If misleading headlines are to be believed–and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be–then you all owe Boris Vallejo, the makers of Viking Barbie, and the websites that hawk Sexy Viking Costumes* (pictured above) an apology.** As I have always kept an open mind about the possibility of sexy Viking women, I am under no such obligation. But shame on you, judgmental readers, for denying the sexiness of the medieval Scandinavians.

I’ve arranged the misleading headlines that led me to shame you so terribly below in order of sexiness:

The International Herald Tribune: Researcher Says Fashion Counted for Some Vikings
Australia’s The Age: Dig Supports Theory Viking Women Were First to Use Bras
The Sun (UK): Viking’s Gals Had First Bras
LiveScience.com: Viking Women Dressed Provocatively
NationalGeographic.com: Viking Women Wore “Sexy” Outfits
The Local (Sweden’s news in English): Viking Women Had Sexy Style***
About.com: Sexy Viking Women on Display in Sweden
Glasgow’s Daily Record: Viking Women Had Bra Fashion Shows
The Scotsman: Uplifting Evidence for Viking Lingerie range

American papers don’t seem to have picked up the news story yet, but give them time. Also, by my calculations, the story seems to get sexier the further north it moves. The Australian paper is clinically historical, while the Scotsman‘s unfortunately punny headline is well on the way to “Viking Strippers Bare All!!!” which, if the trend holds, is how they’ll label the story when it reaches those racy Alaskan tabloids.

The story behind these headlines concerns the work of Uppsala University archaeologist Annika Larsson, who has been re-evaluating evidence, apparently from digs done in the 1800’s near Birka, concerning what Viking women wore (or more accurately, what the female relatives of the Swedish Vikings who raided Byzantium and Russia circa 750-1050 wore). The substance of Larsson’s new claim is that 1) the fabrics these Viking women wore were much more colorful than previously thought, 2) the dowdy, concealing fabric smock associated with Viking women was actually worn as a long train, and 3) metallic brooches that were thought to have been worn at collarbone-level, holding up the smock, were actually worn pinned centrally over the breasts.

Since I know very little about medieval Scandinavian fashions, I have no reason to doubt Dr. Larsson on the physical details. Certainly, she gives a better explanation for why these metal brooches are found down around breast-height in the grave sites than was previously given. Larsson dismisses these “prudish reconstructions” that claim that shoulder-pieces or collarbone-pieces “migrated” as the bodies decomposed.

I’m less convinced about the sexiness of said brooches, migrated or no, misleading headlines notwithstanding. Either Dr. Larsson is being misquoted or she is enjoying media attention perhaps a bit too much when she says things like…

The garments had an aesthetic lingerie effect as well as providing support. I think Viking women would have chatted about clothing styles and designs in simple fashion shows while their men were away marauding.

or

One might imagine that the Christian church had some misgivings about a style of dress which emphasized the breast and in addition revealed the front of the linen blouse underneath.

The first quote is half-“duh!” and half-“huh?!?” Of course Viking women chatted about clothing styles! Anybody who has ever worn clothing ever has, at one time or another, talked about the style of the clothing they’re wearing. I’m sure that, from time to time, even women who wear burqas that cover them from head to toe find themselves discussing whether the mesh that they wear over their eyes is too lacy or not lacy enough and how Susan in HR is such a tramp because you can so totally see her cheek bones.

But the “simple fashion shows” that so caught the attention of the Daily Record are just so much random vague speculation. As for the “aesthetic lingerie effect” and the Church’s imagined misgivings over emphasizing the breasts or revealing linen blouses, I just don’t buy it. Below, on the left, you can see the old stodgy Viking clothes, and on the right, the new, sexy Viking clothing with specially formulated “aesthetic lingerie effect.”

Were you momentarily confused there, thinking that I’d included before and after screen shots of Laney Boggs from the movie She’s All That?****

I didn’t think so. That’s because the difference in sexiness between exhibits A and B is roughly 6 femtohelgas.

Sorry to dip into specialist jargon there. As I said earlier, I don’t know much about Viking clothing, but I have done pioneering research on Viking sexiness, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that I’m writing mostly to non-specialists. The medievalists who read my blog are no doubt familiar with my groundbreaking Viking Sexiness Metric (VSM), which has become the standard measure of the degree of sexiness of all things Viking, but for the non-specialists out there, here is a brief recap. Through consulting documents not unlike the Flateyjarbók, the Codex Regius, and the other Codex Regius, I developed a simple scale that allows researchers from various fields to arrive at a precise definition of the level of Vikingsexiness in a given artifact.

The standard unit of Vikingsexiness measure is, of course, the now famous millihelga, defined as the amount of sexiness found in Helga, the wife of King Features Syndicate’s Hägar the Horrible. The scale proceeds exponentially from there both up and down, so that something that rates as one helga’s worth of vikingsexy is one thousand thousand (one million) times as sexy Helga herself, and something that is 1000 helgas, or one hectohelga, is precisely one million million times as sexy as Helga. Once the scale reaches megahelgas, gigahelgas, and so on, it gets a little harder to follow, so I made this chart to explain things to my layfans:

Helga		Honi (Hägar’s daughter)		Bugs Bunny in “What’s Opera, Doc?”		Viking Barbie
1 millihelga		1 helga		2.5 helgas		.7 decahelgas
The girl in the Viking Woman YouTube video		D&D cover illustrations		Marvel Comics’ Valkyrie		Fevered imaginings of Internet costume sellers
8.2 kilohelgas		17 megahelgas		17.123 megahelgas		.137 zetahelgas

I hope that clears things up for everybody.

