Yes, yes, for the love of God, I’ve seen this:

You can all stop forwarding the link to me now. I mean, yeah, I get it, I’ve got something of a Mel Gibson fetish–what medievalist doesn’t?–but this isn’t Got Braveheart.

And the joke here isn’t really medieval. It’s actually just “Wow, the SNL writers really didn’t know much about Gerard Butler.” I can see them in the writer’s room now. Crap! This Butler guy who’s hosting this week, he’s Scottish, right? We’ve got a lot of old Mike Myers material laying around, I suppose we could dust off some of that, but we’re going to need to work in a topical reference, something for the kids, you know. Hey, Braveheart, that’s a movie about Scottish people, right? And it might be fifteen years old, but it was still in the New Release section at Blockbuster last time I checked, so that counts, right? It’s better that then Trainspotting, and that’s the only other Scotch movie I can think of.

Oh, and I know that many of my readers are international types that can’t be bothered to learn how to use a proxy server, so my Hulu embed above won’t work. For you, I offer instead this picture of me nearly eight years ago* at the William Wallace Monument in Stirling:

Looks like they’ve scrubbed all evidence of the blocky Mel Gibson tribute from the official website. I wonder, is that hastily constructed 1995 movie tie in still at the base of the monument? Anyone know?

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*Man, I miss that bulky jacket. Fun fact: I got caught in a Welsh hailstorm on that same trip and it completely ruined the leather. And yet I continued to wear it for another three years. The reason? I don’t know, probably some sort of tribute to all the brave Scotsmen Irishmen who died caught colds filming Braveheart.

While working on this month’s saints calendar, I stumbled across this:

It’s a cake celebrating the encounter between the Loch Ness Monster and St Columba, the sixth-century Irish saint who converted the Picts. (More on him in the December calendar.)

The baker responsible for this sugar-crafted cuteness, Lucy Shaw, made the cake for her son Columba’s christening party. And while edible hagiography isn’t the only thing she does, she does do it awesomely. Here’s her Joan of Arc, for instance:

And here’s her St. Francis of Assisi:

Anyone have a kid named Bartholomew who needs christening? I’d love to see a cute little marzipan saint carrying his own flayed (marzipan) skin in his arms.

For the medieval faithful, November gets started with two feasts that jointly celebrate every Christian who has ever died. All Saints Day (November 1), AKA All Hallows,* commemorates all the capital-S Saints, even the ones who’ve already had a day during the year, as well as all the Christians who have worked off their venial sins in Purgatory and thus completely purified their souls. The unpurified but still Heaven-bound Christians have to wait until the next day, All Souls (November 2) to get their props.

The illuminator of the calendar I’m following for these posts chose to follow a standard medieval visual model and depict the souls of the faithful departed as birds in a tree. For All Saints, he got a little creative, and went with a little composition I’m going to call “a bathtub full of decapitated heads and Jesus.” Observe:

If you click the picture, it should zoom in enough so that you can see the nameless (and bodiless) saints’ eyes, many of which seem to be focused on the three identical saints to their right with a clear air of “oh, crap, I’m totally blanking on those guys names, let’s hope they don’t come over to the bathtub…” Poor medieval bathtub saints, they lacked the Internet, and thus access to my blog, upon which now will be inscribed the names of the identical ones.

But first we must discuss the gentleman in red, St. Leonard, whose feast day comes on November 6. Leonard is the patron saint of women in labor, because his prayers safely delivered a son to Clovis I’s wife. Afterward, Clovis granted him as much land as he (Leonard) could cover on donkeyback over one day.** He’s also the patron of prisoners, because for some reason, locks would open spontaneously near him and chains would refuse to bind.

So then, the three identical gentlemen. The first is St. Martin, the second St. Brice, and last (and arguably least) St. Edmund Rich of Canterbury.

St. Martin of Tours is important enough that his feast day, November 11, gets a fancy name in English, Martinmas. Martin is famous for cutting his cloak in half, giving one half to a beggar, and then (after dreaming of Christ) finding his cloak magically restored–kind of like a sartorial Everlasting Gobstopper, but 50% less delicious.

