My wife is “summering” at a law firm in Atlanta, which means that I have found myself making small talk at a distressingly large number of dinners, cocktail hours, and corporate retreats of late. Conversations with lawyers are all pretty much the same. Since they are prestigovores, the initial small talk is taken up with my resume and institutional affiliations. We then proceed on to my dissertation, a complete non-starter, leaving us with half a drink’s worth of conversational space to fill, and more if the event is outside and the ice is melting quickly.

If this is a second or third drink conversation, there’s a good chance that the lawyer is going to confess to me in suitably hushed tones that they aren’t really sure when the Middle Ages were or what qualifies as properly medieval. I tend to respond with an anecdote that I’ve been meaning to blog about, and so here goes:

Last semester there was no room for me to TA in the English department, and after a hard scramble, I ended up in the History department in the Renaissance Italy course. It was actually a much better fit for a medievalist than it sounds, because (depending on who you ask, of course) the Renaissance in Italy kicks off in the middle of the fourteenth century, when the parts of Europe that I study (England and France, mostly) are still classified as medieval.* In fact, as it turned out, one of the main themes that the professor had planned for the course was the difficulty of separating out most of the things we tend to label as “Renaissance” from their “medieval” antecedents.

During a discussion section, I wanted to make the point that, although contemporary popular accounts of the Middle Ages tend to emphasize lawlessness and barbarism, late medieval societies were in fact extremely litigous. Building off a similar exercise we’d done in class with the word “Renaissance,” I asked the students to play a game of free association by giving me any word or concept that they thought of as especially “medieval.”

The first student offered, “knights.”
The second thought for a second and said, “swords.”
The third quickly added, “shields.”
After some delay, the fourth produced, “horses!”

Seeing where this was going, I paused to clarify. “Ok, I think we’ve got knights and the associated paraphernalia thereof pretty well covered. So, other than knights, what do you think of when you hear the word ‘medieval.”

The fifth student said, without irony, “armor.”

Again, I narrowed the scope down to “Medieval things that have nothing to do with knights, their weapons, armor, clothes, or mounts.”

I turned to the sixth student, one of the best in the class, who quickly produced, “peasants.”

Since this was my Friday section, attendence was spotty at best. There was only one student left, who looked me dead in the eye and said, “They took all of them.”

“Knight, sword, shield, horse, armor, peasant… and, that’s it?” I asked.

“They took all of them,” the student said definitively.

Roughly a thousand years of human history boiled down to its essence: knights, things found on or around knights, peasants, and they took all of them. I decided not to go for a second trip around the room.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t tell this story to shame my students–or, rather, I don’t tell it merely to shame my students (who you shouldn’t feel too bad for, since almost all of them left the course with A’s or A-‘s, because, hey, that’s Yale). I tell the story at cocktail parties to lawyers to make them feel better about what they don’t know about the Middle Ages. And I tell it here on my blog, because I’m actually curious about this one. If I had to boil it down to seven, what are the seven things that people ought to know about the Middle Ages?

Judging by my label cloud,** the seven things I associate with the Middle Ages are, roughly: Beowulf, King Arthur, Marginalia, Manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, Popes, and Latin.

If you’re a medievalist, either amateur or academic, consider this a challenge: What are the seven things that people ought to think of when they think of the Middle Ages? “They took all of them” is not an option.

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*So, by rights, this should make Chaucer a sort of time-traveler, since, as a young man, he visited Renaissance Italy and then went back to Ye Olde Medieval England to write works inspired by his intellectual successors.
**Counting only medieval concepts and not my ragbag of pop culture obsessions. Otherwise, yes, the Middle Ages consists of Dan Brown, Harry Potter, Angelina Jolie, not boobs, boobs, The Da Vinci Code, and Orlando Bloom.

While I was working on a side project, Google served me this ad:

Take a look at the middle line item. Pretty awesome, eh? One of history’s oldest mysteries solved by Google Ads. Not only is King Arthur real, he lives somewhere in the US, and he’s got a phone.

Today’s marginal image comes from the fan-favorite* Macclesfield Psalter, which, as the name suggests, is a lavishly illuminated psalter once owned by the Earl of Macclesfield. In the lower margin beneath the collect Deus qui caritatis (f. 223v) you can find the following couple:

I know what you’re thinking, and, really, it’s not porn. Promise. Rather, it’s a picture of a common late medieval joke about Aristotle,** who you may know from such philosophical works as On Generation and Corruption, On the Parts of Animals, and The Organon 4: Posterior Analytics***

According to the medieval story, while Alexander the Great was conquering Asia, he fell in love with a beautiful lady named Phyllis and spent all his time with her, neglecting his duties as world conqueror and general baddass.

