Via GoNintendo.com:
I was beginning to fear that Japan’s reserves of inscrutable supercuteness might be running low, but it appears my fears were misplaced. Allow me to introduce Gimli, son of Gloin, in amigurumi-form.

Apparently, amigurumi (literally: knitted stuffed toys) is the latest Japanese trend in making cutesy versions of established geek properties to hit our shores. And unlike Beanies, Legos, Mighty Muggs, Kubricks, Minimates, Bobbleheads, Animaquettes, Super Deformed Crap, et al., they’re hand-knitted [or hand-crocheted] and people trade clothes patterns online, so it’s conceivable that you might be able to make one yourself.*

Here’s a link to a flickr gallery chock full of LOTR amigurumi, and here’s a link to the website (from whence I snagged the picture above) where you can purchase little Gimli clothes for fifty bucks.***

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*Or, failing that, you could drop strong hints to the knitting crafting readership of your blog that you might like one. You know, if you have a blog, and loyal readers who knit. [Or crochet. I’m not picky.]
**Or Legolas, or Boromir, or… Kif Kroker?

This one goes out to all the law students, lawyers, paralegals, and other assorted legal professionals who read this blog. I know that you come here for diversion because the reading you’re forced to do for work and school is ungodly amounts of boring. You should, however, consider yourselves lucky. Medieval law books are just as eyeball-numbingly tedious, and just think, many medieval law students had to copy their textbooks out by hand.

Take this passage from the Codex Iustinianus, for instance:**

4.27.1. Emperors Diocletian and Maximian to Marcellus.
It is undoubted law that, excepting possession, nothing can be acquired through a free person not subjected to another’s power.

1. If a procurator, therefore, entered into a pact, to which a stipulation was added, whereby it was agreed that not he, but the person whose business he managed, should have the right to have the property restored to him, no obligation accrued in favor of the master.

Eyeballs numb yet? Tsk, tsk. We haven’t even gotten to the commentary!

So what could an enterprising scribe do to liven this up? A few marginal monkeys playing at procurator and slave, perhaps? Well, whoever commissioned the Bodleian’s MS Canon. Misc. 495, a copy of Justinian with the marginal gloss by Accursius, had other ideas, as you can see below:

That is exactly what it looks like: the initial I** of Imperator decorated with a woman holding a giant erect amicus curiae. And while there’s something fitting about illustrating the laws of possession in such a manner, the scribe didn’t limit himself to just the one onus probandi. Witness these, as well, from various places in the MS:

If anything, that first obiter dictum is the least weird member of the set, eh?

—

*Translation taken from the University of Wyoming’s excellent resource.
**And so really this is an Mmm… Initial Capitals rather than a true Mmm… Marginalia, but don’t be too pedantic, because the interesting part of the capital is still out in the margin.

Salon.com posted a review of the new book, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, today. The review mentions Poggio Bracciolini, the 14th-century Italian author of the Liber Facetiarum, a work it describes as “Europe’s first joke book.”* Since I’ve never heard of the guy or the book, I Googled until I found my way to this site, which hosts a public domain translation of some of the jokes, mixed with some from other medieval sources.

Alas, Chaucer it ain’t. In fact, I think Poggio must have been like a fourteenth-century Don Rickles, only not as funny.** Below, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of,*** I’ve tried my best to translate some of the jokes into that idiom:

This Florentine cook goes to the Duke one night after he’s served him dinner, goes right up to him and says, “Oh, lord, if you would be so gracious, could you please turn me into an ass?” The Duke looks at him like he’s crazy. “An ass? Why’d ya rather be an ass than a man,” he says. “Because,” says the cook. “I’ve seen all those guys you’ve given titles and treasure too, and they always end up as total asses. So I say, turn me into an ass!”

Man, I tell ya, those Florentines are nuts. Ever hear the one about the Florentine tailor? One day his wife gets pretty sick, so he goes and begs the doctor and says, “Couldja come by my house and take a look at my wife? I’ve got some tailoring to do, so you can just let yourself in.” The doctor says “Sure,” and he heads over to the tailor’s place, where he finds the woman in her bed, so sick she’s out of her mind. And then he rapes her. In fact, he takes his time with it and just barely makes it out the door as the tailor comes walking up. The tailor asks how she’s doing, and the doctor says, Oh, don’t worry, I’d say she’s just about cured.” The tailor heads in and finds his wife in tears, but what can he do, so he keeps quiet. A few days later, who comes calling at the tailor’s shop but the doctor’s wife, wanting a special new dress. The tailor says, “Yeah, I could do that, but I’ll need to come by your place to take the measurements.” When he gets her alone, he tells her he needs her to strip down naked, so he can be sure to get the measurements just right. She does, and, wow, she’s a looker. So he rapes her. Then he goes and tells the doctor what he did.

