Feeling stressed over the outcome of today’s election? Is the suspense getting to you? Consider this image from the Bodleian Alexander MS:

Here we have two knights barreling towards one another, caught in the final second of their joust. One moment more, and one of them will be other ground with a splintered lance sticking out of him, and the other will be kneeling before the lady who graces the center margin, receiving the victor’s crown.

If we follow the floral margins beneath the two knights, we find the artist has also included images of them from some time before the joust, receiving their respective helmets from their respective ladies. The perfect symmetries of space and time here collude, I think, to enhance the sense of suspense and tension in the center of the image. Everything is coming down to one last moment. Everything hangs in the balance.

But follow the righthand border just a bit longer, and the tension is undercut:

Frequent readers of Got Medieval will no doubt recognize, even at this distance, that the interloper in the right hand margin is a mischievous little monkey. It may be a little hard to make out what he’s doing, however, so here is a closeup:

Up above the fray of the long-fought chivalric contest, our monkey friend is free to indulge in an idyllic hobby, chasing butterflies with a knotted up hood (no doubt stolen from the marginal peasants playing blind man’s buff a few pages back).

Today’s electoral battle is going to play out how it’s going to play out. Until the lances are splintered and the crown is bestowed, take a moment to indulge yourself in your own idyllic hobby.

This is a monkey, and he approves of this message.

According to medieval calendars, November is the time to fatten your swine on acorns.* Just grab a handy stick and thrash the tree soundly until they fall. Your swine will thank you.

Important dates in medieval history include:

• November 1st, 1179 — Phillip II  crowned king of France.
• November 4th, 1333 — The River Arno tops its banks and floods Florence, a much more important flood than others, as Giovanni Villani was there to chronicle it for his Nuova Cronica.
• November 9th, 1282 — Peter III of Aragon excommunicated for invading Sicily.
• November 11th, 1215 — The Fourth Lateran Council begins. Among their decisions: clergymen may no longer wear red or green, go hunting, or be entertained by mimes.
• November 13th, 1002 — The St. Brice’s Day Massacre. English king Ethelred orders all Danes in England killed.
• November 16th, 1384 — Saint Hedwig, daughter of King Louis I of Hungary, is crowned king of Poland. That’s Hedvig Rex, boys, not Hedvig Regina, and don’t you forget it. She later becomes the patron saint of queens.
• November 18th, 1302 — Pope Boniface VIII issues the bull Unam Sanctam, declaring that the church has “one body and one head, not two heads like a monster.”
• November 18th, 1307 — William Tell shoots an apple off his son’s head.
• November 25th, 1120 — The White Ship sinks in the English channel near Barfleur.  William Adelin, the English heir apparent, drowns trying to save his sister, setting the stage for twenty years of civil war when Henry I dies.
• November 26th, 1476 — Vlad the Impaler takes over southern Romania for the third time.

 
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*There’s probably a metaphor there about the election and ACORN, but this staunchly apolitical blog can’t go there, so you’ll have to make up your own.

I know I said that I would keep this blog above the political fray, but last night’s Daily Show offered up an analysis of the McCain campaign’s medieval tactics too good to ignore:

Just a quickie this week. The following image comes from the lower border of a leaf of a late thirteenth-century manuscript today called the “Ormesby Psalter.”  According to the catalogue notes, it illustrates a popular medieval riddle:

Roughly stated, the riddle asks, “What comes neither riding nor driving nor walking, neither clad nor unclad, bringing a gift that is not a gift?”

And here’s a closeup of the answer.  It’s this guy:

The riddle comes from the story of Marcolf and Solomon.  Marcolf (pictured above) is kind of the medieval version of Oscar Wilde.  He gets invited to all the best dinner parties because of his reputation for being clever, but his cleverness mostly manifests itself in making fun of his hosts.  Once he’s thoroughly annoyed Solomon, he is challenged to do impossible tasks, like the one above.

here is a certain epistemologically messy game that all professors play with their students at some point in the semester.  Students arrive to class unprepared and pretend that they’ve read the assigned material.  The professor, in turn, pretends not to know that the students are pretending to be prepared.  The students, in turn, pretend not to know that the professor is pretending not to know that the students are pretending to be prepared.  The professor, in turn, pretends not to know that the students are pretending not to know that the professor is pretending–OK, you get the point.[1]

Well, it’s that time of year again, the time to send out applications for the academic job market, and for the first time, I’ve decided to list “Got Medieval” on my C.V., under “Professional Service.”    (Since this place occupies the first couple of Google hits for my name, I figure I might as well be proactive in claiming the blog.*)  So, if you’re someone on a search committee doing research on this Yale applicant with the old-fashioned sounding thesis topic, welcome.  If you would like, we, too, can play the game.  You can pretend you never found this place, and I can pretend I don’t know you’re pretending, etc.**  If it helps, I retracted my blog, Chaucer-style, before my aborted foray onto the job market last year.***  You can pretend that I really meant that.