Aghast, his nobles call on Aristotle, Alexander’s old tutor, to step in and talk some sense into him. Aristotle does, and the world-conquering badassery is resumed. Now, our Phyllis is a bright girl and quickly realizes that Aristotle is the one to blame for her lover’s sudden change of heart, so she sets out to get her revenge. She begins by flirting shamelessly with Aristotle, until she has him sufficiently head-over-heels and wrapped around her finger. Then, she tells the besotted philosopher that she will not do him give herself fully to him until he proves his love to her by letting her ride him around like a horse. No doubt hoping that this is the prelude to something seriously kinky, Aristotle agrees and goes to fetch the riding gear. Phyllis tips off Alexander as to where aforesaid horsing around is going to go down, so that the two are subsequently discovered making the beast with one back and a bit and saddle, if you know what I mean… [Pornometer reports: 1.47 and falling.]

When Alexander demands an explanation, Aristotle replies, essentially: “Didn’t I tell you how dangerous she was? If a woman can make such a fool out of someone as old and wise as me, how much worse would she be for a young man like you? I’ve made myself an example so you could benefit more from my teachings.”****

So, like I said, it’s not porn. It’s an exemplum meant to teach you how terrible women can be, even to philosophers.

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*Those of you doubting that this psalter has fans, let me remind you that you are reading this post on the Internet. Everything ever created has fans here. Indeed, this post has already created quite the buzz on the Macclesfield Psalter slashfic forum, resulting in a flamewar, which then resulted in a flamearmistic, which then resulted in a flamecoldwar whose accompanying climate of anxiety and repression may in fact result in a new form of minimalist techno in a few weeks. Check back for updates!
**Famed as a bugger for the bottle, according to some reports.
***The pornometer reports that this sentence contains entendres that are well within local tolerances, barely past a 1.385 and nowhere near the 1.95 that marks the legal limit.
****Interestingly enough, this is one of the few defenses that R. Kelly did not offer up in his recent trial. Also, here’s a link to one version of the story, complete with Latin.

Not all marginalia is devoted to public displays of drunkeness, monkeys or and things going into (or coming out of) someone’s ass. Some marginal figures are hard-working decent people who hate being associated with that unruly lot.

Take this guy, for instance:

Tom, let’s call him, is no ne’erdowell lounging around in the margins, and he wouldn’t be caught dead subverting, problematizing, or deconstructing anybody’s textual authority.

Hoccleve scholars (all two of you*) have probably seen him before. Tom appears in the margin of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, where it’s his job to deliver stanzas to their proper places, like so:

As the usual explanation goes, the exemplar that a scribe was working from was missing a stanza at this point, a stanza that the scribe later discovered. The plan for the manuscript was for it to have four stanzas to the page, and the pages before and after the omission were already completed. So he wrote the newly discovered stanza in the margin below a Latin gloss, then doodled up trusty Tom to yoke it into the right place.

The best thing about our hard-working stanza wrangler is that once one scribe thought him up to cover his mistake, he was so well received that someone–almost certainly Hoccleve himself–directed that his other scribes include him in at least two subsequent presentation copies of his Regiment: British Library MS Harley 4866 and British Library MS Arundel 38, thought to have been presented to Henry V when he was still Prince of Wales. What started as an extemporized flourish to make up for an accidental omission became a selling point.

By the way, if you’re still pondering whether there were medieval emoticons or pre-emoticons or not, Tom is probably as good a candidate as any.**

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*I know, I’m being harsh. There are probably dozens of you. Let’s see, there’s that old guy that’s both widely influential and mostly ignored, and there’s you there, the one fuming at me for saying there’s only two of you, and then… well… nope, looks like it’s just the two.
**Tom may be a closer analogue of that annoying habit some people have of omitting capital letters in their emails in the hope that it will seem like they’re so hip and informal that they can even be bothered to remember to hit the shift key.***
***If you’re one of those people, remember that it’s very formal and unhip to fume over what some jerk with a blog thinks of your informal and hip uncapitalized text.

Via BoingBoing:

Hamilton Designs in England is advertising a new line of wine glasses inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins. According to their ad copy:

Each glass encapsulates a sin, which is revealed through the ritual of drinking. The ‘7 Deadly Glasses’ are about celebrating passion and encouraging the user to be sinful in a theatrical fashion.