Actually, Martin is famous for a lot of things. In the low countries, for instance, they eat goose on Martinmas, because they say Martin hid in a goose pen when he heard they wanted to make him a bishop. In parts of France they stuff themselves with croissants on St. Martin’s Day, presumably because Martin hid in a croissant cupboard after they found him in the goose pen. The illuminator of our calendar above depicts him with an axe, which is probably an allusion to a battle Martin had against a demonically possessed tree. Long story.***

November 13 sees the Feast of St. Brice, a saint who’s mostly famous for having been near St. Martin. Brice succeeded Martin as bishop after the more famous saint died, but those who opposed his election started spreading rumors that he’d gotten a nun pregnant after a nun in his household had a baby. In order to silence his accusers, Brice walked all the way to Martin’s grave carrying a hot coal in his pants in his robe. Miraculously, the robe was unburnt. The people of his bishopric were not impressed and forced him to go do penance in front of the Pope anyway. It’s just like I’m always telling people: no matter how bad the problem, putting a hot coal down your pants rarely makes it any better.

St. Martin of Canterbury has his feast on November 16, but he was a particularly pious saint who lived in the thirteenth century and so is dull as dishwater. The most interesting thing about him is that he pledged his chastity by marrying a statue of the Virgin Mary. Well, by putting a ring on the finger of a state of the Virgin Mary, anyway. No wonder the artist of our manuscript just drew St. Brice twice.

[Oh, by the way, I’ve decided that these saints calendar posts are getting way too long, so I’m splitting November in half. We’ll see how that works out. Tune back in on the 15th or so to see the rest of the month’s sanctified feasts.]

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*Of which Halloween is it’s E’en.
**Usually when kings grant such a rash boon, the recipient does something clever like strap a jetpack to the donkey’s back or burn the donkey and spread his ashes over the land, but not here. Leonard took a leisurely trip around the woods on his donkey, thanked the king for his gift, and built a monastery on the reasonably-sized tract he’d been left with.
***Actually, it’s not that long a story. See, there was this demonically possessed tree that some pagans were worshiping, and Martin told them they had to cut it down. So they said they would, but they made Martin lay down where it was clear the tree would fall if they cut it. After the tree was cut, it did fall toward Martin, but the saint made the sign of the cross, and the tree spun away and landed inches from the clever people who’d cut it down.

Here’s a little something awesome a reader sent me this weekend:

Just to be clear, she sent me the picture, not the cake. Said cake was made for her birthday, which happens to coincide with the Feast of St. Denis, he of headache-curing and preaching-whilst-decapitated fame. She learned of this august coincidence here, of all places. A little knowledge really is a dangerous thing.

Cake-wreckers beware. This was an intentional design choice, so I’d best not see it next time I’m wasting time over there.

After that last post, I was a little worried my blog might be flooded by Conservapedians hellbent on revenge. And when I checked my little site meter doodad the next morning, I did see a huge jump in the number of incoming readers. Turns out that the conservatives are pretty much ignoring me. But a years-old post about James A. Brundage’s medieval safe sex flowchart got picked up by the “sex links” section of a new wikified links aggregator called “plime“.

I assume it’s because the guest blogger at BoingBoing recently rediscovered the chart (which they covered around the same time as I did before). Anyway, welcome, new readers!

There’s a little news story bouncing around the blogs I read regularly. You’ve no doubt heard about the story by now from the blogs you read regularly in an a post titled something like “OMFG!!! Conservatives Declare War on the Bible!!!!!”

Now, there is some truth to my effusively-punctuated mock headline. Some conservatives* (or professional internet trolls from 4chan posing as conservatives) who write for founded the Conservapedia** have proposed creating a wiki-translation of the Bible that eliminates the “liberal bias” that has crept into the document over the years. And by over the years, they mean a lot of years. Like, hundreds of years.

