Theme months–they’re what the kids today are into, yes?* Excellent. I’m all about jumping on the trends while they’re hot. If I were any trendier, I’d be twittering the hell out of this post in 140-character chunks.

Actually, here’s the deal: I realized I’ve got about a half-dozen or so images from the same manuscript that are metaphorically burning a hole in my pants**–or, possibly, my blog’s metaphorical pants*** and rather than spacing them out with filler, I’ve decided to just devote the whole month to them.

The manuscript in question is one that I’ve drawn from before, Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24, a fourteenth-century Flemish manuscript which includes, among other things, a copy of Jacques de Longuyon’s Vows of the Peacock (AKA Les Voeux du paon), a late chanson de geste that is only read these days because it contains a very early (and possibly the first) catalogue of heroes grouped into Nine Worthies.

So, without further ado, let me introduce the first of April’s marginal curiosities from MS G24. This guy:

I always do manage to find the classiest images, don’t I? This week’s touch of class is doing exactly what it seems like he’s doing: number one and number two at the same time. Luckily for the people who have to clean up the messes in the margins of manuscripts, he thought ahead and brought two appropriately-sized matching pots with him.

This little fella is probably going to make it into my upcoming presentation at Kalamazoo, because in addition to having his carefully-orchestrated double bowel movement, he also appears to be reading the text that he’s placed next to. I’m not sure if he’s doing it in a “wow, that’s so interesting it can even tear me away from my complicated business” or a “wow, that’s so interesting it made me poop and pee at the same time, lucky I was already naked and was on my way to throw these two pots into the recycling bin” kind of way. I suppose I should get that nailed down sometime soon.

And in case you’re worrying that this month-long theme is going to lead to stagnation and tedium, you really should trust me more. I promise, this manuscript is so odd that I could easily do a year-long feature and still not exhaust its strangeness. Already, it has provided such joys as the ass-kissing Templar, the ass-utilizing bagpiper, and the naked men disassembling themselves, and together these four are but the tip of the weird iceberg of weirdness.****

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*The kids today sure are crazy, with their music that diverges from the music that I am fond of and their opinions on the optimum positioning of one’s waistband and/or hemline that differ from my own preferred norms.
**Which, as I indicated before, are worn with their waistband at the appropriate elevation, not like those crazy kids.
***Yes, my blog wears pants. Or metaphorically wears them. But unlike me, my blog is hep, man, hep, and wears its pants all freaky-deaky like you would not believe. Unless you’re one of the kids today, in which case you would find the distance between the top of its pants and its metaphorical belly button to be quite acceptable.
****Possibly an anal-fixated iceberg, come to think of it.

Medieval calendars all agree that, like March, April has something to do with trees. Earlier calendars say it’s time to get your plant on and put some of those bad boys in the ground. Later ones suggest planting flowers at the same time. Still later ones suggest that the flowers and trees you’re planting might be a good gift for a potential lady love, which leads to the calendars giving up on work for the month and urging you to get your romance on instead. So, April is the time for lovers to plant trees and flowers and then sit under the trees while giving each other flowers. Make sense? April = beer me that romance.

Amongst the medieval dates of most importance in the time of April are being:

• April 3rd, 1043 — Edward the Confessor is crowned King of England.
• April 12th, 1204 — Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, falls to the forces of the Fourth Crusade, who were supposed to be headed to Jerusalem, but, hey, what’s a little besieging and looting between coreligionists?
• April 15th, 1450 — The French defeat the English at the Battle of Formigny. Cannons are involved in some capacity or other and this is very important to military historians.
• April 17th, 1387 — Chaucer and 29 pilgrims set off for Canterbury. Some tales are told. Or should that be Tales?*
• April 23rd, 1014 — Brodir the Viking kills Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, ambushing him while he prays in his tent after the Battle of Clontarf. According to Njals Saga, Brian’s brother Wolf the Quarrelsome tracks Brodir down shortly thereafter, cuts him open, and ties him to a tree with his own entrails, leading me to wonder if quarrelsome is really a strong enough epithet for the man.
• April 23rd, 1343 — The St. George’s Night Uprising starts in Estonia. It lasts for two years, but they refuse to change the name to “The St. George’s Night and the Next Two Years Worth of Nights After That Uprising”
• April 23rd, 1348 — The Order of the Garter is founded by Edward III of England. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
• April 28th, 1192 — Conrad I of the Crusader State of Jerusalem is assassinated by the Hashshashin. Or should that be hashshashinated by the Assassins?**
• April 29th, 1429 — Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orleans.
• April 30th, 1492 — Christopher Columbus gets his commission from Spain to head out on the ocean blue.

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*Yeah, probably not.
**Yeah, probably not.

