works double duty as the patron of bakers, too. Oh, and just to be clear, that last sentence isn’t one of those clearly nonsensical sentences I pepper my writing with for purposes of the comedy.** Agatha is the patron saint of severed boobs and everything that kind of looks like a severed boob.

On February 10, you’ve all no doubt got big plans already arranged, but on the off chance that you don’t, remember that St. Scholastica has her feast on that day. Scholastica was St. Benedict’s sister, and her chief miracle consisted of summoning storm clouds and rain to keep Benedict from leaving her house after a long visit. For that, she ought to be the patroness of overly-demanding family members, but instead she’s invoked against rain and storms and watches over nuns and convulsive children.

February 14 is reserved for the Feast of St. Valentine, an obscure saint of little importance.

See you in two weeks, give or take the demands of journeying with Dante through the Inferno next week (though I’ll probably spend more time returning to Rapture, knowing me).

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*And I’m pleased to report that Commander Shepard and her crew made it safely back through the Omega 4 Relay with no casualties. If you were worried.
**And neither was that last one. Or the one before this. Or… you get the idea.

Sometimes scribes accidentally leave out some of the text they meant to copy. Catching the error on review, they usually just put the text out beside the original with a mark indicating that the reader’s eyes should skip over to the side.*

The scribes behind a particular edition of the Revelations of St. Brigit, now held at the British Library, were particularly sloppy, necessitating this move be made again and again. But rather than just leave it at a little mark, the revising scribes decided to add little marginal figures to the added text. This one’s my favorite:

I like it because of the 3D effect of the guy popping up out of the page, something pretty rare in medieval manuscripts. I don’t know who this dead man is, but he’s an appropriate bearer of such morbid omitted text.

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*You’re all familiar with such marks, yes? The ones that tell you to stop reading one section of text and move to another?

Hey, check this out:

An enterprising young artist has reimagined the first 252 Pokemon as a series of Edo-period panels. I’ve selected my favorite cluster above (Mr. Mime, I chose you!), but you really owe it to yourself to go see the rest, even if you’ve never thought about catching them all.

Via Kotaku.

Looks like* the Morgan Library recently digitized selections from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves and put them on the web, which is awesome**. I’m less impressed by the commentary included with the newly available images, full of observations like “the many rabbits symbolize fertility” and “the peas symbolize fertility” and, presumably, on the later pages after I gave up reading, “hell, all this crap symbolizes fertility, really.” But my biggest complaint is how often the commenter sees what they know they should be seeing, instead of what’s actually on the page. Take this image, for instance:

Here we have a closeup on a larger image of Sts. Joachim and Anne, father and mother to St. Mary, in a pose the website’s annotator helpfully describes as “the joyous meeting of Joachim and Anne at Jerusalem’s Golden Gate, where they tenderly embrace, sharing their delight in the prospect of parenting a child in their advanced years.” To me, Anne’s expression looks at least as much like nausea as joy, but that might be due to a lack of detail on the part of the artist. But, regardless, I don’t see how anyone could read that dead-eyed grimace on the old man’s face as “delight”–unless, of course, knowing that the meeting is supposed to be joyful, they just ignore what’s right in front of their eyes.

Sadly, the commenter also largely ignores the marginalia–except the fertility peas–which is largely devoted to creatures eating or otherwise destroying in creative ways the vegetative borders they inhabit. We see what we want to see, I guess. Me, I want to see more of this guy, who lives in the lower right-hand margin of the page devoted to Christ’s crucifixion:

I don’t know what he’s planning to do with that blue leaf, but I’m pretty sure it won’t symbolize Christ’s passion. Maybe fertility, though.

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*Why no, I don’t get all my news from BoingBoing, why do you ask?
**…but would be more awesome if it they just provided access to the full-sized scans instead of embedding them in an annoying image browser that forces you to click and drag to pan around the page instead of looking at it all at once–but I digress.

Both “arthur” and “knight” are on the list of banned Twitter passwords. Sounds fishy, if you ask me. Probably a Templar plot–somebody call Dan Brown!

The one problem with running a specialist blog like Got Medieval is when there are things I’d like to weigh in on but can’t because they’re too far off topic. The late night wars are exactly that–or at least they were, until now. Spotted in a Huffington Post story about Conan O’Brien’s contract woes:

Before you complain, faithful readers, fanciful griffins are acceptably medieval. I swear!

So while we’re on the subject, It’s a shame to see you so mistreated, Conan. Even though I haven’t watched your show live in ten years. But Norm did warn you, didn’t he? If the sympathy of a specialist medieval blogger you’ve never heard of means anything, you have mine. And, apparently, $40 million dollars.