Heyoooh!

At least the Florentines can get wives. I once knew this guy in Pergola. He was looking for a wife, so his neighbor says, “How about my daughter?” “Her?” She’s way too young to marry,” he says. “Shows what you know,” says the neighbor, “She’s already had three kids by our parish priest!”

I said, “She’s already had three kids by our parish priest.” Is this thing on? Hello? Hello?

Two peasants go to buy a crucifix for their village church. They go to town to the crucifix guy, who sees them coming a mile away–total bumpkins–so he says, “I’ll sell you a crucifix, but you’ve got to tell me, do you want it alive, or do you want I should kill it for you now?” After talking it over, the peasants agree, “We’ll take it live. If the folks back home want it dead, they can kill it in less than a minute, we figure.”

I kid the peasants, but they know I love’m. Now, merchants on the other hand–can’t stand’em! My buddy Frankie Ortani, he once owed a merchant a lot of money–I’m talkin’ seriously in the hole to the guy. He’s working for King Ladislas out in Perugia at the time, and the merchant sends him a letter to remind him he needs to pay up. Thing is, the letter arrives on the same day as a letter from his wife. She’s complaining that he’s not been home in months and she’s getting… well, you know, she’s not had it in a long time, faithful girl that she is. So Frankie writes a letter for each of them, only he puts them in the wrong envelopes. His wife gets the merchant’s letter, and boy is she upset. It’s like he doesn’t care about her at all: he knows he owes her, but it’s going to take him some time to get it all up and please be understanding yadayadayada. The merchant, on the other hand, man, he’s pissed, cause his letter is full of promises of the kind a young fella makes to his wife, if you know what I mean. So the merchant takes the letter to Ladislas and says, “Will you get a load of the nerve of this guy? Doesn’t say a word about the money he owes me, and promises when he sees me he’s going to chase me around the room and then ride me until I’m tired of him. And let me tell you, I’m tired enough of him as it is.”

Speaking of debts, my buddy Dacko, he’s working as a tutor over in Florence, you know, looking after this young guy and his money. Old Dacko, he spends all this kid’s dough on wine and sandwiches. When the kid finally wises up and hires a lawyer, they call Dacko in to the magistrate and tell him he’s got to provide a legdger of all his income and outgoing expenses. So Dacko points at his mouth and his ass and says, “Sorry, I’ve got no record of incomings or outgoings other than that.”

You see, the sandwiches went into his mouth and came out his–aw, forget it.

You guys hear about the Easter sermon the priest gave in Perugia last year? “Brothers,” he says, “I need your help here. I just got finished listening to confession from your wives, and not a single one of them confessed to breaking her marriage vows. But when I heard your confessions, every one of you said you had been out there fooling around with the wives of other men. So let me ask you: Where are these women?”

Ha! Where are they, I ask ya? They’re not in my village, I tellya that. Anyway, that’s my time, folks. For those of you staying around, remember, the ten o’clock show is completely different from the eight o’clock show. Thank you, and don’t forget to tip your waitress. Good night, everybody.

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*There’s probably a silent [extant] there in the claim that Poggio’s book was the first, since the name was used by Gervais of Tilbury in the twelfth century for a book of jokes he gave to the young son of England’s Henry II, sadly lost.
**Or possibly a fourteenth-century Andrew Dice Clay, only much, much funnier. Ayyyoah!
***To tell you the truth, about halfway through this post, it sort of morphed in my head into Gilbert Gottfried doing a parody of Don Rickles and became legitimately funny again, but not in the way that I think Poggio was hoping for. I realize that if you’re not as big a standup geek as me, this claim may not make any sense, so some of you will have to trust me when I say that while G.G. is just OK amounts of funny when he’s doing his own jokes, when he does meta-jokes about other comedian’s jokes, he’s a comedy god–much funnier than you’d think from a guy who whose chief claim to fame is voicing the parrot in Aladdin.