Ostensibly, the Conservapedia’s editors seem to think that they mean a little less than four-hundred years, or the years since 1611, as the entry on the Conservative Bible Project (AKA the Bible Retranslation Project) repeatedly praises the King James translation as a model for the proposed new conservatively constructed Bible. But if we take their project’s stated guidelines at face value, it becomes distressingly apparent that they actually want to take down the “liberal bias” that’s crept into the Bible since–well, since just after the Nicene Creed. You can read all ten guidelines for yourself if you’d like; I’m only going to focus on one. Oh, and if you’re wondering what all this has to do with medieval studies, just bear with me. Ready? Here we go:

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story.

The person responsible for adding this criterion is, not surprisingly, the author of the Conservapedia’s essay on said offending Adulteress Story, linked in the quote above and in the CBP’s entry. And actually, as it turns out, this user, Aschlafly, AKA Andrew Schlafly, is the founder of the Conservapedia. He also holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Princeton and a J.D. from Harvard Law School and works as an adjunct law instructor and a homeschooling specialist. I mention this not to engage in any sort of academic shoe size comparisons, just to note that Aschlafly’s educational background seems fairly unlikely to have given him much exposure to the discipline of textual analysis. And before you can start a Biblical translation and revision project that anyone else should take seriously, you need to know a bit about textual analysis.

In short, textual analysis is the process by which you go about reconstructing an original document from imperfect copies. Like, say some bloke named Geoff writes a poem about his vacation and hands it off to his servant Adam to copy for him so he can distribute it to his friends. Adam botches the job, because he doesn’t quite understand what Geoff is describing because he’s never been there himself, and besides Geoff is the sort of genius who sometimes just makes words up willy-nilly. Yet even with Adam’s bungling, the little vacation story turns out to be popular, and other people want to read it, so they get their people to make them a copy of Adam’s copy, and because years have passed and both Adam and Geoff are deceased and spoke a slightly different dialect than these new people (and from each other), and some of the copies are missing pages, and other copies are hard to read, further errors creep in. But the story’s still popular, even with all the errors, and it stays popular for hundreds of years, and thus through many iterations of copying.

Eventually, parts of the vacation poem end up being meaningless, and lots of the words don’t seem to rhyme right, or they rhyme too well, and parts of it seem like they might have actually been written by someone else, and there’s not just one but a dozen different versions floating around, so someone says enough is enough and calls in the textual analysts. They sit down with all the copies of What Geoff Did on His Holiday that they can get their hands on and try to figure out what the original poem looked like when Geoff handed it to Adam so many years ago.***

Thus, if the editors at the Conservapedia want to revise the Bible back to its original authorial state, they’re essentially going to be doing what we medievalists do when we make new editions of medieval books that exist in more than one manuscript. But before you can go rescuing a text from its imperfect copiers, you have to have a consistent system of principles to explain why you choose one divergent reading over another. And with a text like the Bible, you’ve got an extra problem to contend with, because the original author whose work you’re trying to recover is not just some random fourteenth-century bureaucrat named Geoff, but the infallible Almighty God Himself. And to make matters worse, you’re not recreating some funny story about pilgrims bumbling around on the road to Canterbury, but rather a document meant to guide the lives of the faithful to their eternal reward. A principle that might work for deciding what Geoff’s friend from Bath said or didn’t say might not apply to what the omnipotent creator meant to say about stoning adulteresses.

The adulteress in question appears in John 7:53-8:11. You’ve heard of her by reputation even if you’ve never read the Bible. She was going to be stoned to death, what with the adultery and all, but the scheming Pharisees saw the chance to kill two birds with one stone and put Jesus on the spot. Would he defy the old law and declare himself a heretic by not stoning her, or would he be a hypocrite and submit to the old law, which the Pharisees just so happened to be in charge of interpreting? But Jesus is wily and says instead, “Hey, sure, stone her, but let the person here who’s never done something they knew was wrong throw the first stone. It’s only fair.” And the crowd breaks up, because, well, awkward!