But please, even while pretending, don’t let the gratuitous posts on Mrs. Brad Pitt, Dan Brown, or monkey shenanigans fool you.  I really am a normal academic who will dutifully show up to faculty meetings and teach survey courses and freshman comp at 8AM without complaint.  My office door will have the same collection of twenty-year-old photocopied comic strips as your normal, non-blogging colleague.  Yes, you’re right that my blog shows a remarkable lack of career foresight.  Yes, perhaps I should have prepared for your arrival by delaying my piece on medieval political propaganda and pushing out some additional scholarly sounding posts starting back around August, but it’s almost November, and here we are.

In my defense, I think it’s fair to call this blog “professional service.”  The last conference I was at, more than a few people came up to me and said, “Hey, aren’t you the guy with the Got Medieval blog?”  One of them even said, “I use your blog in my class to show students who don’t believe me that medieval people weren’t boring.”  That’s a service, right?  I’ll be presenting a paper at Kalamazoo this year on self-aware medieval marginalia, a topic I’ve been poking at in my Mmm… Marginalia feature for a while now.  Like it or not, this weird Internet thing I do is tied up to my scholarly identity in ways I can’t quite disentangle from now.

So, for my normal readers, I will promise to try not to become suspiciously dull now that we have guests reading over our shoulders.  Maybe in return, normal readers, you can help me out, at least in a small way, by becoming my blog-follower on the Google, or faving me at Technorati, or by writing a glowing testimonial about how I definitely would be a great literature professor, etc.  There are many applets and links in my blog’s right hand margin for you to give me additional Internet credibility.  Remember, the Internet cred to academic cred exchange rate is akin to the Zimbabwe dollar to American dollar rate, so I’ll need approximately 60,000 internet recommendations to translate into one real world one.

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Good natured readers have been sending me links to op-eds and letters to the editor in which someone drops the old M-bomb while referring to something McCain, Obama, Palin, or Biden said or did recently. Thus far, I have decided to distance myself from the presidential election. As a medieval blogger, I have a responsibility not to seem partisan or biased. With this blog’s vast reach, if I were to intimate that the Middle Ages somehow taught us which candidate to vote for, it would jeopardize the very fabric of our fragile democracy.

Consider this a blanket response to claims that a candidate is “getting medieval” by doing this or that.  The medievals  weren’t so big on the whole democracy thing, but if they had had presidential elections, their attack ads wouldn’t pussyfoot around the real issues that mattered to voters. They would get straight to the point:

No, this is not further evidence of my obsession with magical private parts. It is, rather, more or less what some scholars think actually happened in the medieval town of Massa Marittima in the thirteenth century.

Back in 2000, workers restoring the wall of a medieval public fountain in the town discovered a mural hidden under years of grime. At first blush, it was a pretty tame find:

Just a big tree with a group of women in medieval garb clustered beneath it, presumably the sort of women who would have frequented the fountain in its heyday, right? Oh, how wrong you are, my naive readers.  As the layers of grime came off, it became apparent that the tree’s branches were inhabited–by over two dozen detached penises:

At first, it was thought that the mural was meant as some sort of fertility display. But more recently, George Ferzoco, director of the Centre for Tuscan Studies at the University of Leicester, published a book that argues the mural was meant as political propaganda. During the time when the fresco was likely painted, Massa Marittima was controlled by the Guelphs,* who had recently expelled their rivals the Ghibellines. The black eagles flying about underneath the tree were the symbol of the ousted Ghibelline faction.  Taken together with other details in the mural, Ferzoco says that it is meant to send a clear message to the people of Massa Marittima: “if the Ghibellines are allowed power they will bring with them heresy, sexual perversion, civic strife and witchcraft.”