A week ago, I gave you, my readers, a challenge to condense the Middle Ages down to seven concepts. I realize that this was a tall order. The medieval period is a thousand or so years of (mostly European) human history, which boils down to less than one concept per century. Looking at what you all had to suggest,* it looks like the most skippable medieval centuries were the sixth, seventh, and tenth, and by far the most popular were the twelfth and thirteenth, with a smaller cluster of entries in the ninth century. Lots of your concepts were transcenturial, of course, and others weren’t datable at all.

So now, according to Got Medieval’s readership, these are the seven things that sum up the Middle Ages:**

1. The Black Death (and assorted associated plague paraphernalia)
2. Feudalism
3. Monasticism
4. The Crusades (and individual Crusade milestones)
5. Book Making
6. Law (and its foundations)
7. Religious Potpourri

That would be one hell of a Jeopardy round. If I had to pick my own favorite list from the submissions, on the other hand, it would be:

1. slippers woefully lacking in arch support
2. monkeys
3. weird attitudes toward the Classical past
4. those silly plague doctor bird masks
5. musical enchiladas***
6. apple pie
7. The Turk

And finally (and seriously) after a fair amount of thought on my part, these are the seven topics that I think an academic medievalist in America ought to be prepared to give an account of to a lay audience at a cocktail party:

1. Feudalism
2. The Crusades
3. Witches
4. King Arthur
5. Black Death
6. Chivalry
7. The Church

Overall, I think my list doesn’t need that much explanation. Witchcraft might raise some eyebrows, as what most people think of as medieval witchcraft is actually Renaissance or early modern witchcraft, nonetheless, most people do think about witchcraft and witch burning when they think about the Middle Ages. King Arthur is accorded the honor of being the only fictional character worthy of inclusion on the list because people are always asking me if he was real or not (in two words: he wasn’t–but most people want more than two words), and because he routinely makes it near the top of those Most Recognizable Characters in Western Civilization lists. I end the list with the church (or, to be pedantic, the Church), because for me, the definition of the Middle Ages boils down to this: the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation, when people in Europe generally conceived of themselves as being united by common citizenship in Christendom.

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*As of today. You’re all perfectly welcome to keep adding your own lists to the original post, which has the longest comments section of any post on this site ever, by far, and that includes my BoingBoinged fanfiction thing.
**I had to make a lot of judgment calls to make this list, so don’t send me angry letters. Also, I left off extremely general references that aren’t particularly confined to the Middle Ages, like the very popular “war.”
***That’s what I though I read when I read “musica enchiriadis,” and I’d be lying if I said I knew what it was before looking it up.

In an editorial by George Monbiot in today’s issue of The Guardian, we learn that Britain’s libel laws have gone so far that they are positively […wait for it…] medieval.

Make any accusation, anywhere in the world, and if the subject can demonstrate that a single person in England or Wales has read it, you could be sued here for every penny, cent, rouble, rupee or renminbi you possess. The internet and the global nature of publishing ensure that these medieval laws have become the most powerful extra-territorial legislation ever drafted.

And

The blogger Richard Brunton tells a shocking story of the threats he received from a leisure company (which he is now too frightened even to name) after contributors to his site had made adverse comments about some of its products. Such threats could bring an end to critical online reviews. The internet butterfly is repeatedly broken upon the wheel of England’s medieval laws.

At first, I wasn’t certain that these were medieval-in-a-bad-way‘s, as I don’t know very much about medieval English law (my medieval law prof was a Gratian scholar). Maybe the roots of British libel law really do stretch back to some medieval king, I thought. It only took a smidgen of research to discover, however, that modern British libel law took shape under the rule of James I, who took the throne at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I suppose “Jacobean libel law” doesn’t pack quite the same punch, as it conjures up images of Shakespeare rather than medieval butterfly torture.

One reason modern libel laws took shape under James, rather than one of those horrible old medieval kings is, of course, that libel refers to printed falsehoods, and ye olde printinge presse is a very late medieval advance. This is not to say that there were no medieval laws concerning slander or libel. [UPDATE: However, for most of the Middle Ages, defamation (which covers written and spoken injurious statements), seems to have been primarily a matter for canon courts (the Church’s legal system) not English civil courts, though there was the occasional civil prosecution.]

