You will all have to pardon me for not posting for the last few days, because I have been busy developing a new and exciting scientific theory. Here it is, the fruit of my labors:

(Smart Science Person + Science Reporter / Anecdotal Hook)^# of Repetitions = Absolute Drivel

Before you dismiss my glorious equation as nothing more than a clever rhetorical device used to spice up some minor nitpicking, allow me to explain. It all begins with this piece over at–of all places, the BBC News website–titled ” ‘Oldest English Words’ Identified“.* According to the article, a group of researchers at Reading University have developed a computational model that analyzes the rate of change of words in the Indo-European language family, and from this model they have concluded that words change more slowly the more often they are used.** And using this model the researchers believe they can speculate fruitfully about what words might have looked like 10 and 20 and even 40,000 years ago.

Yet somehow, after an extended conversation with the BBC science editor and other affiliated reporters, the head researcher on the project, Professor Mark Pagel, ends up spouting utter nonsense like this:

“You type in a date in the past or in the future and it will give you a list of words that would have changed going back in time or will change going into the future,” Professor Pagel told BBC News.

“From that list you can derive a phrasebook of words you could use if you tried to show up and talk to, for example, William the Conqueror.”

You heard him right. When a wild-haired scientist pulls up in a Delorean and tells you that you’ve got to get back to the 1066 Enchantment Under the Sea dance*** to make sure that William the Conqueror and Matilda hook up, you should run a computer model that simulates average linguistic change over time and rewind through 1000 years of linguistic evolution in order to figure out how to talk to the locals. Rather than, say, telling Doc Brown to swing by Barnes and Noble on the way up to 88 MPH so that you can snag a copy of Clark-Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary.

I mean, it’s not like the English language in 1066 is some great mystery that we poor scholars can only theorize about today. Ever hear of a little poem called Beowulf, BBC? You do realize that the weird scribbles on the left-hand pages of the Seamus Heaney edition are not just some sort of fanciful elven language cribbed from Tolkien, right? Wouldn’t using this model to make a medieval phrasebook be a lot like taking a model that analyzes average genetic mutation and using it to predict what the Mesozoic ancestor of humans might have looked like?

OK, I know you probably think I’m being too hard on the BBC, that I’m being purposefully obtuse. Surely, you say, all the reporter meant for you to take from that little quote above was that Professor Pagel’s team’s model is “kinda nifty”. They didn’t mean to give the impression that you could type “Now, we’ve all heard about how awesome those Danish leaders used to be back in the day” into their linguistic wayback machine and have it spit out “Hwæt! We Gardena in gear-dagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.” Instead, they meant that their model would have been able to predict ahead of time that words like “we,” “in,” “day” and “how” would more likely to be the same 1000 years ago than words “awesome” “leaders” and “heard”.

As much as I’d like to believe you, I don’t know how that explanation would jive with the pictures and captions they use to illustrate the article. Right by the nonsense about phrasebooks, we have this helpful sidebar to make it absolutely clear that they have no intention of talking about what the model actually does:

Time-travelers would find a few sounds familiar in William’s words.

See, it really is all about the time-travelers and what’s best for them on their hypothetical visit to Hastings.

At this point, I suppose I should go ahead and mention that William was a Norman, and so would be far more likely to be shouting at you to move your inoperative time machine**** from his battlefield so that the archers can get in position in French, not English, so this whole line of discussion is probably moot.

Though if I may be permitted to beat this dead cheval just a few sentences longer, time-travelers trying to speak French to William would have had a whole lot more luck than those trying English, even if we ignore the question of William’s English fluency. While eleventh-century English looks a lot like those few lines I quoted from Beowulf above,***** eleventh-century French is much closer to modern. Take this snippet from the eleventh-century Life of St. Alexis:

‘E! Deus,’ dist il, ‘bels reis qui tot governes, se tei plöust, ici ne volsisse ester.”

You might have a little problem deciding on tenses here and there, especially in the second half, but I’m pretty sure you could get ” ‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘beautiful king who rules all’ ” with only second-semester French. (For the record, this seems to me like a problem with the whole premise of the computational linguistics model the folks at Reading put together. If there really is a law-like constant rate of linguistic change, why is French so conservative and English so promiscuous?)

