A helpful reader alerted me to this new, bizarre medieval metaphor from ESPN.com’s Page 2. Discussing the really odd photo spread that A-Rod did for Details magazine recently, LZ Granderson observes:

It’s curious how technology makes it possible for anyone on the planet to pull up A-Rod’s photo spread, and yet when it comes to discussing it, we’re trapped on some sort of medieval hamster wheel.

“He’s on the DL”
“That’s supergay”
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, Could this be the gayest pose of all?”

Your first reaction is, no doubt, one of incredulity. What makes this metaphorical hamster wheel which represents the tendency of sports fans to make gay jokes medieval, exactly? Does he mean to suggest that medievals were well known for their very simplistic gay jokes? [They weren’t.] Or that they often strapped gay people to their big medieval torture wheels? [They didn’t.] Or that they loved their hamsters, but were also paralyzed by the secret fear that their hamsters were gay? [That’s more a Late Antiquity thing, really.]

Actually, as it turns out, LZ Granderson has been reading his Boethius. As the Boethius scholars who frequent my blog can attest, Boethius followed his medieval bestseller The Consolation of Philosophy (which featured his meditations on the fickleness of Dame Fortune and her Wheel) with the disastrously under-performing The Consolation of Owning a Pet Hamster, in which Boethius suggested that what appears to be the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune can better be explained by supposing that inside Fortune’s Wheel–to which all of humanity is mercilessly strapped in a never-ending cycle of bliss and blunder–there lives a cute, furry hamster. This image is taken from one of the only remaining manuscripts of Boethius’s Consolation II:

You see, in this further refinement of his Fortune metaphor, man still passes from regno (I reign) to regnavi (I have reigned) to sine regno (I am without a kingdom) to regnabo (I shall reign again), but the motive energy is provided by the hamster which, unlike the Lady who holds the wheel, does love us very much and wants the best for each and every one of us, but his cage is small and nobody thought to buy him one of those tubes that he could crawl through when he gets bored, so what do you expect him to do except run in the wheel? And the consolation is that if you give him pistachios, which are his favorite, he’ll run faster and fast forward you to the regno again.

So, yeah, Unlocked Wordhoard has already mostly covered this one, but if you haven’t heard already, there’s this archaeologist* out there who claims to have discovered the skull of a lady vampire in a mass plague grave in Venice that dates to the end sixteenth century. Most of the sites that have picked up the story insist on calling this a “medieval vampire” for some reason. 1576, the date of the plague in which this “vampire” “died” is a bit late for “medieval,” especially in “Italy,” which by the 1570’s has been printing “Home of the Renaissance” on their license plates for over a “century.”***

How does the intrepid archaeologist know this skeleton belonged to a vampire? According to the article, it is a well-known folk belief that vampires can be stopped from rising from the dead by being buried with bricks in their mouths. Why Bram Stoker didn’t mention this is beyond me. But then again I’ve never heard of such a thing happening in a medieval story, either.

Now, you may be asking, “Were there medieval vampire stories?” Not really, but people sometimes point to Walter Map and William of Newburgh, twelfth-century English chroniclers who mention returned-to-life corpses that terrorize people when they’re looking for medieval vampires. Newburgh’s is the closest, I think, to qualifying. He writes of a man who, suspecting his wife of adultery, hides in the rafters to catch her. When he does catch her, he’s so shocked that he falls to the ground and hurts himself badly, but is convinced by his wife that he’ll be fine and doesn’t need to call the priest in to perform his last rights. The poor guy dies without having taken the Eucharist and, apparently, returns to prey upon the living because of it. When the townsfolk have had enough of him, they go to his grave for a little mob justice. William describes the event thus:

They grabbed a pretty dull spade and headed to the cemetery and began to dig. While they were digging, they worried they might need to dig deeper, but suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, they uncovered the corpse, swollen and enormously fat … the shroud it had been wrapped in nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, were angry, not afraid, and wounded the unmoving corpse, causing blood to flow out in such a stream that you might have thought the corpse was a leech filled with the blood of many people. They dragged it beyond the village and quickly made a funeral pyre. And one of them said that the diseased body would not burn unless its heart was torn out, so the other one tore open its side by repeatedly hitting it with the blunt shovel, and then, thrusting his hand in, pulled out the accursed heart.

