As we all know, when times are bad, the Middle Ages will always be there to step in and lend a hand by providing newspaper writers and bloviating pundits with a handy metaphor for just how bad times are.  The current global financial crisis is, naturally, the latest in a long line of things so bad that it almost outmedievals the medievals.

Take the behavior of the government regulators who were supposed to protect us from that sort of thing.  The editorial board at the Business Daily chides them thus:

When the crisis started mid last year, even the famed regulators of the west stuck to a familiar tune: ‘do not panic, everything is under control’. A year later, the phrase ‘under control’ is akin to the medieval assertion that the earth was flat.

From Bodleian Library MS Bodl. 693, a fifteenth-century gradual (think “medieval songbook”):

Oh, sweet merciful crap! 

Did Matt Groening, of the Simpsons, Life in Hell, and Futurama, steal his trademarked overbitten cartooning style from an anonymous fifteenth-century English scribe?  The evidence speaks for itself.  It’s just hard to understand, the evidence, what with that enormous tongue it has.  Nonetheless, it definitely bears a strong resemblance the hooded members of the No Homers Club, or post-apocalyptic mutant Moe from one of the Treehouses of Horror.

I should admit, though–for any codicological CBG‘s out there– that technically the hooded gentleman above is not properly called “marginalia,” as the sloping brow, beaked nose, and long tongue form the three arms of the capital E of Exultabunt, making our four-toothed friend more properly a decorative initial instead.  But it’s my recurring feature, and I can do what I want.

Quick, before the DMCA fairy comes in the night and takes this video from underneath your pillow,* check out “Table Be Round,” from Robot Chicken‘s third season finale.**

This Table’s long 

but it should be Round.

King Arthur can’t hear a sound.

When a knight tries to talk,

that brother’s got to walk

half a freaking block 

to be heard.

Can’t hear a word,

cause this table is so absurd.

In an interview with Ireland’s Independent, the designer of Carrie Bradshaw’s favorite togs had this to say about his new line:

“I’ve gone mad for warrior images this season,” said Mr Blahnik, pointing out the Samurai masks on the boots, and armoured metal discs.

“I’ve used shapes for a modern, powerful woman — a kind of medieval Amazon.”

What kind of shoes does Blahnik think a medieval Amazon might wear?  Well, this is the picture that accompanied the article:

So, there you go.  No metal discs here, but that’s one helluva heel.

Strictly speaking, of course, Amazons are the province of the classicist and the Xena fanfic writer, not the medievalist.   But the medievals did have ideas about what amazons ought to look like, so I plan to keep this blog post going on that technicality.  I did a quick search through the Bodleian’s archives today and came up with two illuminations of Amazon queens.  

The first comes from a mid-fifteenth century manuscript of Le Miroir du Monde, a universal history, and shows Alexander the Great meeting with the Amazon queen:

The second manuscript is a few years later, a copy of Christine de Pisan’s Épître d’Othéa, showing the Amazon queen Tomyris overseeing the execution of the Persian emperor Cyrus:*

Sadly, in neither of the images can we see the feet of the lady in question–their long flowing fifteenth-century dresses get in the way.  This is because if a fifteenth-century illuminator is going to draw an Amazon, he draws a fifteenth-century woman and gives her a sword or a helmet.  This is pretty much the case throughout the Middle Ages; medievals simply didn’t worry about anachronism.  If you put King David, King Arthur, and King Henry I in a medieval lineup, you’d not be able to pick out the one who slept with your wife by looking for clothes or weapons appropriate for an ancient Hebrew, a fifth-century Briton, or a twelfth-century Englishman, respectively.**

So, taking my cue from the medievals, I’d be forced to conclude that Blahnik is spot on.  Of course medieval Amazon queens wore red open-toed stilleto pumps with wide ankle straps.  Haven’t women always?

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*Tomyris is famous for hollowing out Cyrus’s skull and using it as her favorite novelty drinking cup.
**A trick question, of course, as all three got up to more than their fair share of naughty business between the sheets.

OK, folks. It has been pointed out several times that this blog has become unduly concerned–perhaps even obsessed–with monkeys. That’s a fair cop.* But bear with me for just a little while longer here, as I take you on a tour of the margins of the “Hours of Englebert of Nassau,” a Dominican Book of Hours produced in Flemish lands near the end of the fifteenth century. Trust me, it’s worth the trip. This marginal image is a bit later than most of the monkeys you’ve seen so far (who live primarily in the ornamental borders of late thirteenth to mid fourteenth century gothic manuscripts), and is roughly contemporary with Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur.** The artist responsible is today called the “Master of Mary of Burgundy,” after a commission he undertook for said Duchess of Burgundy. The difference in artistic sensibility is marked:

[This and all the other images today should expand when you click them.]