The other sidebar picture and caption they use for this story is also a treat, if only for manuscript snobs:

Medieval manuscripts give linguists clues about more recent changes

I suppose it’s technically true that linguists use medieval manuscripts to track linguistic changes more recent than 1066. But that’s only because they use them to track linguistic changes before 1066 as well. Indeed, I’m pretty sure all the linguistic inputs concerning the middle ages for the fancy computer model are derived, at one remove or another, from evidence culled from manuscripts. This is like running a story about how the Republicans are going to try to stop Obama’s health care plan and illustrating it with a picture of Garrett Augustus Morgan (the inventor of the stoplight)***** labeled “Other famous African-Americans have had challenges involving stops.” Technically true, yes, but not exactly relevant.

And, as if to add insult to injury, the picture they chose is a stock image of the Macclesfield Psalter. I’m almost 100% certain than nobody’s studying the Macclesfield Psalter for clues about English’s recent changes, because it, like every other lavishly illuminated fourteenth-century psalter, is written in Latin.

So let this be a lesson to you. If you’re a smart person with a clever new theory or process, stay as far away from the BBC’s science reporters as you can. You might think you’re going to get the chance to tell the world about your new method of detecting dark matter, but they’re just as likely to try to get you talking about whether, on Bizarro World, Bizarro Superman is just plain Superman or if he’s some sort of extra-Bizarro Bizarro Superman. And if they put you on the front page, it’s only going to be as an excuse to show a picture of Bizarro with the caption, “Does dark matter explain the Bizarro universe? Bizarro says, ‘This am good question.’ “

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*Or perhaps I should say that it begins with this post over at the Language Log, which first directed my attention to this story.
**Apparently, these researchers first published their results in a reasonably well received paper in Nature back in 2007. That paper was called”Frequency of Word-Use Predicts Rates of Lexical Evolution Throughout Indo-European History“, but there is no way to determine that from the article. Again, I must thank the good people at the Language Log for said information.
***Though I would imagine, given the way that dashboard display works on that Delorean, we’ll probably have to settle for going back to 1055. And listening to Huey Lewis while we do.
****You should have asked the Libyans for more plutonium before you left. It’s 1066 1055. You can’t just pop over to the corner store for some more.
*****That’s right, I’m a late dater for Beowulf. Kaluza’s law my ass, that’s all I have to say.
******Thank you, Black History Month. [Music cue] The more I know….

Medievalism: it’s the fashion craze that’s sweeping the nation! As you may recall, only a few months ago, it was Manolo Blahnik crafting fashionably torturous armored high heels for the modern woman. Now it’s Vera Wang, who is describing her new collection as “modern medieval.” Me, I’m not so sure:

OK, yeah, you got me. That’s not Vera Wang. That’s actually the “Deluxe Barbarian Queen” fancy dress costume available at finer web retailers. But in my defense, it is certainly very modern (her axe is plastic!), and probably about as medieval as the real deal. If you don’t believe me, well, this is actually the Wang:

Wait, hold on, I’m getting word now that that’s actually the “Pup Royale,” a doggie costume from the same site as the Barbarian Queen. Apparently, there are technical issues here with our servers at Got Medieval, so you’ll just have to follow the original link to see the real Wang.

But if you’re the sort who refuses to follow links on principle, the article I linked offers this explanation of what she meant by “Modern Medieval”:

“Techno fabrics and modern architectural silhouettes combined with the romance of old world Venice through soft organzas and the illusion of Fortuny pleating vis-à-vis sewn strips of fabric that created a bib effect on some of the dresses.”

Now, my reading comprehension skills aren’t what they once were, but it seems like the “medieval” part of “modern medieval” is “the romance of old world Venice” as manifested in “soft organzas” and “the illusion of Fortuny pleating.” Of course, as a non-queer-eyed American male,* I have no idea what any of this means. But thanks to my crack research staff*** I am starting to understand.

Mariano Fortuny was an early 20th-century designer famous for making long pleated tea gowns for turn-of-the-century socialites inspired by ancient Greek art.**** (It has to be the “illusion of Fortuny pleats” because his top secret pleating technique, like Greek Fire, has rarely been duplicated.) Organza is a thin, transparent silk fabric first made in the 1800’s. And while “old world” is a weasely word, usually the oldest world people associate with Venice is the the world inhabited by Donatello, Michaelangelo, and the other ninja turtles, which is to say Renaissance–not medieval–Venice.