I’ll admit, it reads a bit like the script to a grindhouse vampire flick, especially the continued insistence on the dullness of the shovel they’re using.**** Nevertheless, while William does suggest the dead cuckold somehow consumes the blood of the living, the thing that causes the townspeople to mob together and go digging for Draculas is not a sudden increase in the overall paleness of the town’s supply of hot chicks who happen to like hanging out in diaphanous robes near the open windows of large castles by night. Rather, William tells us that this proto-vampire has taken to beating up people that he catches out on the roads at night–not drinking their blood, just beating them black and blue.

As far as I’m concerned, it just ain’t a vampire story unless there’s a hot chick having her blood drained on camera (so to speak). For that sort of thing happening in a medieval context, we really don’t have to look any farther than the Quest del Saint Graal in the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian stories. In that romance, Perceval, Bors, Galahad, and Perceval’s sister come upon a castle inhabited by a woman suffering from leprosy. It is the custom of the castle that all maidens passing by must fill a (presumably quite large) silver dish with their blood and offer it to the lady of the castle so that she may be healed. Perceval’s sister, for reasons I’ve never quite understood, but which probably have something to do with an obscure point of Cistercian theology (don’t ask), acquiesces to the request and is drained until she dies. On the up side, her blood does heal the countess of the castle, and somehow this allows Perceval and company to achieve the grail… for some reason.

So, there you go. Somewhere between William of Newburgh’s revenants and the Grail story’s blood-draining countess lies the medieval vampire.

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*I don’t trust the guy one bit. The picture he has on his website is of him holding a (presumably non-vampiric) skull all thoughtful-like, posed in front of a wall of skulls. Follow the link if you don’t believe me. That would be like me suiting up in chain mail** to have my blog profile picture taken.
**Actually, given the usual focus of the blog, I supposed it’d be more like me having my picture taken with a monkey or a man with a bagpipe coming out of his hind end. And since both of those sound like excellent ideas, I retract my skepticism. Now, where’s that camera?
***OK, OK, I’ll stop with the air quotes before I get accused of making a dated Dr. Evil reference.
****And this from the guy who accused Geoffrey of Monmouth of lying out of an inordinate fondness for lying.

I’ve never quite been sold on the identification, but the good people over at the Pierpont Morgan Library assure me that these little guys with big hats crawling around the margins of MS G24 are supposed to be Templars:

If it’s not clear, the one on the right is the “Templar”. The guy on the left is just your average gryllus, though one who appears to have been beaten recently (note the scourge at the Templar’s feet).*

What do you think? On the one hand, Templars tended to wear crosses prominently on their outfits. And they occasionally wore tall hats. On the other hand, there are surprisingly few records of their engaging in bukakke & bondage parties (with or without sickle-wielding monkeys). Like so:

The manuscript these images are from is usually dated to the middle of the fourteenth century and was likely produced in the border region between modern day France and Belgium. The 1350’s or so is a little late for anti-Templar propaganda, seeing as Philip IV rounded up most of them in France in 1307 and had them executed and burned.

But maybe jokes about how heretical those Templars were** managed to stick around in the public consciousness for a few generations. Like how cartoon animals are still slipping on banana peels and hitting each other with anvils even today, though the original objects referenced in the jokes have themselves long since departed the zeitgeist.

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*I imagine that for a gryllus (a head with legs, essentially) a spanking is the scariest possible punishment. They’re basically 1/3 ass by volume.
**Possibly overheard during Bob Hope’s Ninth Crusade USO Tour?:

Man, I tell ya, those Templars sure are heretical.
(How heretical are they?)
They’re so heretical they scourge a guy’s butt just so they can kiss the boo-boo better.
They’re so heretical they defecate in front of monkeys. After the monkey ties them up, I mean. Did I mention the monkey has a scythe? Wait, let me start over here…

I’d never heard of HowItShouldHaveEnded.com until a fortuitous series of YouTube see alsos brought me their way. Hopefully, you can guess their shtick from the URL. They’ve got a laugh to click ratio of about 1:5, which is probably slightly above par for YouTube.

“How Braveheart Should Have Ended” isn’t their funniest video, but it is their medievalest.* So enjoy.**

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*Wait, check that. Looks like they did Beowulf recently. So please correct the above sentence to “it is among their more medievaler”.
**It doesn’t really become worth it until the 0:50 mark, so you’ll have to trust me and hang in there. But probably you’ve already either hung in there or closed this window in disgust well before you got around to reading this footnote,**** so the point is moot.
***Or not reading it–for those of you that closed the window in disgust, I mean. But then, you’re also not reading this footnote, either,**** so who am I correcting for?
****I could have had this footnote read “or this one,” but that’s tempting an infinite regress, now isn’t it? So we’ll leave it here.