According to Andrew Schlafly, this moment of mercy and rejection of the letter of the law is a later liberal addition to the Bible and should be removed. People even use it to oppose the death penalty, of all things! To back his claim up, Schlafly cites Bruce Metzger as an authority on Biblical textual analysis. Metzger writes (and Schlafly quotes):

The evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming. It is absent from such early and diverse manuscripts as Papyrus66.75 Aleph B L N T W X Y D Q Y 0141 0211 22 33 124 157 209 788 828 1230 1241 1242 1253 2193 al. Codices A and C are defective in this part of John, but it is highly probable that neither contained the pericope, for careful measurement discloses that there would not have been space enough on the missing leaves to include the section along with the rest of the text. In the East the passage is absent from the oldest form of the Syriac version (syrc.s. and the best manuscripts of syrp), as well as from the Sahidic and the sub-Achmimic versions and the older Bohairic manuscripts. Some Armenian manuscripts and the old Georgian version omit it. In the West the passage is absent from the Gothic version and from several Old Latin manuscripts (ita.l*.q). No Greek Church Father prior to Euthymius Zigabenus (twelfth century) comments on the passage, and Euthymius declares that the accurate copies of the Gospels do not contain it.

Metzger’s academic credentials are sterling. Unimpeachable. He knew at least as much as anybody else about the transmission and content of the earliest Greek versions of the Bible, and anybody doing rigorous Biblical textual analysis is going to take his opinion seriously. It’s possible that Schlafly even knew Metzger personally, since they were both in Princeton at the same time. So, case closed, right? Out with the adulteress! But hold on, there are two problems with that.

First, and more mundanely, take a look at some of those manuscript names: syrc.s, ital.l*.q, syrp. Huh? He should write that as syr^c.s., it^a.l*.q, and syr^p. Schlafly would know that the superscript is what makes those names legible if he knew much about Biblical textual studies. (And it’s not like the wiki software doesn’t know how to make superscripts.) Likely, Schlafly just cut and pasted something he read elsewhere online. Cut and paste is hell on text formatting. Now, this might seem like a minor quibble–the sort I’m always saying I’m above–but to me this particular moment of sloppiness says a lot. Schlafly is trying to impress his readers with a bunch of impenetrable technical jargon, but the jargon is impenetrable to him, too. He’s just counting on you not to follow the footnote back to the internet source he’s using.

The second problem is a bit bigger. Schlafly is quoting Metzger selectively, and the rest of Metzger’s discussion of the adulteress seems to me to be at least somewhat relevant. Just a sentence later, he writes:

At the same time the account [of the adulteress] has all the earmarks of historical veracity. It is obviously a piece of oral tradition which circulated in certain parts of the Western church and which was subsequently incorporated into various manuscripts at various places.

Addition? Yes. Added by liberals to distort Jesus’s true message? Well, Metzger, Schlafly’s textual expert, says no. But Metzger’s obviously biased by having a consistent theory of what the original Bible that Schlafly hopes to recreate might have originally looked like.

Metzger’s work was predicated on the well-established belief that the Bible did not begin as a single unified uncorrupted correspondence from the divine that has since slowly accumulated errors that need correcting. Rather, because of the overwhelming preponderance of textual evidence, Metzger takes as a given that the early church was awash with many different competing accounts of the life and deeds of Jesus and of his followers which they had to sort through, making careful decisions about which of these documents ought to go into the Bible and what oughtn’t. The majority of their work collecting texts together happened several hundred years after this Jesus was supposed to have lived.

One irony that Metzger is well aware of is that these men who put the Bible together in the third and fourth centuries do seem to favor texts that appeared to have been written by eye-witnesses to Jesus’s life.**** But as every serious textual scholar of the Bible will also tell you, none of the gospels are actually eye-witness accounts. The book of John is certainly not; it was likely the last of the gospels written, probably within a decade of the year 100. So, while those church fathers did have a consistent principle for what they included or excluded, they were likely deluded as to the actual history of the documents they were dealing with.*****

Yet even operating under this preference for texts that appeared to be eye-witness accounts, and even though they thought that John was indeed such an account, and even though they could tell that this adulteress story wasn’t original to John, the early church fathers still decided that the adulteress story was likely true and chose to include it when they decided what was canon. Metzger’s explanation for this is perfectly reasonable. The church fathers thought that even though this story about the adulteress hadn’t been written down by John, there was good reason to believe it was a historical account that had been transmitted through other means. Because it fit with what they knew about Jesus and his life.