Here are some of my favorite non-ecclesiastical defamation laws:

• The Lex Salica puts the penalty for (as one early twentieth-century scholar circumspectly put it) “the false imputation of unchastity against a woman” at forty-five shillings.
• By the same law, men who falsely call another man “wolf” or “hare” must pay three shillings. A bargain, especially considering…
• …that the Anglo-Saxon Dooms, on the other hand, set the punishment for folcleasung, or slander, as the loss of one’s tongue.
• The Norman Costumal dictated that a man who falsely charged another with thievery or murder not only had to pay damages, but also had to publicly confess to lying while holding his nose with his fingers.
• And according to Pollock and Maitland’s History of English Law, falsely calling a woman a harlot (meretrix) under the legal codes of medieval England was fineable, though the fine was one shilling less than the fine for falsely calling a man a thief (latro).*

The last time that Mr. Monbiot drew this site’s attention, it was for comparing carbon offset credits to medieval indulgences. As a certain famous brush management technician once said, “fool me once, shame on–shame on you. Fool me–you can’t get fooled again.”** With this in mind, I did a quick search of the Guardian and pulled up still more Monbotian medieval horrors:

• In a June 2007 editorial, Monbiot warned that the UK had “been allowed to remain in an almost medieval state of ignorance.” About what? The health benefits of breastfeeding. I know there were a lot of things the medievals didn’t know about, but breastfeeding?
• In an April 2005 editorial lamenting Paul Wolfowitz’s appointment to the presidency of the World Bank, he wrote that one of the few positives would be that it would remind the world that the Bank “is run like a medieval monarchy.” (Note: This was well before Wolfman’s mistress saw the light of day.)
• In December 2001, he childed “Torquemada Blair’s inquisitors, the lord chancellor’s medieval department” for threatening to dispense with jury trials for enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan. Isn’t there something about trial-by-jury in some medieval document or other? It’s on the tip of my tongue… uh, Magma Blarta? Flagna Marta? Something like that, anyway.***

Huzzah for bulleted lists! But anyway, that’s five it’s-so-bad-it’s-medieval‘s for George Monbiot. Sure, it doesn’t quite match Christopher Hitchens, but what is with British journalists and the M-word?

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*That led historian Richard O’Sullivan to postulate the following algebraic formula:

Thief – Harlot = 1 shilling.

**That old Tennessee–I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee–saying.
***There once was a footnote here that said nasty things about the Star Court and compared it to the Bush administration’s secret military tribunals. I’ve removed it after a dressing down by a reader in the comments section for the post. Any similarity between the US’s now unconstitutional tribunal system and a court that (in the late Middle Ages, at least) held secret sessions with no right of appeal, no witnesses, and no juries I will leave to my readers to suss out on their own.

In penance for my distasteful Google Penance, please see the attached unicorn chaser for my medieval unicorn chaser, a marginal illustration from a 14th-century Flemish Psalter (MS Douce 5) of a monkey riding a unicorn:

Ride on, my monkey friend, ride on to freedom. If you see a virgin, you know what you have to do.

According to my sitemeter, Google sent someone with the question “Is it true about medieval unicorns?” to an old post here about Harry Potter, giving me reason to suspect that, once again, people at Google are having me on. But since it’s been a while since my last Google Penance, I’ll play along.

So, is it true about medieval unicorns?

Yes, it’s true; medieval unicorns, like everything else in the Middle Ages, signify Christ. Unicorns cannot be tamed and run fierce and wild–just like Christ… who could not be held by the prisons of Hell. Their horns symbolize the unity between God and Christ,* and their small size symbolizes Christ’s humility in taking on the form of a wretched human.

Ok, it’s more likely the Googler wanted to know if it’s true that medieval unicorns could only be tamed by virgins. (If there’s one thing I know about Googlers, it’s their love of virginity trivia.)

Answer to this “it”: A definite yes. You cannot catch a unicorn unless you have a spare maiden around who is willing to stay seated until a unicorn happens along and puts its head in her lap. She may or may not have to bare her breast and let the unicorn suckle first.

Given their fierce untameableness, you might think that medieval depictions of unicorns would feature a lot of unicorns proudly running free, chased by hapless knights (or 13th-century wouldbe P.T. Barnums), their silver manes dancing with light and their horns pointing ever on toward freedom.