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*You may purchase these costumes here, here, and here.
**As one of those geeks who came of age staring longingly at D&D cover art illustrations, the Chainmail bikini has always seemed like a perfectly reasonable clothing option for medieval women, and not at all impractical, even in the frozen north.
***I am pretty sure this is a translation of what I take to be the first version of the story, Vikingakvinnor klädde sig mer vågat.
****For members of Generations other than X, please replace the dated reference to the Rachel Leigh Cook movie with a dated reference to your own generation’s movie that featured a very attractive girl made up to look slightly less attractive so that she could miraculously be transformed into a very attractive girl by someone on a bet who really falls for her, and then it’s awkward because it was like a bet at first, but now it’s something more than that, it’s real, and he loves her just like she really is, though it doesn’t hurt that she was always pretty hot, but she’s not sure he loves her, because of the bet, but he’s pretty hot, too… and they all live happily ever after and Eliza gets him his damned slippers or they go to the prom or something, I forget.

I don’t go by my mailbox in the Medieval Studies office very often, because the only real reason I need an academic mailbox is as a temporary holding pen for unread Dean’s excuses from my students and calls for papers for conferences I probably heard about online several weeks ago. Also, I have mailboxes in History and English, too, and they are in more convenient places. But every so often, a trip to the old 12″x9″x 5″-inch slot at the bottom of Wall Street brings me glorious rewards.

As longtime readers of my blog know, once I got a book. An autographed book. And this other time, I got a hat.* Both came from appreciative readers.** So this past week, when I strolled by my mailbox, what to my wondering eyes did appear?

IT… WAS… BEOWULF!!! [If you’ve seen the movie, you know how that should be said.]

Apparently, my review of the 2007 movie from the man who brought you Death Becomes Her and Bordello of Blood has brought my humble blog to the attention of the powers that be in Hollywood, and some random intern working on marketing the Director’s Cut DVD of the movie thought that a mention on this blog might be the extra push needed to drive the DVD to #1 on the sales chart. So, they gave me free advance copy of the movie.

The postmark on the package was roughly two weeks before the DVD’s release, which was over a week ago when I finally got around to checking that mailbox, so that means I’m at least three weeks behind schedule in watching the thing and posting here about it. So much for the advanceness of it. Oh, poor overworked intern, I failed you. I’m pretty sure that when the sales figures come in, Tyler Perry will stand gloating over the hero of Heorot, and all because of me.

I fast-forwarded through the movie, looking for the additions that make this the Director’s Cut, but from all I could see, the director was pretty happy with the Theatrical Cut and just added 10% extra blood-splatter to a few fight scenes. I’m sure that if there is ever a commentary track of this movie, Zemeckis will pull a George Lucas and explain that 2007 technology just did not let him to realize his full artistic vision of a little bit of extra blood here and there, but luckily 2008 technology allowed him to amend the lack.

There are a few featurettes on the disc, but there’s not much to them. So instead of reviewing them individually, I’ll just share what I learned from them with you now, in no particular order:

• Beowulf is the oldest poem written in English. [Sorry Caedmon.]
• In the Middle Ages, only monks could write. And they only wrote boring things.
• Everybody who worked on the film wants to make this clear: they did not enjoy reading Beowulf in junior high. Booooor-ing!
• Beowulf is a classic story that influenced so much later literature, like… uh, the Arthurian legends and… um (think… think… what else is literature? Wait…) the Lord of the Rings.
• Nonetheless, Beowulf is a flawed poem, because, what the hell, a dragon at the end? Why would there be a dragon? And why does he attack Beowulf? It makes no sense. Unless… and stay with me here, what if the dragon was really Beowulf’s son? Genius!
• Also, why does Grendel attack Hrothgar? It makes no sense. Unless… and stay with me here, what if Grendel was really Hrothgar’s son? Genius!
• Also, why does Darth Vader attack Luke? It makes no sense. Unless… and stay with me here, what if Darth Vader was really Luke’s son? Genius!
• Angelina Jolie had a sweet clause in her contract that specified that she didn’t have to show up to stupid things like cast meetings or set tours or technical explanations or featurette shootings.

OK, ranty list done. Now, some of the nice and/or neat things I learned from the featurettes:

• Ray Winstone (Beowulf) seems to be a funny, likable guy who is fully aware of how weird it is that his character has abs sculpted of stone while he has a body by Duff Beer in real life.
• The props the actors used were represented by wire-frame facsimiles that were made of loud, fluorescent plastic. The Horn of Much Symbolism, for instance, was hot pink.
• As much as they relied on The Horn of Much Symbolism, many scenes that featured it were cut from the final film. I presume this is because the Horn’s agent was demanding a higher cut of the gross.
• Even though they feel comfortable showing a digital idealization of Ms. Jolie’s parts in the movie itself, the featurette director inserted a big blue oval to cover a horse’s private parts when it urinated during the middle of the featurette.***
• During the fight scenes, Crispin Glover wrestled with cute stuffed Geats.