So, by “modern medieval,” Vera Wang means some amalgam of 20th-century Spanish design, 19th-century fabric, and 15th- or 16th-century Italian romance. Or, in other words, “kinda old-timey.” Awesome. Matthew Gabriele and company, it looks like your trademark is safe.

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*Carson, why won’t you return my phone calls?**
**Does the fact that your show ended in 2007 have anything to do with it? Because I’d totally understand if that’s the case.
***Read: Wikipedia.
****The dresses were inspired. Not the socialites.

Sometimes people* say to me, “Carl, why always the pictures of trumpets coming out of the asses? Why always the penises that land in the treetops and the vaginas that wear hats? Do you never have the pretty pictures for us? One thousand years of history and you have only the pooping and the sex pictures?”

And that’s a fair point. So, here’s a change of pace. No sex, no violence, no goose-molesting foxes. Just a completely harmless picture of a cat and a monkey sharing a bowl of milk.

I’ve actually been meaning to post this one for a while now, but I no longer have any idea where I got it, and I don’t like posting things I can’t cite.** I’ve got a hunch it’s from the same manuscript as the monkey with a cannon that’s been sitting in my blog’s title bar for nearly a year now (Bodleian MS Canon. Liturg. 283), but for whatever reason I can’t seem to find the right leaf again. If that’s not it, and I had to guess, I’d say mid-to-late fifteenth century French, probably a book of hours.

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*Full disclosure: the people referred to in this sentence are imaginary. And apparently played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
**But I’m pretty busy this week, and the less I know about it, the less I have to write about it, right?

There are approximately 2.3 (repeating) facts that mainstream media types know about Geoffrey of Chaucer, and one of them is that he is somehow responsible for Valentines Day. Exactly how he’s responsible for it, well that’s not one of the other 1 and 1/3 facts. So every year, the association between Chaucer and February 14 twists and morphs as it is passed from one reporter to another, then across the wikipedias and infopleases of the web, and then back to reporters for another cycle. And you end up with claims ranging from “Chaucer invented Valentine’s Day,” to “Chaucer invented St. Valentine,” to “Chaucer wrote the first Valentine,” to “Chaucer was the first CEO of Hallmark, Inc.”

So allow me to clear this one up. Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls contains the first extant reference to “Saint Valentine’s Day” as an occasion for romance. This is that reference:

[…] ther sat a quene
That, as of light the somer-sonne shene
Passeth the sterre, right so over mesure
She fairer was than any creature.

And in a launde, upon an hille of floures,
Was set this noble goddesse Nature;
Of braunches were hir halles and hir boures,
Y-wrought after hir craft and hir mesure;
Ne ther nas foul that cometh of engendrure,
That they ne were prest in hir presence,
To take hir doom and yeve hir audience.

For this was on seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make, (ll. 298-310)

Loosely translated:

There sat a queen who was more lovely by far than any other creature, just as the summer sun outshines the stars. This noble goddess Nature sat enthroned in a pavilion she had wrought of branches upon a flowered hill atop a meadow. And there was not any bird born of love that was not ready in her presence to hear her and receive her judgment. For this was Saint Valentine’s Day, when all the birds of every kind that men can imagine come to choose their mates.

The word I bolded and italicised above, extant is key to properly understanding the Chaucer-Valentine connection, and for that matter, I think, to understanding Chaucer in general.

The Parliament of Fowls was probably written sometime in the late-1370’s to the late 1380’s,* in what we might call Chaucer’s “Dream Vision Period.” To say that Chaucer’s Parliament contains the first extant reference to a romantic Valentine’s Day means that no texts that can be dated earlier than the late 1380’s connect the Feast of St. Valentine to romance. This is not to say that there was no Feast of St. Valentine before Chaucer. In fact, we can say pretty certainly that there was. He’s the next major saint on the feast calendar after St. Scholastica, of Oxford massacre fame.**

Likewise, crediting Chaucer with the first extant reference does not necessarily mean that he was the originator of the tradition of doing romantic things (like… uh, mating your birds) on Valentine’s Day. It just means that no earlier references survive. To put it another way, the first time we can be sure that A-Rod was using steroids was in 2003, when he came up positive in that oops-wasn’t-that-supposed-to-be-anonymous? test. That doesn’t meant that the first time he used steroids was in 2003. It’s just the first concrete proof of his using them that survives to this day. And, similarly, The Parliament of Fowls proves that Chaucer used steroids as early as 1381 or so, but he might have been doping as far back as The Book of the Duchess. And other authors might have been doing it before him, but we lost their test results to the ravages of time.***