As frequent readers of Got Medieval already know, the medieval unicorn can only be tamed by a maiden, but can be ridden by a monkey. The Master of Mary of Burgundy combines these two facts to tell a little story in serial installments in the margins of this manuscript. Here, we find the maiden, having tamed the unicorn, preparing it to be ridden by a knight, assisted by the knight’s clever monkey squire. Just what sort of knight has a monkey squire?

Why, a monkey knight, of course:

This is actually the first image in the sequence, when the monkey receives his arms and armor from our mysterious Lady in Red.*** She then prepares his horse for him, as above. The next time we spy the monkey knight, he is riding toward adventure with his squire and another attendant, monkeys all:

What glorious adventure do they ride on to? The artist builds suspense. Several pages pass, until we spy another monkey, this one riding a boar, blowing a trumpet adorned with the monkey-knight’s arms:

If this were a comic book, I would call the final image in the sequence a “splash page.” It covers an entire leaf, on which we find that the monkey was riding on to a battle against some wildmen:

His monkey trumpeter appears to have left the battle, replaced now by a fox riding on a dog. And possibly, the wildman on the left has traitorously joined with the monkey’s animal forces.

Two final points of interest. The first is the elaborate linework forest scene in the background. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen elsewhere. Here’s the full page, on which you can see the trees and the birds that nest in them.

And finally, I may be seeing things, but I’m pretty sure that someone-possibly our master–has signed his name in the middle of the piece. I can’t quite make out the letters, though:

Paleographers? Any thoughts?

Extra credit to anyone who can put these images into a comic book-style series of panels and add narration and dialogue. I’ll post any submissions here.

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*But society’s to blame.
**In other words, the printing press has been around for a generation at this point, though it has only recently arrived in England.
***This knight is occasionally identified as a lion, but I think that’s a mistaken impression created by the way the artist draws the knight’s tabard a bit later.

At a reader’s request, I’ve also added coasters to the Cafe Press site. I’ve not had time to order one myself yet, but they look nice. I’ve also started experimenting with photoshop, trying to restore some of the color that has been washed out of some of the scans I’m using, and also to edited out some of the text so that the image is the main focus. Like so:

When I do this, I’ll try to offer an unedited version of the manuscript image as well. That’s the nice thing about CafePress’s digital delivery. I can make as many different versions of the same thing as I want. If there’s anything you want in particular that you don’t see there, drop me a line using the blog’s contact form.

I’m also going to be working on turning some of the Historic Personals into some swag.

According to medieval calendars, October is the time for sowing your seeds. Also, it’s the time to be on the lookout for giant six-armed taloned bear monsters.*

Important dates in medieval Octoberian history include:

• October 1st, 959 – Edgar the Peaceable becomes king of England. Anglo-Saxon kings had awesome cognomens.
• October 3rd, 1283 – Dafydd ap Gruffydd, prince of Gwynedd in Wales, is executed by being hanged, drawn and quartered. You have to admire Henry III’s commitment to being a royal bastard.
• October 9th, 1003 – Leif Erikson lands in Jellyfish Bay, Canada, thereby becoming the first man to become the first man to discover America. Don’t tell the post office, or they’ll surely close in his honor, just to be safe.
• October 13th, 1307 – The Knights Templar are arrested in France by Phillip the Fair. And the early 21st-century English historical conspiracy book trade is born.
• October 14th, 1066 – The Battle of Hastings. The Normans–they came, saw, and conquered.
• October 17th, 1091 – The Great London Tornado destroys London Bridge. It won’t be the last time that bridge goes down.
• October 22nd, 794 – Emperor Kanmu moves the Japanese capital to Kyoto.
• October 23rd, 4004BC – The world was created according to James Ussher’s calculations. Next time you call Biblical literalism “medieval,” remember that this guy outlived Shakespeare.
• October 25th, 1147 – The Seljuk Turks defeat the German crusaders under Conrad III at the Battle of Dorylaeum. Just when the Crusades were going so well.
• October 27th, 1275 – Amsterdam is founded. You hear that, stoners? Now you have a reason to “celebrate” at 10:27 every morning.
• October 29th, 1390 – The first Parisian witchcraft trial. They had to hurry, too. Only 127 medieval years left to get that witch burning in!
• October 31st, 1517 – Martin Luther nails his theses to the church door in Wittenburg. The Middle Ages are pronounced officially dead about thirty minutes later, giving rise to the expression “dead as a doornail.”**

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*For the most part, medieval illuminators had no earthly idea what a scorpion was supposed to look like, so you get some pretty interesting looking Scorpio images in calendars.
**Not really.

