Well, well, if it isn’t the middle of the month already. Don’t worry, though, you’ve still got a few days to get your feast attire dry cleaned and your festive centerpieces out of storage, for the medieval feast calendar doesn’t pick back up until January 19, which marks the Feast of St. Wulfstan, the patron saint of vegetarians. Wulfstan landed the vegetarian gig because according to his Vita, he renounced the flesh of animals after the smell of succulent roasting goose caused him to stumble in his prayers at morning Mass. This pious overreaction also led to the well known eleventh-century ad campaign with the tagline “Goose: It’s Sacrelicious!” I suppose to celebrate Wulfstan’s day, you should cook something delicious and swear never to eat it, or anything like it, ever again.

Saith Tycho:

Maybe it isn’t entirely forthright, putting a crusader badass the cover of your medieval allegory – but I don’t care. In fact, I support this kind of thing wholeheartedly: fact is, sometimes you got to lie to a motherfucker. If showing a dude holding a giant spine with an aftermarket scythe affixed is what it takes to get young men to read a single page of the classics, than so be it. I hope these shenanigans work like gangbusters. We’ve got your backs on this thing.

They also did a comic about it, natch.

Here’s a little something I worked up tonight:

Voilà: the opening crawl of the NES classic The Legend of Zelda mocked up as a gothic manuscript page of the sort I’m always going on about in my Mmm… Marginalia posts. It demonstrates a few things about the way professional manuscript houses in England and France serving the nobility in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries put a page together. Chiefly…

• The space a text fills is as important as the text itself. It should be as close to a solid wall of letters as possible.
• Words can be compressed or split up in order to make the text fit the space.
• They can also be abbreviated, as I have done with ‘before’, ‘darkness’, and ‘into’ above.’
• Medievals used Roman numerals and their own capricious system of punctuation.
• In general, the decorative border should be vegetative, and it should usually not cover all four sides around the text.
• Nearly everything on the page should be connected to everything else.
• The page should be drawn as though gravity pulls everything from the top of the page into the lower margin. Nothing can be unsupported.
• Though gravity is active, weights can be inconsistent.*
• Almost always, it’s only the main illumination on a page that concerns the subject of the text directly.
• The marginalia can be anything else your heart desires.
• I just now realized I left out the fancy “S” I’d planned for “SHE”, even though I left a little space for it. Believe it or not, you see planned but omitted decorations all the time in medieval manuscripts. So let’s just forget I ever admitted it was a mistake… Fixed it!

I make learning fun!

By the by, here are the two reference images I used in making this:

And yeah, I used a reference that violates half my little rules, but it’s a much smaller book from a different region than the deluxe ones I’m talking about, and I needed something with a simpler layout to copy.

P.S. Image now available in magnet form, for a limited time.
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*Large initials like the ‘G’ can be held up by Guile’s hair just fine, thank you very much.

Via Kotaku (and a helpful reader):

Lucky I got a Barnes and Noble gift card for Christmas. Don’t spoil the ending for me!

Ever wonder how the elaborate decorative borders in medieval manuscripts are made? This image from Mainz Stadtbibliothek MS 33, a 15th-century breviary, has an answer:

Why, it’s monkeys, of course! Clever, nimble, hard-working monkeys gather up the blue and red vegetable bits and pin them carefully to the manuscript’s borders.

Monkeys–is there anything they can’t do?

Note: Considering how many incoming visitors have been trying to get to my discarded Mario post, I’ve reposted it with only a few changes. I’m still not 100% happy with it, but I am a slave to my public.

Consider the following image, taken from the lower margin of Bodleian Library MS 264 fol. 17v:

Hopefully, you don’t need me to point out that the dashing mustachioed figure in red between the hound and his fleeing prey isn’t original to the manuscript. But imagine for a moment that Mario (here pictured circa 1990) hopped down a warp pipe and emerged on the page of a medieval manuscript circa 1290. If we look closely at the way that the medieval artist arranges his page, I think we’ll find that Mario would get along pretty well. In fact, I contend that the imagined world of the deluxe Gothic illuminated page is follows many of the same rules as Mario’s side-scrolling 8-bit one.*

In this post, I’m just going to focus on just one of those rules, but it’s a big one: gravity. Deluxe Gothic manuscript pages are drawn as though the figures on them are subject to a force of gravity that pulls them down towards the open space in the lower margin.** Consequently, you almost never see figures stranded out in the middle of open white space. Marginal men, women, and beasties may hang from beneath the page’s decorative borders or run along the top of them–as Mario and his rabbit friend above are doing–but if they stray too far into the margin and away from the border, they require some additional support. Usually, that support takes the form of patches of ground, like those underneath these figures I’ve shown you before (from the Ormesby Psalter):