I know updates to the old blog have been fairly scarce of late. Once again, I have entered into one of those spells where I am so busy with non-blog stuff that my blog posts are abandoned and consigned to the Drafts folder about halfway through, right after I realize that I’ve been spending half an hour doing something other than the oppressive crap that I have to get done.*

So today I decided to just bite the bullet and push those posts out the door. Half-assed posts are better than no posts, right? Right? But I’ve left the posts with their original dates, to honor my best intentions and to frustrate those blog Puritans who demand strict honesty in blog chronology. Frequent readers know that I pull this crap all the time, so this note is really for the Got Medieval newbies. If you’re offended, just pretend this is all one big April Flogs Day joke.

However, looking back on my quickly finished posts, I realize that it may seem like I’m complaining about all the people who email me medieval news to post about.** Let me assure you, that’s just the offblog stress talking. Please keep using the old contact form up in the upper right of the blog to send me things I ought to blog about. Clearly, I can’t promise to do it in any sort of timely fashion, but I do appreciate the mail.

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*Full disclosure: my recent purchase of an X-Box 360 might also have contributed a little bit. But on the upside, you can all look forward to a review of the Beowulf game sometime soon.
**And, in part, my sudden spate of productivity was spurred on by realizing that visits from people just checking the page real quick to see if I’d written a post on the thing that they’d emailed me about had become about a third of my blog traffic, threatening to overtake Google searches for “medieval pr0n” as my top incoming traffic source.

According to medieval calendars, April is the time to begin the Spring Cleaning of your local hellmouth. It’s important to get a start on that before the April rains set in, or your hellmouth will get soggy and lose its fetid air of despair and hopelessness. Also, racooons are notorious for crawling into hellmouths for the warmth during the winter months, and let me tell you, you don’t want to be cleaning racoon scat out of the mouth come July.

Among the more important April dates in medieval history:

• April 1st, 1066 — Tostig, Leofwine, and Gyrth Godwinson convince their brother Harold to send William the Bastard of Normandy one of those fake cans with the springy snakes that spring out and scare the recipient. In response, William conquers England. And Tostig refuses to apologize, because of all the times that Harold made fun of his name with lame puns on the word “Toasty.” Also, technically, he [Toasty Tostig] had been dead for three months. But would it hurt the guy to apologize?
• April 1st, 1099 — The Priory of Scion thinks it’d be a real hoot if they hide the relics of Mary Magdalene beneath a Roslyn Chapel nearly 500 years before it’s built.
• April 1st, 1312 — Pope Clement V thinks it’d be a real hoot if he sends a fake order to Philip IV to round up all the Knights Templar and burn them at the stake for heresy. When Philip does just that, Clement merely shrugs and says, “You know the old saying, ‘Templars–you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them, unless you’re the pope and you have the ability to order their excommunication and burning.’ Oh, wait, I am the pope. Awesome job, me!”
• April 1st, 1313 — Pope Clement V becomes the first pope to wear the big pointy pope hat. He explains the significance thusly: “You see, it’s big and pointy, like an inverse vee. And I’m Clement the Fifth, or Clement V. So it’s like I’m wearing myself on my own head. Cool, right?” When people tell him that, in fact, it isn’t cool, he has them excommunicated and burned.
• April 1st, 1316 — Pope John XXII issues the bull Hootimus minimus which makes the intentional seeking of “hoots” a crime punishable by excommunication and burning.
• April 1st, 1337 — Due to a misunderstanding that was totally not his fault, Philip the VI of France puts some real vomit on the throne of Edward III of England, instead of the hilarious fake rubber vomit he bought at the joke shop (long story) . The result? The Hundred And Sixteen Years War.
• April 1st, 1437 — Due to a mix up at the plant that, again, was totally not Philip the VI of France’s fault, the commemorative Hundred and Sixteen Years of War collectible plate set is printed up as the commemorative Hundred Years War plate set. They decide to just go with it, because they figure what’s the chances somebody’s going to check the math?
• April 1st, 1582 — Pope Gregory XIII, aka His High Gregorianishness, issues the bull Inter gravissimas** which results in the creation of the Gregorian calendar.
• April 1st, 1583 — The precursor holiday to April Fools Day is first celebrated. On “April Flogs Day,” cheapskates who refused to buy new Gregorian calendars and insisted on using their old Julians are publicly flogged as a “joke”. Pope Gregory XII reportedly approves of the “joke,” saying to the man next to him*** while trying to cough back his laughter, “It’s funny because they’re being flogged!”
• April 1st, 1584 — Finding no more Julian holdovers to flog, the celebrants of April Flogs Day flog the hell out of some Puritans.
• April 1st, 1585 — Gregory XIII dies. Nobody believes the news until April 10th, because they’re pretty sure it’s just one big April Flogs Day joke. When his body is found, the floggers are all like, “Hey, Popekeepers, why didn’t you tell us?” and the Popekeepers are all like, “Hello?! Because you were flogging us!? Duh!”
• April 1st, 1586 — Lorenzo Valla’s lost treatise De Voluptate Vapulorum or “On the Joy of Flogging” is rediscovered by a Belgian cheese shop employee who wandered into an old library containing lost treatises of Lorenzo Valla’s while looking for–oh, I don’t know… some cheese, I guess. Yeah, cheese. So, anyway, he finds this treatise–under wheel of Venezuelan Beaver Cheese–and it turns out that in classical Latin vapulo, or “to flog” is more accurately translated as “to make a bad joke” and in really really extra double classical Latin the joke has to be obligatory. April Flogs Day is renamed April Fools Day, and the forced frivolity begins.