[UPDATE: 2/26/09 — Looks like I was wrong when I tagged this image as being from a manuscript of Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus. The text over our marginal man’s head is Psalm 2, and the manuscript itself is a Benedictine breviary. For whatever reason, the day I accessed this image, the Bodleian’s databased was acting all wonky and I took it at its wonky word. I’ve adjusted the following post appropriately, which means losing one level of recursion from the joke. But check it out, this may be the first time the blog has ever used the strike tag for anything other than a silly joke!]

Following up on my recent tirade about medieval textual precociousness, let’s leave the monkeys behind for a week and instead peer into the lower margin of this manuscript of Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus Benedictine breviary.

That’s right–more text! And not just any text, but the Magnificat and part of the Ave Maria, as well as a teensy tiny scribal signature at the very bottom.**

The result is a fairly clever series of little jokes. In order to read the text “Magnificat anima mea Dominum” or “God magnifies my soul,” you need a magnifying glass!

The recursion joke of a man at the edge of a text holding a text has theological dimensions as well. The Magnificat is no random ipsum lorem. It’s a canticle in praise of Mary, from whom sprung Jesus, the Word Made Flesh, the Son who made His Daughter His Mother. In other words, this marginal text “outranks” the text that is in the center of the page. The text this weird grotesque holds praises Mary, who is the mother of the Word, who is the Father of all of Creation, including the main text it attends.***

And as if that wasn’t already enough, Alain de Lille, the author of the main text, is famous for his description of God as “an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” We almost have an attempt to literalize this quote here: a sphere that is intelligible, because it is formed by words, a sphere whose circumference bleeds into those words and disappears, a sphere whose content is literally everything, including the name of the scribe who put it all together.

Pretty deep for a bunch of illiterate clods waiting on the printing press to give them their humanity, eh?

BONUS: Any budding paleographers out there, here’s one last clickable image of the sphere, if you want to try your hand at some serious transcription:

Next week: A most thrilling tale of monkey adventure!

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*You know you’ve seen too many marginal images when you can describe a man with a an old man’s face for a butt as “mundane.”
**Alas, the name is smudged in the middle, but our scribe appears to have been called something like “Humfredus R*smudge* Matt.”
***Theology requires lots of capitalization.

I’ve been reading BoingBoing extra carefully this week, hoping that Cory would comment on his monkey doppleganger. Alas, nothing yet. But this extra attention means that I haven’t been able to just ignore the inane pseudo-academic ramblings of Douglas Rushkoff, BB’s current guest-blogger.

This in particular draws my ire:

For me, the development of a gamer from player to cheater to programmer mirrors our development as a society…. Before literacy, we were mere listeners. We heard stories read to us as a group. After the printing press, we were elevating to individuals, each with our own, acknowledged perspective on what we read. (The Renaissance, if anything, was a celebration of individual perspective – just like the paintings.) This reading phase took us right through the reading equivalent of cheating: postmodernism, cut-and-paste, and other personal deconstruction of the author’s original intent.

Finally, computers have changed our relationship to the text again. Instead of just reading the publications of others, we are free to write and distribute our own – on a relatively level playing field. We become authors.

I can’t say exactly if Rushkoff means to conjure up a pre-literate society, one that actually has little to no written language, or instead one like much of Europe during much of the Middle Ages, a society in which the general populace is illiterate and literacy is primarily the province of an “elite” subclass of specialists. I’ll assume it’s the second, since he describes these stories as being “read” rather than recited from memory.

Certainly, there was some group-reading-to going on in the Middle Ages. In fact, lots of the manuscript images that I show off here during my Mmm… Marginalia are from gigantic books designed to be displayed as they were read–the Bodeian Alexander manuscript with the drunken monkeys, and Yale’s Lancelot MS, are about the size of a (modest) TV when you open them up. Reading these manuscripts was a performative art, with the reader at the center. But the listeners, out on the periphery, are free to interpret and reinterpret the story they are receiving.

The textual margins, with their drunken monkeys and bizarre scatalogical humor, seem to be begging the audience to engage in just that sort of interpretive play. The reader might be reading aloud the story of Lancelot, but you, the audience, can see that on the same page as the main narrative, there’s a man getting shot in the ass out to the side, and it’s up to you to figure out how that’s relevant to the main story, or perhaps even to turn away from the story entirely and to just sit and think about how funny ass-shots are while that jerk who knows how to read just drones on and on about how awesome a knight Lancelot was.*

And this is just one sort of medieval textual activity. It’s hard to say exactly who the “we” in Rushkoff’s pre-literacy societies is supposed to be. Maybe he’d cry foul and say that these elaborately ornamented books were just for rich folk, the nobles with too much time on their hands. And he’d be right there. But I imagine that at least part of that “we,” is composed of the time-displaced analogues of the people who read BoingBoing now–folks with some spare time, some spare money, and an interest in technology. These sorts of people did not suddenly come into being in the Renaissance as a side-effect of the printing press.