In order to keep the man and his goat in the middle from falling right on through the bottom of the page, the artist draws in little patches of ground beneath them.** Mario, no stranger to platforms that hang in the air as if bolted to the background, would feel right at home with this arrangement. And vice versa:

And it’s not just the little grass clots that are attached to the page behind them. If I widen my focus a bit on the image I started with, you can see that the border-platform that Mario, rabbit, and hound are standing upon dangles from a fancy initial capital that, like the grass clots from the Ormesby Psalter and the question blocks from the Mushroom Kingdom, does not itself feel the pull of gravity:

If the rabbit wants to escape the hound, he’s going to have to double back and follow Mario up to the solid ground of the inhabited initial and hope the hound isn’t as nimble. Just in case, he probably ought to platform his way up the page’s center margin like so:

If you look carefully (the image above–and all the images in this post–should expand if you click it), you can see that the two initial capitals on the page form separate platforms, not quite touching. The uppermost capital provides support for two vine-like borders, one growing upward and another that downward toward the lower capital. And the vines in turn provide support for little birds who sit atop them.

If it turns out that the hound can leap, too, the rabbit still might be able to get away if he can convince Mario to give up one of his precious oak leaves. Flying creatures are allowed to ascend into the open white space of the medieval manuscript page, as this moth is doing in the top left margin of this very same page:

The poor insect enthusiast beneath can only gaze up wistfully at the moth, unable to get any higher on the page because he’s run out of platforms.

Now, this attention to gravity is a general tendency, not an ironclad rule. If you poke around Gothic manuscripts long enough you’ll find many exceptions, but probably a lot fewer than you might expect. In fact, I’ve found that the fancier the manuscript, the more consistently its artists tend to respect gravity’s role on the page. Deluxe manuscripts like the Yale Lancelot or the Bodleian Alexander are scrupulous about making sure everything is resting on something that’s attached to something that’s attached back to one of the anchor points. In fact, the better manuscripts purposefully play with the expectation of downward gravity, creating elaborate and fanciful connections between the objects on the page. Next time I get around to this subject, I’ll try to show you some of my favorite examples.

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*Thus, this post is going to basically be a rehash of the paper I gave at K-Zoo last year–with 300% more Mario!
**And presumably losing an extra man.

The guest blogger over at BoingBoing this week has a post up insinuating that professors somehow collude with publishers (ala doctors and drug companies) when selecting textbooks. The main piece of evidence for this claim seems to be that professors, like doctors, sometimes receive free samples, in this case free sample textbooks.

Now, I know that seems damning. And if you’ve read the post, you know it presents an ironclad case. I mean, it’s in outline form. And some parts of the outline are bolded. Very convincing stuff. But there’s a few facts that the author, Andrea James, leaves out. So allow me to fill in the gaps.