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*Yeah, I know you’re trying to play it cool now, but you all know that I know that you fell for my clever ruse. April Flogs Day starting in 1583? Ha! Everyone knows that dates to Dionysius Exiguus.
**Its first line Inter gravissimas pastoralis officii nostri curas roughly translates to, “Man, being pope is HARD!”
***Reportedly, Napoleon.****
****Though the reports are somewhat suspect.*****
*****Though not as suspect as reports that there was a wheel of cheese inside the Lorenzo Valla Memorial Library.******
******Library rules clearly stipulate that each patron is allowed only to bring a pencil (no darker than #4), loose leaf paper (or a 7 1/2″ x 32″ notepad), and no more than a half-pound of a locally made spreadable cheese.*******
*******And that joke only makes sense if you read my footnotes out of order, something I have expressly forbid you from doing, Dr. Nokes. Oh yeah, I know all about how you read my posts.

This week’s marginal delight comes from the pages of the Hunterian Psalter, a twelfth-century English manuscript currently held by one of my alma maters, the University of Glasgow, and kept safe and sound inside their appropriately named Hunterian Museum:*

Mermaids are fairly common in the margins of manuscripts, but this one is of a rarer stripe, able to slip out of her fishy bottom to walk around on two legs just like us surface dwellers, as you can see if you look a bit closer:

I’m not familiar with this forgotten talent of medieval mermaids in any other accounts,** but such an ability would answer a question I’ve always had about mermaids. People say they were dreamt up by lonely sailors away on long voyages without women. But if that’s true, why would these horndog sailors give their dream women inaccessible lady parts? Or, to quote Fry from the Lost City of Atlantis episode of Futurama: “Why couldn’t she be the other sort of mermaid, with the fish parts on top and the lady parts on bottom?”*** This gal neatly sidesteps the problem. She can be half fish while still remaining all woman.

Oh, and manuscript illustration snobs will descend upon me with teeth bared if I don’t add the disclaimer that this lovely lady is technically part of a historiated initial, and thus strictly speaking not marginalia–but it sure looks to me like it’s into the margins she’s headed once she shucks that tail.****

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*Both named for William Hunter, an eighteenth-century collector of antiquities.
**And, as I allude to in my title, neither was Walt Disney–or, for that matter, Hans Christian Anderson. But think how much shorter their Little Mermaids would be if the titular mermaid could just hop right out of her tail.
***This said after his Parker Posey-voiced mermaid date offers to let him fertilize her eggs with his man jelly while she’s out of the room.
****Possibly as soon as she finds some pants.

This struck me just right when I read it last week. Marvel as T-Rex’s “fun facts about St. Patrick’s Day” lecture devolves into a discussion of Middle English:

Read the rest of the Dinosaur Comic here.

More than a few of you have emailed me to give me a headsup about the recent discovery of a marginal note in a fifteenth-century manuscript that mentions Robin Hood and places him in Sherwood Forest in the thirteenth-century. To the scholar responsible for the find, Dr. Julian Luxford of St Andrews, I tip my hat. Awesome find.

On the other hand, to the mainstream media reporters who wrote the articles that have been forwarded my way, I take off my hat, scratch my head, and fall into an awkward silence while feigning a sudden and pressing interest in the hat’s interior.

The cause of my consternation is this: the marginal gloss is twenty-three words long. Yet most reports do not include the text of the note. And those who do give the text bury it in the middle or the end of the article, spending the first half to three-fourths of their account describing the find. It’s just twenty-three words, already! Here, let me write a reasonable news story for you:

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — A manuscript scholar at St. Andrews University, Dr. Julian Luxford, has recently announced the discovery of a hitherto unknown medieval reference to the popular character Robin Hood in a historical chronicle dated to the fifteenth century. It reads: “Around this time [1294-9], according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood, with his accomplices, infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies.”

Yeah, the style isn’t very newspapery, but it gets to the point, doesn’t it? If the subject of your story is one-sentence long, lead with that sentence and save your clever analysis for later in the article.