If this Condé Nast Daily Traveler article is correct, I may have to put a new definition in the old sidebar. Describing Carnival (or, rather, Rosenmontag) in Cologne, they write:

Seven thousand miles east of Rio, Carnival’s epicenter in the Teutonic lands is the Rhineland capital of Cologne, with its forbiddingly dark Gothic Cathedral and its almost medieval party-till-you-die ethic. This time of year, Cologne is the un-Germany, playing a role not unlike that of New Orleans in America–the steam valve, the free city ruled by Bacchus.

For once, the word medieval gets a positive spin. Paaar-tay! Wooooooo!

Memo to frat guys (who may or may not be preparing to celebrate Ragnar Hairy-Pants Day 2009): Toga! Toga! Toga! is out. Baldric! Hauberk! Wimple! is in.

Unfortunately, the 2009 Rose Monday parade in Cologne was several weeks ago, so you’ll have to wait until February 15th, 2010 for your next chance to get almost medieval and almost party-till-you-die like the medievals did. Until then, you’ll have to console yourself with these pictures of medieval-themed Carnival floats I stole culled from Flickr and elsewhere:*

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*Deciding what counts as “medieval” and what counts as “weird Mardi Gras stuff” proved harder than I’d expected when I came up with the clever idea of a post full of medieval carnival floats,** because the main float aesthetic (other than neon, bright colors, and semi-clad bosoms) is anachronistic pastiche. If I used my original standard, “stuff with dragons, crowns and/or jesters,” I’d have 12,000 pictures instead of 12.
**And as the old saying goes, when the going gets tough, the not-so-tough cheat, so I also included a couple of non-Mardi Gras, non-Carnivale floats from some English medieval carnivals, to fill out my little collection.***
***And, for the record, though Hulk Hogan is dressed as a gold-plated Roman gladiator (ala Ridley Scott), he’s standing on a medievalish throne. On its own, a throne isn’t medieval enough–but a throne with Hulk Hogan on it is so medieval it busts through the other side of medieval and becomes modern again.****
****Or, possibly, I just think Hulk Hogan is hilarious. You be the judge. That’s him as King Bacchus at Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 2008.

Here’s an interesting fact I discovered today. Arnold Schwarzenegger spent the better part of the 90’s, off-and-on at least, trying to get a medieval movie made. It was to have been titled Crusade and even went into pre-production at one point, only to be canceled when it became clear that it was going to seriously exceed its $100,000,000 budget.* This teaser poster was made but (mercifully) never used:

According to Variety, the film was meant to go something like this:

Schwarzenegger long has been expected to play the hero, Hagen, a reluctant warrior who begins the film as a prisoner set to die. He’s freed when he burns the image of the cross into his back during a visit by the pope, and he’s drafted to recapture Jerusalem. The 11th century drama has shades of both “Conan the Barbarian” and “Braveheart.”

According to other rumors, Hagen was going to reclaim the True Cross once he got to Jerusalem!

Man, we medievalists really dodged a bullet on this one. As if Kingdom of Heaven wasn’t bad enough, I’d hate to have to be the one to break the news to a student that the First Crusade wasn’t actually led by a cigar-chomping, one-liner spouting former body builder with a penchant for bad puns and self-mutilation.

Nevertheless, Arnold still has the rights to the script, and he mentions it every now and again in interviews. Back in 2003 he told Entertainment Weekly, “I will get it done no matter what. I will be 105 years old and I’ll have to be strapped to the horse, but I see it happening.” To me, that reads more like a threat than a promise. Thankfully, Arnold has sworn off movies until after his gubernatorial term ends, so we still have a few good years ahead of us yet.

You can read more about the movie, including excerpts from the script, at TheArnoldFans.com.

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*As a cost-cutting movie, the studio decided to axe one of its two big budget productions that year, and Crusade was the victim. The film that was spared? Cutthroat Island!

According to medieval calendars, March has something to do with trees. Either you’re supposed to prune them, like the gentleman on the left, or you’re supposed to ambush them with an axe like the guy on the right. Even though the trees will never see you coming, it’s probably best to stick with pruning, lest you be confused with someone knocking acorns out of the trees for their hogs. That’s so November.