1. Your prof has a budget of exactly no dollars to evaluate potential textbooks for your class. He’s completely at the mercy of whatever scraps the publishers will send him, whatever’s in the library, whatever he has left over from his own undergrad days, and whatever he can beg off a colleague who taught the class last term.*
2. Your prof only uses textbooks in big survey classes. And your prof is not an expert in the material covered in the big survey classes. How could he be? Big survey classes cover things like “History from the Dawn of Time until about a Century before the Stuff Your Prof Wrote His Dissertation on”.
3. Odds are, your prof has absolutely no idea what the introductory textbooks are in this general field he’s not a specialist in. They don’t cover that in grad school. Indeed, the number of days spent in grad school going over how to pick textbooks is zero. That’s slightly–slightly!–less than the number of days in grad school spent on how to design a course. Hell, if you’re at a big university, your introductory professor probably is still in grad school.
4. He’ll probably do an Amazon search or just use whichever textbook he used when he took the course ten years ago. Hope there’s a new edition!
5. Say your prof actually had time to request evaluation copies. Unlikely, since until two weeks ago, he was scheduled to teach “History from about a Century after the Stuff He Wrote His Dissertation on until the Modern Day, with Special Emphasis on Multicultural Something-or-Other” instead. It’ll still take weeks for the publishing elves to get back to him.
6. When they do get back to him, half the books sent by the publishing elves will be completely useless. Say the course in question happens to be “World History Before 1500”. Some publishers will send American History textbooks, others biographies of people who lived two hundred years after the period being taught, others books clearly designed for middle schools.
7. Oh, and now that your prof has contacted the publisher, they have added him to a generic marketing spam list and will periodically send him updates on every book marginally related to the intro course in a field he’s not a specialist in that he taught just once three years ago.**
8. On the off chance that your prof does decide to use one of the books the publishers sent him a free copy of, professors don’t have any further interaction with the publishers, because they have to order through their university bookstore which has people on staff to talk to publishers for them.
9. Oh, and by the way, sample copies of textbooks are absolutely useless to a professor once they’ve decided which text to use. A doctor with free samples of Cialis or Ritalin has something people want. A prof with a sample textbook has something useful chiefly for propping up wobbly tables or pressing dried flowers. There’s no recreational or off label use for World History Before Columbus: A Slipshod Survey With Useless Full Color Sidebars.
10. If your prof doesn’t use the university bookstore, he is an ass, because students on financial aid often have book vouchers that can only be used at the university bookstore.
11. If your prof tries to direct students to Amazon or textbooks.com, half the students will seize upon nonstandard behavior as an excuse to delay buying the textbook. They’ll email the prof with things like, “I don’t have the book yet [five weeks into the course]; it takes three weeks to get things shipped from Amazon.”***
12. Meanwhile, the bookstore requires professors to jump through insane hoops to submit their book orders. Usually, they want the orders three months before you knew for sure your class was going to make.
13. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the professor jumps through said hoops, because the bookstore is just going to fuck the book order up anyway. They’ll order too many of one book, too few of another. They’ll order Henry IV, Part 2 when you need Part 1. They’ll order the wrong edition, or inexplicably order the third edition for the text and the fourth for the workbook. They’ll shelve your books across the room from all the other books in your department. They’ll shelve the books for your section of History 112 in the area for Art History 101, but strangely not vice versa.
14. Even if the bookstore doesn’t botch the order, several students will pretend they did to try to delay buying the book.
15. Oh, and those nefarious sample books? Your prof lent out the sample book he got, to a student much less prepared than you. And he’s never going to get it back.
16. And perhaps most important of all: No tenure review board has ever in the history of academia considered whether a candidate uses appropriate or affordable textbooks.
17. After all the emails to publishers, all the time spent evaluating books, all those emails and phone calls and personal visits to the bookstore to make sure that the books were there, when your prof grades the first test, he’s going to realize that it doesn’t matter what textbook you assign, half the students simply will not read it.
18. And the half that did read it probably bought it on Amazon or checked it out of the library, so why are they so eager to believe in nefarious collusion?

I hope that clears things up, BoingBoingkateers.

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*Him and he are perfectly acceptable non-gender specific pronouns, especially in this case, where all the facts are drawn from one dude’s life.
**The marketers will send him emails that say things like “You taught ‘History Before 1500’ once, so surely you’ll be happy to know that we just published a new workbook for use with Europe in the Balance: 1913-1950!!”
***I must admit to fictionalizing that example. The student in question did not use a semicolon.

It’s a day late, but here’s my resolution for the New Year:

In 2010, I will destroy Dennis Blunden.

Let me explain.

As everyone with even a whit of pop cultural wherewithal is well awarewithal, Dennis Blunden was a character on the mid-to-late eighties sitcom, Head of the Class. You know, the fat one. But you may not know that the kid who played Dennis Blunden, Dan Schneider, grew up to be a big time small time kinda medium time Hollywood producer whose oeuvre consists primarily of the low-grade tweenish-targeted dreck that Nickelodeon’s glutted with these days, shows like iCarly, Zoe 101, Kenan & Kel. If it features wisecrackin’ kids that can’t quite act confidently spouting the sort of jokes that were stale and formulaic when Alex P. Keaton was last a going concern, Dan Schneider (née Blunden) is probably the one to blame for it.

Anyway, Danny boy’s got himself one of those blogs you’ve been hearing so much about these days called DanWarp. I don’t quite remember the chain of links that led me there, but while I was there I noticed that, according to his little Google Widget, Dennis Blunden’s blog is followed by 243 people. That’s not a lot by fancy pants Hollywood standards, but it’s only 35 more than this little blog o’mine.

So I think I can take him.

I know Got Medieval‘s been mostly fallow over the last few months, in danger of falling into an all saints all the time format, but that’s changing in 2010. Don’t worry, the feast calendars aren’t going anywhere, but I’m going to kick it into high gear on the other fronts. For real, yo. Because now I’ve got a goal: by year’s end, I want to be able to wow people at cocktail parties by casually dropping the fact that my blog’s got more followers than Dennis Blunden’s blog into conversations.*

Mano-a-mano, blogo-a-blogo, meo-a-heo–it’s on. It’s so on. 2010 will go down in the history books as the year a niche academic blog toppled the mighty Hollywood elite.