You know Lady Fortune, Dame Nature, Lady Rectitude and Lady Justice, the Pearl and Lady Reason and Fair Welcome and Forced Abstinence.* But do you recall the most famous [pair of] female medieval personification[s] of an abstract concept of all?**

That’s Synagoga and Ecclesia there, resting peacefully in the lower margin of a manuscript currently held at the National Library of the Netherlands. They represent the triumph of New Law over Old Law, which is to say the triumph of the Christian faith over Judaism. (Ann Coulter would be very proud.) Here’s another version from the carvings on the choir seats at the Cathedral of Erfurt in Thuringia, which reminds us that marginalia isn’t just for manuscripts anymore:

And while I have your attention, here’s another set from the exterior of Strausborg Cathedral (which are technically even further removed from my normal subject of marginalia, but they do hang out on the margin of the south transept portal):

Ecclesia, or The Church, is generally depicted as a woman carrying one or more of the following: a crown, a cross-staff, a chalice of the Savior’s blood, a communion wafer, or the orb of the world. Synagoga (also Synagogua and Synagogue) packs her bags with a broken spear, a discarded crown, and/or the Mosaic tablets. Synagoga also wears a blindfold, just like Lady Justice, but unfortunately her blindfold symbolizes ignorance instead of impartiality. Damn you, traitorous double-sided metaphors. For the record, the pig-riding Synagoga in the second image is probably related to the tradition of the Judensau, and doesn’t show up near as often as the standing figures.

As my initial laundry list of female personifications might have already indicated, there was very little that the medieval Christian mind couldn’t turn into a hawt chick in diaphanous robes. Perhaps there is something to that whole fevered imaginings of repressed monks theory.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this completely un-scatalogical and asexual edition of Mmm… Marginalia. (Sorry–put more job apps in the mail this week.) Next time, we will return to our normal poop-, monkey-, and/or pooping-monkey-flavored fare.

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*And, lest we forget, the hot foreign chick in the Song of Solomon that somehow represents the Church.
**OK, so maybe Forced Abstinence isn’t that well-known a personification, but that whole Rudolph thing*** was the best intro I could come up with this week, so deal. Maybe I’ll do a whole series on weird medieval female personifications.****
***And while I’m on the subject, the beginning of the Rudolph song makes no sense, philosophically speaking. If I agree with the initial premise, that I know Dasher and Dancer, etc. and I agree with the second premise, that Rudolph is even more well known than the ones I already have admitted to knowing, then it is demonstrably the case: I must know Rudolph. QED. The question is superfluous.
****As soon as I figure out how to properly acronymize it. All successful web recurring features have an awesome acronym.

A friend of mine alerted me to the existence of short story “Math Takes a Holiday” from Paul Di Filippo‘s Neutrino Drag which includes, among other cool things, an imagined cat fight between medieval Saints Hubert and Barbara–precisely the sort of hagiography I can get behind. Why they’re arguing is not important right now. Just read this snippet:

[Saint Hubert said,] “You are deliberately obscuring my point, Barbara. I am merely arguing for a proper chain of command and obedience–“
“Because you’re descended from the kings of Toulouse! And because you were once a bishop!”
“What of it? I’m proud to have been Bishop of Maestricht and Liege!”
“Certainly, certainly, a wonderful item on your cv. But you were once married as well, don’t forget!”
Saint Hubert coughed nervously. “The Church had different policies back in my time–“
Saint Barbara crossed her arms triumphantly her chest. “On the other hand, I am still a virgin. A virgin and a martyr!”
Stiffening his pride, Saint Hubert countered, “I was tutored by Saint Lambert himself!”
Barbara snorted. “I learned my precepts at Origen’s knee!”
“I was vouchsafed a vision–a cross appeared between the horns of the stag I hunted!”
“I experienced a miraculous transport from my tower prison to a mountaintop!”
“As Bishop, I converted almost the whole of Belgium!”
“I was one of Fourteen Holy Helpers! You probably prayed to me!”
“You–you insolent young pup!”
“Young pup? I was born four centuries before you!”
“Where’s your historicity, though? Not a single documented proof of your actual existence. Why, you’re positively mythical!”
“Mythical! You dirty old huntsman, I’ll show you what a sock from a mythical Saint feels like–“

Will Jesus intervene? Will St. Barbara get all fourth century on his ass, or will Hubert show her how they roll down in the Ardennes? I’m not going to tell you. You’ll just have to read the book and see for yourself. Just drop by your local library, where you can find these and many other amazing booksthat will take you away to a land of whimsy and wonder…*

Or buy the thing at Amazon. The author might not sic the copyright police on me for posting that quote. Hurry, though. As of this writing, there’s only one copy left!

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*Butterfly in the skyyyyyyyyy, I can fly twice as hiiiiiiiiiiigh.