Let’s run down the charges:

Civic strife?

Check. The two women bent over at the foot of the tree are pulling each other’s hair and fighting over one of the tree’s inhabitants. (Hard to make out with the images I could find, but it’s there.)

Sexual perversion?

Check. The woman on the far left in the beatific pose is being sodomized by a penis. (Click the image above to zoom in; you can just make out the back end of the perpetrator.)

Heresy and witchcraft?

Well, this requires a bit more of a stretch. According to the Malleus Malificarum, AKA The Witch Hammer, a guidebook written in Germany in the fifteenth century in order to assist and instruct the pious in recognizing and responding to the threat of witchcraft, witches have the ability to remove a man’s penis and keep it alive and mobile while detached:

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?

…

For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest.

On the charge of witchcraft, I am less convinced. Beyond the problematic several centuries separating the Massa Marittima mural and the Malleus, there is little in the mural other than their proximity to the magic johnsons, that suggests that these women are witches. 

I know I’m going to take some heat from the medieval witchcraft lobby here, but not every medieval woman found taking an interest in a suddenly mobile phallus should be considered a witch. The Bibliotheque Nationale, for instance, has a manuscript of the Romance of the Rose with a marginal illustration of a woman trying to fish a penis out of a penis tree,*** much like the woman in the Massa Marittima mural, and in the Romance of the Rose it’s usually just thought to be a joke about how lascivious women are.****  Similarly, there is the German medieval story, Nonnenturnier, in which a man quarrels with his penis so much that it decides to leave him, eventually ending up at a convent where a group of nuns hold a tournament to determine who will get to have it.

So while I doubt the witchcraft allegations, I’m still sold overall on the political message of the mural.  If you let Ghibellines run your town, it’s going to be pretty much 24/7 your daughters and wives getting sodomized by flying penises.  That, my friends, is not change we can believe in.

I’ve always been vaguely aware of this, but interest in my recent post on a potential marginal joke in the Maciejowski Bible made it clear: people dig trebuchets.  A lot.* Something about them just brings out the medievalist’s inner fanboy.

At any rate, while Googling “traction trebuchets” today (thanks, Steve!), I learned that I’d missed a trebuchet image about 20 pages later in the same MS.  I’ve posted it above, because I’m fairly certain the artist meant it to be a callback to the original joke I pointed out on Monday. 

The alert reader who remembers what happened to the first trebuchet sling loader can probably guess how the conversation in the left margin is playing out.  I imagine it’s meant to go a little something like this:

I should note, though, that according to some medieval military experts, the sling puller is supposed to hold on for a little while to add an last minute whip to the lever arm when he lets go.  I think the original sling loader is a bit higher than would be optimal for such a strategy, though, so I say the joke still stands.

From the Maciejowski Bible, AKA the Morgan Bible, AKA the Crusader Bible AKA the Book of Kings (AKA the Bible so nice they named it twice thrice over and over… ice) comes the only marginal image that I’ve ever seen that should probably be accompanied by a Goofy holler:

And here’s a closeup of our holleree:

A few interesting things to note, other than this catapult operator who clearly skipped the day they covered ‘Step 2’ in catapult operating school.*  First is that the illuminator draws in a mound of earth for the overzealous catapulter to have just been pulled off of.  That little brown hill is important, because medieval manuscript pages are usually decorated as if the characters on them are subject to gravity’s pull.  People can hang out in the vertical margins, so long as they hang off of something, like a a piece of decorated border or the edge of an image.   So, the dirt is a key part of the sight gag.  Without it, you’d have a different punchline: the man in the margin would be an interloper, like one of those mischievous monkeys, a guy who just happened to come along and grab ahold of the piece of the catapult that’s sticking out of the main image. 

The main image, by the way, is of Saul leading the Israelites against Nasash, the king of Ammon, a cruel tyrant who gouged out the right eyes of all the Israelites he could get his hands on, for reasons that nobody’s sure of, but it’s cruel and tyrantish nonetheless.  Saul is leading the Israelites in a righteous battle, but not so righteous a battle that the illuminator was worried that a bit of slapstick might be out of order.

I think there’s a little more to the joke beyond simple slapstick, of course (don’t I always?).  The illuminator of the Maciejowski Bible is overall fairly strict about the borders of his main images.  Like picture frames, this Bible’s borders usually contain the entire subject within them with no marginal overhang.**  Almost every time the illuminator lets the image spill out of the frame, however, it’s when the main scene is something bloody, violent, or gory.