I’m not sure how spilling wine on yourself demonstrates the sin of Envy (bottom left in the picture above), but the site is worth a visit, especially if you’re a fan of the sort of product that is so expensive its web site does not even bother trying to sell it to you.

Since I have your attention, I’d like to ask you, my readers, if anyone knows of a good mnemonic for the Seven Deadly Sins. I’ve always used the castaways on Gilligan’s Island, but this year’s crop of freshmen were so unfamiliar with the show that now the Seven Deadly Sins are their mnemonic for remembering who the castaways on Gilligan’s Island were.*

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*The correspondence between castaways and sins was intentional on the part of the show’s creator. The island is the world, and each week they try to escape it, but fail due to one of the sins, usually Gilligan’s Sloth. I’m not sure which sin the Harlem Globetrotters were, though.

Those of you subscribed to the News for Medievalists blog have probably heard about this one already. A paper scholar* by the name of Sydney Shep from Victoria University of Wellington has been in the news lately for her work on the pre-history of the humble emoticon. 🙂 As the Canada’s National Post puts it:

For all their slick sheen of modernity as a by-product of the computer age, the roots of the emoticon can be traced as far back as the days of dank medieval castles.

*sigh* Why is it always dank castles? 🙁 Why never well-appointed medieval castles? Or sufficiently maintained medieval thatched-roofed cottages?

I tend to be suspicious of any news story that promises the medieval roots of X, where X is a current or recently expired fad like “girl power” or “subprime morgages.” Emoticons are a pretty specific phenomenon: faces made from punctuation in order to clarify some emotional register beneath the text they accompany.**

From the article, it looks like the main thing Dr. Shep has done is find bona fide pre-Internet emoticons–that is, faces made with punctuation (-)_(o) marks –in a hand typeset page from the 1880’s. This discovery is pretty nifty, if you ask me. So, did medieval scribes do the same thing, making faces out of loops and whorls of script? Well… not exactly, not even in Shep’s account. She points to a different medieval phenomenon as the precursor to the emoticon, illustrated below:

The Post (and Shep) explain:

Writers, and often readers, she [Shep] said, would annotate medieval manuscripts with drawings of pointing hands to emphasize particular passages. “It’s a human hand saying, ‘Look, I’m here and I’m reading this with you,’ ” she said. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, this is me in the text,’ and ‘Let’s have a conversation.’ “

Depending on who you ask, these sorts of symbol are called fists, hands, digits, or manicules. I’ll be using the latter term from here on out, because “manicule” sounds more pompous and obtuse–and therefore more scholarly. You can find manicules all over medieval texts, but should we really consider them the precursors of emoticons?

Certainly, manicules are icons, but their primary function is indexical, rather than emotional. I don’t think they’re saying, “Hey, let’s have a conversation,” but rather, “Hey, this is important, pay attention.” Yes, a pointing hand is a bit more emotive than a stripe of yellow highlighter or one of those angled paperclips, but I would hardly think that this trace amount of “emo” that the manicule boasts qualifies it for elevation to the status of ur-emoticon.

Then again, occasionally, manicules became more elaborate, like this one here:

What emotion do you see behind his lopsided eyes? Boredom? Maybe even despair? It’s hard to say, and so I think this expanded manicule is still a pre-pre-emoticon at best.

If I had to nominate something medieval as an emoticon-precursor, it’d probably be the portrait initial, a fancy drop cap that contains the head or head and shoulders of a person inside the letter. Most emoticons try to depict faces, too. ^.^; Sometimes, rarely, the faces in portrait initials direct their attention–and thereby the reader’s–to something else on the page. Yale MS 229, a manuscript I’ve worked a lot with, contains three of these portrait initials on a single page:

I know it’s hard to see at this resolution, but each of these three faces is staring at something off to the right, in the margin, and each of them looks surprised by what they see.

Here is an image of the page they’re originally on. You can follow their line of sight:

So while these icons are not made out of punctuation, there is definitely more emotional content to them than “Hey, look at this.” Instead, it’s “Hey, look at this; it’s really freaky.” The freaky thing in question is this blog’s old pal, the egg-laying man (pictured way above, in the blog header), who graces the right-hand margin.*** If you saw a man laying eggs, you’d gasp, too. You probably gasp every time you load up this blog.

The only thing that truly disqualifies these three portrait initials from being clear emoticon precursors is that they’re not exactly a commentary on the text around them. They don’t cause us to understand the emotional content of the text any better; they’re really just a commentary on the marginal image.

Ultimately, I think any search for medieval ancestors for the humble emoticon is destined to be frustrated by the comparative freedom that medieval scribes and bookmakers operated within. Printed text (and its online descendants) is bound by all sorts of limitations that manuscripts are not. Emoticons are useful because they operate within those limits, eking a little more message out of a very narrowly constrained medium.