Obviously, the real rub for Schlafly is that he does not believe that the story of the adulteress fits with what he knows to be true about Jesus and his life. It’s too liberal to really be what God intended Christians to emulate, because he knows a priori that God is ultimately a card-carrying Republican. In order for the rest of us to take him seriously, though, Schlafly should provide some other compelling reason why we should take his Republican Jesus over the Jesus preferred by the original church fathers. To return to my original point about textual analysis, Schlafly needs to be able to give some account of what “the original Bible” he wants to recreate is and how he is able to distinguish it from the imperfect copies we’re today left with, imperfect copies which include texts used and accepted as canonical since the fourth century. And he can’t call on Metzger to bail him out, because Metzger actually believes the exact opposite of him.

The medievals, as it turns out, did not believe that the Bible was literally true, as Schlafly does. (Weird, I know, that someone who wants to edit the Bible down to a purer state can simultaneously believe it’s literally true.) How could they? There were lots of bits that seemed to contradict what they knew to be true about their faith. The Song of Solomon appears to be a long love poem to a dusky naked chick, for Chrissake! You’d be a fool to read that literally, because everyone knows, God has very specific views about dusky naked chicks, and they’re not exactly positive. Indeed, the medievals had elaborate jokes they told about the sort of morons who might read the Bible literally. (See Geoff’s vacation story about his friend the Miller, for at least a partial example. Or, for a non-moron getting up to no good with literal meanings, talk to that certain lady from Bath.)

The medievals also didn’t believe that God left the translation of the Bible up to chance, either. They chose mostly to gloss over the early church father’s fights over which books were in and out, but they did remember the story of the Septuagint told by the Christians of late antiquity. Thus, they believed that seventy-two different translators had been locked in different rooms and told to translate the Bible from Hebrew into Greek and that when they compared their work, miraculously, it was exactly identical. The hand of God had moved their pens. Even after Jerome’s revised Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible became the de facto text of Western Christianity, replacing the work that had went into the Septuagint, they still told the story of the seventy-two translators, because they knew that if it had been left in the hands of scribblers like Geoffrey’s employee Adam, or even Jerome, there’d be no way the Bible was legit.

It strikes me that a wikified Bible is the exact opposite of the Septuagint beloved by the medievals. Instead of seventy-two people miraculously reduced to one agreement, you’re going to have seventy-two hundred people all trying to change the one Bible to reflect their own personal tastes.

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*Emphasis on the some. Calling this a “conservative effort” to rewrite the Bible is a little unfair to intelligent conservatives. The people at the Conservapedia are a subset of a subset of a subset, not the central figures of the conservative movement. Granted, I don’t know who those central figures are these days, but I know these ain’t them. And even if they were legitimate conservative figures, you wouldn’t say that SETI is a “liberal boondogle” just because Jimmy Carter and Dennis Kucinich say they saw some weird lights in the sky once.
**Wikipedia + Stephen Colbert – Irony = Conservapedia.
***Obviously, I’m oversimplifying and completely ignoring problems like this.
****In this they’re in good company. Paul insists that one good reason for believing that Jesus was the son of God is all the trustworthy people who say that they saw him after his crucifixion.
*****The ultimate irony, of course, is that if they had had all the facts when they used their principle, they’d have struck most of the texts that they decided were canonical and might even have accepted some that they tossed out.

It may not be an official PS3 ad,* but nevertheless, there’s at least a few ad men working the Chilean market who think that this would be a good way to sell Playstations:

Let me make sure I’ve got the message right. It seems to be somewhere between “Playing a game on your PS3, a system well known for its virtual Joans of Arc, is just as much fun as being an organ donor in the years before anesthesia and antiseptics” and “Playstation 3: the most fun you can have without having open heart surgery” with maybe a dash of “PS3: Get Medieval on Your Heart (and Joan of Arc’s heart [she’s got a congenital heart defect that the chroniclers neglected to mention, you see…])”?