Here, for example, is the Maciejowski Bible’s picture of the Israelites sacking Ai and stringing up its king:

And here we have a picture of Saul’s son Johnathon leading an attack against some Phillistines.  He’s hardly in the frame at all:

In the images of war, the accoutrements of the combattants (spears, swords, horses, catapults) and their grisly results (beheaded bodies, body parts, spurting blood) simply can’t be contained by the border.  Violence is messy; it ruins the lines of the page and spills out into the margins.  

Ultimately, I think the illuminator is going for the medieval equivalent of the jerky hand-held camera style that filmmakers use today when they want to emphasize how gritty and real something is.  It’s like the part in Braveheart where the blood spatters on the camera lens and a blow knocks the camera back, or like the Normandy invasion in Saving Private Ryan.  This illuminator can’t shake the page, so he shakes the images out of the page and into the margins.  But in both cases, we have an artist using a momentary reminder of the artificial nature of the medium he’s working in in order to make the whole seem more real. 

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*Step 1: Load the catapult. Step 2: Let go of the shot, for the love of God. Step 3: Fire away. Step 4: Profit.
**Making it hard for me to get a Mmm… Marginalia out of this famous Bible, but look at me go!  Incidentally, this is not usually the case.  The frame of a medieval image often “belongs” to the world of the picture, not the world of the observer.  The images in the picture can lean against the frame, or use it to boost themselves up, or grab it and shake at it like it’s a set of prison bars, etc.

Periodization debates are extremely silly and subjective, and thus of great interest to out-of-touch ivory tower intellectuals likes yours truly.  To steal a joke from an old prof, people in the fifteenth century didn’t encourage their kids by saying things like, “Just hold on, junior, the Renaissance is a comin’.  Don’t give up now, we’re almost there!”  And 1499 was surely a lot more like 1500 than it was like 1400.  Nontheless, lines must be drawn.*

There is broad agreement, particularly among scholars that use the passive voice impersonal constructions to assert broad agreement, that the Middle Ages lasted for about a thousand years–though the thousand years can be stretched as far back as the fall of Rome or as far forward as Luther in a pinch.  Also, the Middle Ages went into overtime in Britain, so that Chaucer and Malory could remain on medieval course syllabuses, while Donatello and Da Vinci down in Italy were already Renaissancing it up.

I bring this up because several of you have sent me a link to one version or another of a story that appeared in the news the other day.**  Citing a report led by Dr. Elizabeth Towner of the University of the West of England that appears in the November issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, newspapers–primarily in the UK–are reporting something like:

Safety measures leave road travel as dangerous today as in medieval times (The Scotsman)

The problem with the headline is that the research it refers to is based instead on “coroners’ records in Sussex between 1485 and 1688.” In other words, it’s a stretch to call that timespan medieval.  But Tudor times, Jacobean times, Early Modern times, and Renaissance times lack the punch of “medieval times,” I suppose.

The Scotsman is, however, the only one I’ve found to go with the word “medieval” in the headline.  “500 years ago” is the norm:

More died on roads 500 years ago (UK’s Metro)
Road travel in Britain ‘as dangerous as it was 500 years ago’ (UK’s Telegraph)

The Metro botches it in the first line, though, by immediately switching to calling the time covered by the report “medieval times.”  The Telegraph, on the other hand, wisely avoids the problem by instead referring to it by century.*** 

I love playing the game of medieval gotcha as much as the next guy with a blog devoted to playing the game of medieval gotcha, but to me the more disturbing part of the reporting is how mangled the math is.  Regardless of the period, the data cited just doesn’t**** back up the claim that road travel was as dangerous then as now.  

According to the study, “30% of people who died as a result of injury were involved in an accident while traveling on land” while today in the industrialized world it’s around 25%. Though 30 and 25 are only five percentage points apart, 30% is 20% greater than 25%, and if you don’t think that is significant, remember that time when gas briefly went from $4 to $5 a gallon it was also 20% increase, and then it seemed like the end of the world. So saying “travel is as dangerous today as in medieval times” would still be wrong, even if the numbers of people, accidents, and other forms of injury were the same in each case. It was 20% more dangerous.