Certainly, these days, you’re most likely to encounter a unicorn in a poster hanging on a bubble-gum pink painted wall in the room of a pre-teen girl. There’s even an (only slightly outdated) internet meme built around using unicorns to banish away all the bad things one runs into while surfing the blagoblag blogosphere.

U · ni · corn chas · er [yoo-ni-kawrn chey-ser]
-noun
1. An internet post featuring an extremely cute and/or sparkly picture of a unicorn, meant to cleanse the palate after a blog reader has been subjected to a distasteful post or image such as goatse.cx, 2 girls 1 cup, etc.** The concept was first popularized at BoingBoing.net.

The medievals, however, had a different sort of unicorn chaser. Their pictures of unicorns were, instead, of unicorns being chased and then brutally murdered by clever maidens and their knightly accomplices. Witness this, from a 14th-century Book of Hours (MS Douce 48):

Or this, from a 13th-century bestiary (MS Douce 132):*****

Or this, from a completely different 13th-century bestiary (MS Bodl. 764):

In short, medieval unicorn chasers were more like to inspire, rather than banish, feelings of uneasiness. Oh and, poor Unknown Googler, if you really wanted to know about Christ signification and are shocked at all this unicorn snuff-porn, take heart. Unicorns being killed also signify Christ, who was brought to earth in the lap of a maiden only to be betrayed and horrifically murdered.

For everyone else, if images of unicorns impaled on spears don’t satisfy your hopes and dreams of prancing, noble, carefree medieval unicorns, you can at least take a little comfort from knowing that you’re not first to be disappointed by unicorns of the medieval variety. Marco Polo was shown a unicorn–actually, a rhinocerus–on his journeys and had this to say:

They are scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant’s. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead… They have a head like a wild boars…They spend their time by preference wallowing in mud and slime. They are very ugly brutes to look at. They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.

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Read more about medieval unicorns here and here.

*But only when the Holy Ghost is off scaring those meddling kids away from the old abandoned amusement park.
**Note that this bloggist has not provided a link to either of said examples, and this is done as a service to you, my dear readers. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt Google searches for either phenomenon on your own.***
***No, really. Don’t. Really. Really really.****

As you may have heard, the folks behind Mystery Science Theater 3000 are back in two separate incarnations. The original cast members and creators (Joel Hodgson, TV’s Frank, Dr. Forester, et al.) are putting out new DVD’s of MST3K-style rapid-fire riffing on old B-Movies as Cinematic Titanic, while the later cast members and writers (Mike Nelson and the second and third incarnations of the robots) have reunited at Rifftrax, where they sell MP3’s of MST3K-style rapid-fire riffing that you play alongside your own DVD’s (mostly summer blockbusters and sci-fi classics).

I bring the MSTies up because the cohort over at Rifftrax has recently set their sights on this blog’s old punching bag, last year’s CGI Beowulf movie, and I’m pleased to report that the result is well worth the $3.99 price point. Whether it’s worth that plus the cost of buying a copy of the Beowulf Special Collector’s Uncut Extra-Gory Edition, I can’t say, as my indulgence was subsidized by a hapless but well-meaning marketer.*

Here are a few highlights from the Beowulf Rifftrack that hit me just right to motivate you all to go check it out for yourselves:

• “Oh, please, sarcastic slow claps went out in the 200’s.”
• “Gee, in my translation, Grendel wasn’t an effeminate mincing puss.”
• “I am Beowulf, if that helps. Just throwing it out there.”
• “She has Barbie’s rack and Ken’s genitals.”
• “You know, Old English sounds about as pleasant as Olde English tastes.”

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*Rifftrax, on the other hand, has given me no promotional consideration. I consider this plug a debt of honor I owe for the box of decaying VHS tapes in my mother’s basement containing the first three seasons of MST3k, carefully recorded and treasured by the junior high version of me.

I’m going to be mucking about with the template and other widgety doodads here at Got Medieval for the next couple of days, so don’t worry if you drop by the site and everything is all weird looking. And rest assured, the content of the site won’t be changing. You can still expect the same medieval bloggish goodness, just in a different wrapper–and with 10% fewer calories and a more pleasing odor!