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*That is, a scholar who studies paper, not a scholar made of paper.
**Like, when I put a capital B, a hyphen, and a closed parenthesis after the sentence Don’t worry, I’ve got it all taken care of. B-) my readers should be able to see that, actually, I don’t have it all taken care of and that I’m hoping in vain that cheap sunglasses and a forced smile can hide the furtive, haunted look in my broken eyes.
***It’s also interesting to note that these three portrait initials are the only portrait initials in the entire manuscript. I think the illuminator wanted to amp up the freakiness of the egg-laying man by providing him with an audience.

Since I’m all moved in now, I’m going to be reducing these marginalia posts to the quickies they were intended to be all along. This week, I bring you another favorite medieval visual joke, the hunt of the hares:

My favorite part is the poor treed man in the middle, and the smug look on the face of the rabbit who treed him:

Images of hunting are a commonplace throughout illuminated manuscripts, leading to the inevitable role-reversal joke. As a bonus, here’s another version:

My Old French is spotty at best, but I’m almost certain that the text above the figure on the left reads, “Take your stinking paws off of me, you damn dirty hare” or possibly “You maniacs! You blew it all up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!”

For those of you worried that Got Medieval is going to be replaced by Got Marginalia, take heart. I will be back to “real” posts by mid-June at the latest, after I’m all settled into my new place.

This week’s marginalia comes from my old favorite, Yale MS 229, the third volume of a thirteenth-century deluxe set of the complete Old French Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian romances, currently housed at Yale’s Beinecke Manuscript and Rare Books Library. If you’re reading this on my actual site, rather than through a RSS reader, see if you can’t guess what Lancelot’s crossbow is aimed at before expanding the post:

Did you guess “A peasant’s bared butt?” Here’s the wide-angle shot, so you can see said peasant and said peasant’s butt:

I hate to inform the Lucy Allen-types of the world, but this ass-based joke is a very common in the Middle Ages, which is why, perhaps, we medievalists can be forgiven for being the way we are. You can find images of imminent or just-completed butt-shooting in romances and histories, but also in psalters, missals, and books of hours–pretty much in anything with marginalia, both sacred and secular. In fact, like the Wheel of Fortune from two weeks ago, the crossbow-bolt-to- the-butt joke was such a common image that creative illuminators could exploit their audience’s familiarity with it to make further jokes. Here below is a more standard version of the butt-joke, from the Alexander MS that a reader kindly directed me two a few weeks ago:

Usually, the shooter is no different than the shootee, except for the color of his clothing and the and baredness of his bottom. As well, the shootee usually is depicted holding his robe open, daring the crossbow-wielder to let fly. That second feature, at least, appears to be the original intention with Lancelot’s target. Look closely at his back:

Those are the pencil lines of the sketch that the illuminator made when he was planning out the page. Originally, the peasant was just holding his robe open, as expected. But when the illuminator went to ink and color his sketch, he decided to improvise a little joke-within-a-joke that fit the page’s final composition.

As I mentioned last week, one of the things that I like most about medieval illuminations is their self-awareness. The marginal peasant depicted here is particularly precocious: He can see the words floating in the air above him and calls Lancelot’s attention to one of them, “cries” (OF plores). It’s an even bet whether this is meant as a further goad to Lancelot (“You’re a crybaby if you don’t shoot”) or as a warning (“Don’t shoot me, or it’ll make me cry.”)

I think the joke goes even further, though, if you follow the peasant’s pointing finger further up the page. If you’ve noticed, I’ve been constantly labeling the knight in blue “Lancelot.” This is because Lancelot is consistently depicted in the main in-text chapter-heading miniatures throughout this section of the narrative as a knight in blue and red, with the same armor and markings as we find here on the marginal shooter.* Our peasant seems to be pointing at one of these in-text miniatures on the page, one where Lancelot encounters a crying maiden whose case is will soon take in the story that follows. Here is that image:

In effect, the marginal peasant is pointing up at the main text miniature in order to remind the marginal Lancelot that he doesn’t belong down in the margins, as if to say, “You’re not an extra, buddy; you’ve got a starring role up there. Now go, rescue the maiden and joust that dude and leave the ass-shooting to us marginal types. You don’t have time to be slumming down here.”
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*Unfortunately, there are no errant pencil marks around Lancelot on the left, so I can’t say for certain whether the illuminator originally drew a knight or a peasant in the role of shooter.