Ultimately, I think there’s a very good reason to suspect that there were, in fact, other roid-fueled courtly poets traditions connecting Valentine and romance that preceded Chaucer’s reference but which simply, for whatever reason, did not survive to the modern day. Chaucer is the sort of storyteller who builds his own stories out of cross-references to other works, works which he lovingly perverts in making the reference. This scene in the garden with Lady Nature, for example, is immediately preceded by a laundry-list of lovers said to adorn the walls of Venus’ temple: Callisto, Atlanta, Semiramis, Candace, Hercules, Byblis, Dido, Thisbe and Pyramus, Tristram and Isolt, Paris, Achilles, Helen, Cleopatra, Troilus (but weirdly, not Criseyde), Scylla, and Rhea Silvia–that is, he peppers his story of romantic love with a lot of names of people who you probably wouldn’t want to emulate in love, and throws in several who have absolutely nothing to do with romance just to make things good and confusing. And a scant two lines after the Valentine-reference, Chaucer-the-dreamer fobs the actual description of Nature’s beauty off on another author entirely by saying she was “exactly like how Alain describes her in the Complaint of Nature“**** and leaving it at that. Chaucer’s favorite term for himself, was not “author” but “compiler,” after all. He vastly preferred to use the already existing than to resort to the whole cloth.

Most of Chaucer’s work is only really good when you know the other works he’s referring to or quoting–and, more importantly, who he’s misrepresenting and misquoting. Chaucer is the sort of guy who would, were he alive today, be writing things like “As we all know, hard work is critical to success. No one knows this more than that famous man named Jed. He was a poor mountaineer, but he kept his family fed, now didn’t he? We must all work hard, or we will never be able to pack up our family and move to Beverly,***** because there are no shortcuts in life.”

If Chaucer’s is the first actual reference to St. Valentine in a romantic context, rather than just the first extant one, it is probably because he did something like intentionally picking a bad saint’s day for a holiday involving romance. As you may have heard, St. Valentine’s chief pre-Hallmark claim to fame was being beheaded, which I think we can all agree is a good bit less romantic than a box of chocolates. For this explanation to work, of course, we would have to believe that in between the time of Chaucer and Shakespeare–the next most famous romantic Valentine mentioner–someone misunderstood Chaucer’s original joke. Me, I’d take that bet.

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*I’m going to skip discussion of the astrological argument for dating the Parliament. But if you want a more specific date, the narrower range is 1381-1383.
**The image above is taken from just such a feast calendar, Bodleian Library MS. Rawl D. 939. Incidentally, that’s probably not a valentine in his hand. As a martyr beheaded for refusing to renounce Christianity, Valentine is usually shown holding a Bible.
****The Alain joke is a little more obscure. In Alain’s famous portrait of Nature, she is wearing a garment on which is embroidered images of all the birds, from the eagle on down to the bat. The dreamer is thus misremembering his Alain of Lille because his birds are actual birds up in a tree, not pictures of birds upon a magical robe.
****I have always had my suspicions that “moral” Gower was chemically enhanced.
*****Hills, that is. Swimmin’ pools. Movie stars.

(Via Offworld, Technabob, and every other gaming site out there…):

Someone done went and translated The NES sorta-classic Zelda II: The Adventure of Linkinto Latin. Would my Latin be better now if someone had only done this twenty years ago? Probably not. Will I go snag an emulator and play through to improve my Latin today? Eh… yeah, probably not, either. Am I happy that such a thing exists? Indubitably. It gives me a good reason for reminiscing about how frikkin’ difficult those sword and shield wielding knights (were they supposed to be Darknuts?) got towards the end of the game, something I often do, but without the good reason. The scrooowtching sound of my tiny sword bouncing off their surprisingly mobile shields still haunts my dreams.

Kids today have no idea how ass-kickingly hard video games used to be.**

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*It alliterates if you pronounce it like a Latin snob, something I’m usually against, but I couldn’t come up with an iconic V-alliterating Zelda series enemy.
**If you are a kid today and take offense at that, go sit down and play Mega Man 2 and get back to me.***
***Back already? Well, even if you beat it (and stop pretending–you didn’t), know that that’s the easiest of the Mega Mans Mega Men Mega Man games. There’s like seven-hundred others that are six-hundred times as hard. Frankly, I have no clue why we used to put up with crap like that.