Important and/or interesting medieval dates in March include:

• March 4th, 1152 — Frederick Barbarossa, AKA “Freddie Red Beard” is elected king of the Germans.
• March 6th, 1079 — Omar Khayyam, the Persian jack-of-all-trades (with help from some less-famous Muslim mathematicians) completes the calculations for the Persian calendar. It’s officially adopted a week later.
• March 7th, 1277 — The Condemnations of 1277 are issued. Among the things condemned, or officially banned upon pain of excommunication: Andreas Capellanus’s On Courtly Love and huge swaths of Aristotelianism, including the beliefs that “The only wise men in the world are philosophers” and that “It is impossible to refute arguments of the philosopher concerning the eternity of the world unless we say that the will of the first being embraces incompatibles.” You’ve got to hand it to the medieval Church. Faced with losing an argument against Aristotle, they pass a law that makes his arguments illegal.
• March 11th, 1387 — The Battle of Castagnaro is fought between the Paduans and Veronese, another victory for John Hawkwood, most famous of the condottieri.
• March 16th, 1190 — Over 100 English Jews commit suicide in York by self-immolation rather than be forcibly converted by a rioting mob.
• March 25th, 1306 — Robert the Bruce becomes king of Scotland. I’m done with gratuitous Braveheart references, though, so you’ll have to provide your own this month.
• March 26th, 1484 — William Caxton prints his edition of Aesop’s Fables.
• March 27th, 1309 — Pope Clement V excommunicates the entire city of Venice. To be fair, the Venetian armies were beseiging him at the time.
• March 28th, 845 — Paris is sacked by the Vikings, led by Ragnar Hairy-Pants. They pay him a lot of cash (7,000 pounds of silver) and he goes away to terrorize the rest of France instead. If you need an excuse to get drunk and stumble around the streets in March, might I suggest Ragnar Lodbrok Day? Admit it. St. Patrick’s Day is played out, and how many other chances do you get to break out the old horned helmet?

It actually disturbs me a little that I was able to correctly identify the manuscript in the tiny, low-resolution picture used to illustrate the recent BBC story about the cybernetic William the Conqueror clone from 2055 as the Macclesfield Psalter. Probably some of my readers thought I was just making things up, as I am sometimes (entirely without warrant) accused of doing. But here’s the two page spread that, according to the BBC, somehow demonstrates how linguists use manuscripts to study the evolution of English:

See? Same image. If I recall correctly, I last saw this page during a search for pictures of medieval archers shooting people in the ass. You know, pretty much my normal day-to-day routine. The Macclesfield spread didn’t quite fit the pattern I was looking for at the time, because as you can see this archer (pictured on the righthand page) isn’t shooting a normal ass:

He’s shooting the ass of a man who has a dog’s head for an ass.* Though, I suppose it might just as accurately be described as a dog that has a man for a body. Sort of like the cynocephali, only different. And, arguably, the archer might be aiming at the ass of the man who’s getting a piggyback from the man with the dog’s head for an ass. So you can see why I went with the Alexander MS picture instead.

Across the page and up the margin from the piggyback pair, the illuminator has drawn in a picture of John the Baptist. You can tell it’s John, because he’s 1) pointing at a picture of a lamb, which symbolizes Christ, and 2) dressed like he’s batshit crazy:**

I think modern Christians tend to gloss over the fact that John the Baptist was a crazy desert hermit, more like the guy who lives in a van down by the river than the pairs of well-scrubbed Mormons who go door to door. John the Baptist in the picture Bible I had as a kid, for instance, looked a lot like Fred Flintstone, the sort of guy who sends his animal-skin robe to the cleaners twice a week. I like the medieval version better.

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*If you’re a new reader here and find yourself ready to swoon over all this salty talk, I advise you to develop a plugin for Firefox that changes all instances of ass to arse. And make sure it’s context sensitive, because I plan future articles on Hemingway’s short story “Black Ass at the Crossroads” and a five-part retrospective on Arvid from Head of the Class. You don’t want to look silly at the water cooler talking about Head of the Clarse.
**You might want to add an “s-word*** to poo-poo” setting to your filter, while you’re at it. When you’re done swooning, I mean.
***Also, I have plans to one day make “sword” mean something horribly dirty. It’ll be the most powerful dirty word ever, because you won’t be able to euphemize it to “s-word”.

Hey hey! I got linked by the Language Log today. Also, the boys at the Flophouse Movie Podcast read my gushing fan letter this week during their Academy Awards Flopstacular 2009 and linked me on their site. Together, they have brought more new eyeballs here than the PC Magazine ranking has since December, and it’s only been a day. So take that, print media!