Dennis Blunden must die.**

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*Without them calling me the next day and being all “I checked and you’ve actually got thirty-five fewer followers than him, loser”.
**And by “die,” I mean “obtain 35 fewer net new readers over the course of the year”.

Today, January 1, marks the start of the New Year, but for medieval Christians it also marked The Feast of the Circumcision.* Modern Catholics more or less stopped celebrating the day that Jesus got his willy nicked in 1960, and more’s the pity. I wonder, in the 1950’s did they sing that on the Eighth Day of Christmas, my true love gave to me eight holy foreskins?

The Twelve Days of Christmas come to a close on January 6, Epiphany, which marks the day that the Three Magi arrived to give gifts to the infant Christ. Medieval traditions name the three as Melchior, Caspar, and Balthasar, and should my wife and I ever have triplets, those will be one set of three names I’ll suggest–and she’ll reject–daily. Especially if they’re girls.

With all those Christmastime feasts behind them, the fourteenth-century medieval calendar I’m using rests for all of a week, until January 14** brings around the Feast of St. Hilary (of Poitiers) not to be confused with Pope St. Hilarious (who we’ll get to next month). Hilary’s nickname, “Malleus Arianorum” or “Hammer of the Arians” celebrates his role in opposing the Arian heresy, and his penchant for philosophical disputation places him amongst a handfull of other saints who’re all said to be the patron saint of lawyers. In England, his claim to this dubious distinction is a bit stronger, as English courts still begin their post-Christmas term on his day.***

January 15 is a bit of a problem. Yes, it marks the date of the Feast of St. Maurus, but which one? The original St. Maurus was the first disciple of St. Benedict–he of the Benedictine rule, the founder of Christian monasticism–and is the patron saint of cripples, coppersmiths, charcoal burners, and cobblers.

But about three hundred years after Maurus died, a certain Benedictine abbot, Odo of Glanfeuil, miraculously “discovered” a thitherto unknown life of Maurus which contained the likewise thitherto unprecedented claim that St. Maurus had founded Odo’s monastery, the Abbaye de Saint-Maur-sur-Loire. This was an awfully useful find for Odo, who happened at the time to be disputing his claim to possession of his monastery with some intractable Normans.

Odo (or a close associate) forged his Life of St. Maurus in the 860’s, and it only took until 1969 for the Catholic Church to officially declare that Odo’s Maurus was not the same Maurus who was Benedict’s first lay pupil, but what’s a thousand years between coreligionists? For the record, the Normans destroyed Odo’s monastery anyway. It was rebuilt only to be destroyed again during the French Revolution, two hundred years–give or take a decade–before the Maurus hoax was settled.

On January 17, the Feast of St. Anthony (Abbot) is celebrated, and with Maurus on a few days earlier, his feast makes the middle of January awful monkish. Anthony is known as the Father of All Monks, because he was the first famous ascetic to eschew civilization in favor of life as a holy hermit in the wilderness. Anthony’s Vita is a really trippy read, because it makes antisocialism into a heroic struggle, with poor Anthony bravely trying to escape other people and events conspiring to bring him back. His main adversary is, of course, the Devil, who takes Anthony’s fervor as a personal insult and plagues him first with boredom, then with lethargy, and finally with hallucinations of beautiful women.**** As you might expect, the latter was a favorite subject for Renaissance artists, Anthony and the tempting phantom women who he so heroically resisted. When none of the crafty stuff works, the Devil just gives up and beats Anthony until he’s near dead, which does force him (albeit briefly) back to civilization. That Devil, always doing things the hard way. If it’s in your power to beat the crap out of people, why not just start there?

And there you have it, the saints you ought to be raising a glass to in the first half of January. Come back in two weeks for your next set of hagiographic marching orders!

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*If you want to look cool at a Middle English scholar’s cocktail party, casually mention how important you think it is that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is set on said feast. Particularly sloppy Middle English scholars tend to get really excited about this, but come on, it’s not like it’s called The Feast of the Castration.
**Modern Catholics celebrate Hilary a day earlier, for some arcane reason I’m not yet privy to.
***And on an unrelated note, in 2009 Hillary Clinton spent her namesake’s day testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as part of her confirmation hearings.
****You’ve got to hand it to the early Catholics. A man goes into the desert alone, doesn’t eat very much, and subsequently experiences boredom, lethargy, and hallucinations, and they take it as a special mark of his holiness. If you go in the desert and don’t eat, what do you expect’s going to happen?