I realize I missed a week’s marginalia two Mondays ago, and no doubt you have all been alternately jittery with anticipation and lethargic with despair. So to make it up to you, here’s a little bonus from the margins of the ever-present MS Douce 6, AKA my favorite manuscript ever. Here we have a lover, wounded by Cupid’s arrow, offering his heart to his beloved to be healed:

You have my permission to print off as many of these as you want and hand them out as valentines.* You can even scribble “I Choo-Choo-Choose You” beneath the dripping blood. But you should probably make sure your beloveds are medievalists or medieval enthusiasts, otherwise you might get sent to the principal’s office for making terroristic threats.

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*But if you want a magnet or a coaster, you’ll have to visit Ye Olde Got Medieval Shoppe over at CafePress.

This week’s image comes from the lower margin of Das Gänsebuch, a liturgical choir book made in Nuremburg in the early sixteenth century.*

Das Gänsebuch, or to translate it, “The Geese Book” (so named for reasons that should now be obvious), is one of those large format books that would have sat up on a pedestal before the assembled congregation, large enough that the members of the choir closest to it could use it as a crib for the songs they’re meant to be singing as part of the liturgy.

But, of course, the choir has likely all learned the songs by heart, anyway, so there is ample opportunity for their eyes to drop down to the page’s bottom gutter, where they’ll spot this choir of geese doing exactly what they’re doing.

I’m fairly certain the joke here grows out of the tension between where your eyes should be and where they are. If you’re using the book “properly,” you’re going to be looking at the music and at your cantor, so one one level, the geese being led by a wolf is a warning: “Get your eyes out of the margin and back on the cantor, for he has sharp teeth and is quick to anger.”

But, then, the easiest way to keep someone’s attention from drifting into the margin would have been not to have put a picture there in the first place. The book the geese are reading from has no marginalia in it, after all, and their attention seems to be right where it ought to be, on their wolfish cantor. Yet keeping their eyes on their own work has its own perils, too, as the geesely-choristers are blissfully unaware of the fox who’s getting ready to either molest or eat one of them.***

In other words, “ha ha, made you look!”****

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*I recognize that the sixteenth-century is pushing it for medieval. Hell, Columbus was already wandering around Columbia and looking for Marco Polo’s gold by then. But in general, the Renaissance gets later and later the further north you go,** so Nuremburg probably still counts as medieval for our purposes.
**No one has checked, but it is possible that this explains why Santa’s elves continue to carve wooden horses that haven’t been the “it” gift since Christmas 1482. The Renaissance is still moving north and hasn’t caught them yet.
***Something about the way fox is standing to me suggests the fox is going to teach the goose the difference between a “good touch” and a “bad touch”… the hard way. That’s the position and gesture the dogs at the dog park assume right before some dominance humping is about to go down. And yes, I do in fact spend too much time at the dog park these days, why do you ask?
****For me, that line cannot be delivered without doing a Nelson Muntz impression. Oh, and while I have you all distracted down here in the margin thinking about the Simpsons when you should be thinking about medieval junk, I should add that I have no clue why the artists took such care to draw in the wolf’s dangly bits. Perhaps that’s why the geese are keeping their eyes glued to the book. Awkward!

An alert reader tipped me off to this, the opening line of a Newsweek opinion piece by Howard Fineman titled “Why Obama Should Stop Doing So Much TV”:

In medieval Washington, no one gets a half-hour solo meeting with a president. But as Barack Obama labored to sell his economic plan last week, he gave three senators, none a household name, the royal treatment.

I’ve read and re-read the piece and, frankly, I have absolutely no idea what the phrase, “In medieval Washington” is meant to convey. Does Fineman mean that we only now moved past the Middle Ages in our nation’s capital with the election of Barack Obama? Or was Obama recently medieval, until now, when he’s started meeting with junior Republicans? Or does Fineman mean to indicate that Middle Ages should be defined as, “a period of human history characterized by a lack of half-hour meetings with prominent officials”?

Or maybe it’s the setup for some new version of Russian reversal that a copy-editor cut the punchline from.* You know… In America, you drive a car. In Soviet Russia, car drives YOU!! In medieval Washington, no one gets a half-hour solo meeing with the president. In medieval Soviet Russia, the president gets a half-hour solo meeting with NO ONE!!! And he wears funny medieval clothes while he’s not meeting with you. Because its the Middle Ages when he’s doing it–I mean not doing it. I mean… What a country!