While I don’t really dabble in the “lol that codpiece is actually 13th century FAIL!!!” school of medieval bloggery much anymore, I must admit that their vision of the 15th century is pretty odd. For one, it’s clear that for the artists Joan’s armor is just weird metal clothing, her greaves, cuisse and other such armorlogical whatchamacallits simply the medieval equivalent of aughties gamerdude’s jeans.

From this clearly representative evidence, I deduce the following principle of modern medievalishness**:

In the Middle Ages, clothing was made of metal.

Also, seeing as this advertisement’s surgical theater comes equipped with chest spacers, a bloody rag, a large metal key, a meat hook (?), chains, and stocks for your legs (but not your arms?!), I could add to that:

In the Middle Ages, they just used whatever the hell they had lying around when they had to do surgery.

But that would be being unfair. Frankly, even I’ve got no clue what doctors used for heart transplant surgery in the Middle Ages. My medieval medical knowledge goes no further than vein men and purgatives. Alas, that’s the trouble with being a medieval pedant. You have to pretend to have all sorts of expertise you don’t really have.

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*For a few days last week, this ad (and another one featuring a modern gamer giving Rommel a blood transfusion) were thought to have been part of a new PS3 print ad campaign for Chile. Turns out, it was just a mock campaign produced as an attempt to get Sony’s business.
**Before you get all St. Maurice on me, read on. Medievalishness: a word I coined just now to describe what we moderns do when we want to give the feel of the medieval era without caring much about accuracy. See also, ye olde stuffe.

Happy Feast of St. Thomas de Cantelupe, everybody! Who is St. Thomas de Cantelupe? Why, he’s only history’s fourth most popular saint named Thomas!* And that’s not all!! October 2nd is also the Feast of St. Leger (aka St. Leodegar), the bishop famous for aiding Childeric II’s accession over his brother Theoderic to the throne of the Franks in 675!! Talk about your major saintly star power!!! As for the rest of the month, the hits just keep on coming…

St. Francis of Assisi‘s feast rolls in on October 4th. Earth Day ought to be celebrated on the same day, since Francis is the patron saint of animals, particularly cute and symbolic ones, and here lately he’s become the patron saint of the environment in general. But do the environmentalists listen to me? Noooo. They chose The Feast of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, a second rate Scottish saint primarily famous for being used as a character in the earliest D&D books. Cretins.

October 6th is the Feast of St. Faith, aka St. Foy, a beautiful virgin who was stripped naked, cooked on a brazier, and then beheaded by Emperor Diocletian. For reasons I haven’t been able to discover, Faith is depicted as a large disembodied hand by the (admittedly untalented) artist responsible for MS. Rawl D939 (the manuscript from which I’m taking these saints, excerpted above). Usually she’s depicted as an attractive young lady, and fairly often an attractive naked young lady, as medieval artists knew a good excuse to slip a naked lady into a manuscript when they saw one. According to legend, after Faith was martyred God caused it to snow so that her naked dead body would be covered, which does make you wonder why the snow couldn’t have fallen a bit earlier, say, when they were trying to cook her over coals. But, as we’ve established before, I’m no theologian.

On October 9th the Feast of St. Denis is celebrated. He’s one of about a dozen saints who are occasionally mistaken for the Headless Horseman–that is, they’re iconographically depicted holding their own severed heads in their hands. Denis is special amongst the beheaded, for he is the patron saint of headaches, probably because he managed to walk an additional two miles after he had been beheaded, preaching all the way. When you’re looking for help coping with head pain, this is clearly the guy to call.

The saints for the middle of the month aren’t that interesting: October 11 and 13th see a pair feats for extra-holy alliterating saints,* Ethelburga and Edward the Confessor.

The Feast of St. Luke falls on October 18th. Luke is one of the important apostles, as you’re all no doubt aware, and for some reason he is also the patron saint of both butchers and surgeons. I suppose so that you don’t have to switch who you’re praying to if an operation goes awry halfway through.