Before the printing press, people had books–not as many books, surely, but they had books. And some of them loved books. They loved books the way BoingBoingers love Altoid tins and open source software projects. As hard as it is to believe, books were themselves once a cool, innovative technology, and that “once” happened well before Gutenberg came along.

Medieval book enthusiasts were DIYers. They made their own books. They copied texts they liked, freely editing and recomposing–or hacking, remixing, and cut-and-pasting, to use the right lingo. Take a certain fifteenth-century Englishman who went by the name “Rate,” for example. We know him, because he signs his name to a manuscript collection he put together, a book today held by the Bodleian Library that goes by the name MS Ashmole 61. It’s what specialists would call “a commonplace book,” and as other medieval scholars have pointed out, commonplace books had a lot in common with blogs. Scribes collected together texts they liked and copied them down into books for their personal use. If there was a romance floating around they liked, they would “rip” a copy of it into their commonplace book, alongside other things that caught their interest– including recipes, sermons, devotional stories, saint’s lives, dirty jokes (including fabliaux), registers of their finances, lists of animals that start with the letter A, the birthdays and christening days of their children, songs, and so on, and so on.

Rate’s commonplace book is pretty common in this regard. MS Ashmole 61 includes a lot of things I’ve already listed; it’s got some short exempla, a Breton lai or two, several romances, and some fabliaux. Rate was a pretty sentimental guy, apparently, so a lot of the texts in his commonplace book can be lumped together as “stories about faithful husbands and wives that end happily.” But a lot of the texts he writes down, he alters as he does, to make them fit his own tastes. He apparently didn’t have (or didn’t like) the beginning of Sir Orfeo, so instead he made a new one out of a few lines he did like from the completely unrelated poem Of Arthour and Merlin (which happen to mention happy couples). Rate also decided he didn’t like how the sinner of the Sinner’s Lament didn’t have a name, so he edits the first few stanzas to name him as “Sir William Basterdfeld of England” (pun intended) and then he took the whole Lament and turned it into a prologue for his copy of The Adulterous Falmouth Squire.

Rate is notorious, but hardly an anomaly. People were simply a lot savvier consumers of texts in the Middle Ages than they’re often given credit for. If they saw a miniature they liked in one book, they might go to their local bookshop and ask for a version to be pasted into one of their books. Or they might take their business to one shop over another because, “That scribe they have there does a mean Piers Plowman, and his Chaucer’s not bad, either.”** At least one manuscript of Wace, the French translator of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, inserts all of Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances into the middle of the history’s section on King Arthur–which would be kind of like pasting the script of the Untouchables into your 20th Century American History textbook right after the chapter on Al Capone or splicing up Shakespeare in Love to serve as a frame to your copy of Romeo and Juliet.

As I’ve argued here before, it’s absurd to think of the printing press as a sudden world-shattering technology. People were jazzed about the printing press because it allowed them to do on a larger scale things that they already were doing with written texts. It was an advance in scope, not in kind. In fact, if anything, the printing press was more like Windows to the text-hacker scene. Moveable type forces text to behave. It standardizes presentation, creating identical products. Every copy of Sir Orfeo produced by a press has exactly the same beginning, middle, and end. Marginal notes suddenly stick out as interlopers; they’re handwritten and shabby compared to the crisp machined text.

Rushkoff–and most of the people linked at BoingBoing–are committed to the American metaphor of technological progress. Important advances always start with an idea that nobody properly appreciates, an invention by an outsider (possibly with brightly colored hair or inappropriate piercings) that is initially scoffed at and even suppressed by a monolithic pig-headed status quo (of faceless disapproving men in grey business suits), and then, when it finally hits the market, this technological doodad revolutionizes everything, completely supplanting what came before. I think part of the reason why we medievalists have such a hard time convincing people that the Middle Ages was not a homogeneous thousand years of people coated in their own shit is the pervasiveness of this metaphor.

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*In fact, this sort of play gets taken one step further, as characters within romances are themselves often depicted as writing and reading romances and images based on them. Arthur’s knights return to court to have their adventures dutifully recorded. Lancelot draws pictures of his love for Guenivere on the wall of his cell while imprisoned by Morgan le Fay, and then Arthur has to come along later and piece the story together then. The heroine of The Knight with Two Swords is given a mantle with the story of Arthur’s conception embroidered along one edge. Chretien has his Fenis tell her love Cliges that she will not play the part of Isolde to his Tristan. Really, I could keep listing ways that medieval writers play with intertextuality and reinterpretation all day.
**And speaking of Piers Plowman, its author, Langland, appears to have revised it every few years, at least once by using other people’s imperfect copies of Piers rather than his originals as the basis for new revisions.