If you Google ‘Howard Fineman’ and medieval” you don’t get much to help unmuddle the medieval riddle. Apparently, a few years ago, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Fineman claimed

“we [America] are the first post-medieval country. We’re the first country in which no authority from above was saying you must believe a certain way, you must act a certain way. That’s always been the case.”

And a few years before that, he praised Bush’s performance in the wake of 9/11 with this:

Bush passed his first tests, but like the medieval knight, he’s only begun his quest — and ours — for security and a new architecture to preserve it.

Neither of these is particularly revealing. I mean, we all know that there were no countries from approximately 1517 until 1776, and also that the only people worth mentioning who ever when on quests were medieval knights, and they only got to go after passing a series of standardized tests not unlike the SAT.** So I give up.

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*Damn you, copy editers and your incesant intrefeerance! Whatare yo good for, anyways?s”
**Which in those days was called the Ye Olde SATe. Ine thosee dayese, I mean.

The Virgin Mary is having quite a year, and it’s only February. Last month, as you may have heard, a Chilean designer, Ricardo Oyarzun, put on a fashion show featuring sexy Virgins Mary. This story made its way through most of your major newspapers and blog type venues, for two obvious reasons:

Those two reasons, obviously, are that the story filled those hard-to-fill column inches in the “Faith and Spirituality” section of the paper and it gave news outlets in general excuse to feature large-breasted models and call it news. And, of course, this all comes hot on the heels of Mary’s appearance on the cover of the Mexican edition of Playboy back in December. Why, if I were a New York Times writer, these two occurences of Mary sexification would be all I’d need for a trend piece for the Sunday magazine.

Lest you all accuse me of bringing this up solely as an excuse to feature scantily clad women myself, there is an important medieval angle to all of this. Responding to the outraged Catholics (whose outrage he had, of course, intentionally courted), the designer, Ricardo Oyarzun, had this to say:

There is no pornography here, there’s no sex, there are no virgins menstruating or feeling each other up. This is artistic expression.

None of the news outlets that picked up the story record the reporter’s next question after this spirited defense, which surely must have been, “Menstrating virgins feeling each other up? What kind of porn, exactly, do you watch, Mr. Artistic Expression?”

But whatever the designer’s tastes in kink, as I discussed a few years ago when South Park went there, menstruating Virgins are entirely acceptable in a medieval context and not the slightest bit salacious. Indeed, the Virgin Mary’s menstrual cycle was the subject of much medieval theological disputation.* Ultimately, it was decided that the Virgin must have had one, because Jesus was born fully mortal, and according to medieval medical theories, a mortal body was created out of the matter provided by the mother, the same matter that is expelled once a month. Incidentally, this same matter they thought became the mother’s milk, so Jesus’s suckling was independent confirmation of the existence of Mary’s cycle.**

As for feeling Virgins up, that’s also medieval. Shall I remind you again of the medieval Corpus Christi play in which a skeptical midwife feels Mary up to prove she’s no virgin and gets her hand magically withered for her disbelief? Oh, I guess I just did. Stupid rhetorical questions.

At any rate, I popped over to the designer’s web page to see if I could find out more about his weird taste in porn the theological underpinings of his Virgin-inspired fashion, and I learned two important bits of information about the story that those other blogs left out. The first is that the tartification of Mary is really just a sideline interest for Mr. Oyarun. The real attraction to the Virgin comes from his love of improbable and uncomfortable hats. Take these three Marys from his site:

Only one of the three has immodest decolletage, but all three sport insane and enormous halo-esque hats.

The other thing I learned is that easily offended Catholics everywhere should consider themselves lucky. While the extra boobage might indeed be offensive, given the other fashions on display on his site, it could have been much worse. I mean, the Virgin Mary could have ended up looking like one of these two:

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*Re-researching this, I discovered that “Did the Virgin Mary have that time of the month?” is a question that just won’t go away, even today. Check out this long consideration of the issue from the Rev. Mr. Bryce Andrew Sibley’s Mary page, for a contemporary analysis.
**Of course, it would be foolish to deny that the medievals would have had some problems with their Virgin baring so much cleavage as the lady a few pages up, unless there was a suckling baby involved. So deny it I shan’t.