St. Frideswide‘s feast falls on October 19. She’s another one of those female saints who were famous for keeping their virginity in the face of overwhelming opposition. In Frideswide’s case, she had to run to the forest, hide in a tub, then hang out with some swine. Hmmm, come to think of it, that’s not really that overwhelming. I guess that’s why Oxford chose her as their patron saint. She’s chaste, sure, but it’s not like she’s going to throw herself off a cliff or anything. Very practical, that St. Frideswide.

By sheer volume of sanctity, October 21 is the holiest day on the calendar, for it celebrates the martyrdom of St. Ursula and 11,000 nameless virgins. Sadly, this day of 11,001 saints was also struck from the modern Catholic calendar during the 1969 reform, due to something called “a complete and total lack of any corroborating evidence”–whatever that is. According to legend, Ursula was a British princess meant to marry Conan Meriadoc of Brittany. When her father dispatched her to her husband (with her 11,000 virginal handmaidens in tow), a miraculous wind blew her ship so strongly that the journey took only a day. In recognition of the miracle, Ursula decided to go on a long pilgrimage across all the holy sites in Europe before getting married. This is precisely the sort of strange decision that medieval saints make all the time. “Oh, Heavenly Father, in thanks for how quickly you brought me to my husband, I will take a leisurely trip far, far away from him.” It’s like celebrating the $10 a month you saved canceling Cinemax by going out and buying 200 DVDs. Perhaps this is why she is the patron saint of students.** And wouldn’t you know it, they only got as far as Cologne before the Huns beheaded all 11,001 of them.

Sts. Simon and Jude double up on October 28. They were apostles who were said to have went to Persia to spread the faith and died there, leaving no records of what they might have done whilst there. Neither gets much screen time in the Bible, either, which may be why they’re forced to share a day–afterthoughts, like the Professor and Mary Ann in the opening credits of the first season of Gilligan’s Island.

And finally, October 31, Halloween, shares its calendar date with The Feast of the Martyrdom of St Quintin. You’d think he’d be something awesome, like a vampire saint, or maybe a sanctified wolfman. But no, he’s just your average beheaded missionary saint that the Carolingians were fond of for no readily apparent reason. Probably because very little was known about his life, even then, so you could celebrate whatever you wanted about it. Even more perplexing, Quintin gets three saints days–as many as John the Baptist! And like Johnny the B, the other two feasts commemorate the two different days on which his body was miraculously discovered: once in a bog, once in a hidden tomb built by the person who found him in a bog. Early Christians had a lot of trouble keeping track of their saints’ bodies, you see.

Well, that’s all the saints for October. Counting Sts. Oswald and Michael, who both get an extra feast in October due to differences of opinion between sects, that’s a baker’s dozen in all. I hope you’re stocked up on festive plastic dinnerware.

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*After St. “Doubting” Thomas, St. Thomas Beckett, and St. Thomas Aquinas. For a long time, Thomas the Canteloup was considered the fifth most popular St. Thomas, until medieval historians realized that the St. Thomas they had down as fourth was actually an island in the Caribbean–a U.S. Virgin Island, as a matter of fact. This just goes to show how foolish medieval historians can be. If you’re going to count an island as a saint, clearly a virgin island would easily be more popular than Beckett, and arguably more popular than Aquinas.
**Awesome! The paper deadline got moved to Monday! Let’s cut class for the next month and get really good at Halo!***
***Substitute “Civilization” for “Halo” in that last footnote and you basically have my academic career in a nutshell.

If you’re lucky enough to live in the US of A, then you’ve probably got the whole day off from your job* in order to celebrate how awesome it is to have a job.** So use today to celebrate your own peculiar passions. Just be you. Like this guy, from the 15th century BL MS Harley 4380, another chunk of Froissart’s Chronicles:***

Ride on, creepy naked knight on a hobby horse. Ride on for labor!

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*Providing you have a job, of course.
**Fun fact. Labor Day was first created in 1921, during a brief ‘Ironic Legislation’ movement in American politics.
***For those keeping score at home, apparently the guy who owned this edition of Froissart really loved jousting jokes.