To finish up, I’d like to thank the intern for the foolish generous thought that sucking up to this blog would somehow help the DVD’s sales. If anyone else would like to suck up to me, the door [or intermittently-checked mailbox] is open.

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*Which I still wear to this day. Thanks again, Best Reader Ever 2006.
**The question you should all be asking yourselves now is, “how can I best show my appreciation to that guy what has that blog?” Of course, I consider this blog to be a missionary outpost that brings the joys of medievalism to the world, so I need no reward *cough**cough*Amazon Wishlist*cough*.
***Having sat through several lectures on the Bayeux Tapestry in which the professor continually referenced the “tumescent members” of the horses for no apparent reason, I think I was actually relieved that they gave the horse privacy while it relieved itself. Though why they didn’t just reshoot the interview, I don’t know.

Via BoingBoing:

On eBay right now: Nails used to crucify Christ. Someone alert the pope. I’m sure the Vatican’s reserve of nails from the true cross is running low. There were only thirty or so left at the end of the nineteenth century.

Starting bid of €500.00, Buy it Now for only €10,000.00. Only €2.60 for shipping and handling! (Foreign shipping may be more, especially in countries that charge customs duty on spiritual worth.)

According to the buyers’ questions at the bottom of the page, some people are a little skeptical; one even asks for a DNA test. The seller claims only that he is an “expert seller” and he rightly points out that a DNA test wouldn’t exactly establish these objects’ provenance. Dan Brown should take note.

Regardless, as all good medievalists know, it would be impossible for anyone to have all three nails from the Crucifixion. St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, found all three some three-hundred years after the fact, but she found a use for two of them. As this public domain translation of the Golden Legend relates:

When Helena had the cross of Jesu Christ, and saw that she had not the nails, then she sent to the bishop Quiriacus that he should go to the place and seek the nails. Then he did dig in the earth so long that he found them shining as gold; then bare he them to the queen, and anon as she saw them she worshipped them with great reverence. Then gave S. Helena a part of the cross to her son and that other part she left in Jerusalem, closed in gold, silver, and precious stones. And her son bare the nails to the emperor, and the emperor did do set them in his bridle and in his helm when he went to battle. This rehearseth Eusebius, which, was bishop of Cæsarea, how be it that others say otherwise.

So, buyer beware. Unless two of the nails you’re buying are shaped like a bridle and a helmet, you’ve not got the real deal.

The Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Holy Nails notes that most of the thirty holy nails that survived the Middle Ages were either complete frauds or just copies. Fortunately for all you relic venerators out there, you could transfer holiness from the actual nails to copies, either by touching the copies to the original nail, or by including filings from the real nail in the metal you used for your copy.

Unfortunately, according to the DOCTRINE OF CAPITALIZATION, everything in this auction seller’s description is TRUE, so please disregard all of the abovementioned doubt.

As I mentioned before, my recent spate of posts has finally knocked Angelina Jolie from her perch as the top Google search term that brings people here. What has replaced her? “Medieval Porn,” followed closely by “medieval sex.” A distant third is, bizarrely, the word “göt”–with “medieval cheese” and “medieval jokes” rounding out the top five.

So I give up.* This is the best I’ve göt:


Scandalous, I know. It’s an illumination of Lancelot and Guenevere getting ready to you know what from The British Library’s MS Add. 10293, f.312v,** a fourteenth-century manuscript of Le Livre de Lancelot del Lac, the short cyclic version of the romance. It reveals something that I’ve long suspected about the pair. They would have gotten away with it, if not for*** the fact that Joyeuse Guard, his castle, was built out of one gigantic window. Seriously, imagine the heating bills.

As an extra treat, here’s a closeup of the adulterous pair. Without the hat, I’d be hard pressed to say which was which. They both have little cupid’s bow lips and rosy red cheeks. And from this vantage, it looks like Lancelot’s got bigger breasts.

—

*Avenue Q is right as always: “The Internet is for Porn.”
**You can see this and other images from the British Library’s collection of manuscripts by going to this site. Canny readers will notice that I have pirated this picture and removed the BL’s annoying watermark through clever cropping. I do not respect copyrights on images that are over seven hundred years old, give or take a decade.
***Also, those Meddling Kids, Aggravain and Mordred, and a pup named Scooby Doo.

Frequent visitors to my blog* have probably noticed that I’ve been sprucing the place up lately. While I’ve not yet escaped the clichéd Scribe template, I’ve gone to a three-columned layout and added “Peekaboo” posting technology to the main page. So when you visit the blog, you’ll see a short version of the post, followed by a “Read More,” like, oh, well, like this one here:**

Definitely worth peeking and/or booing, don’t you think?

I’m still on the lookout for a non-Scribe but still medievalish template, so expect further changes in the weeks to come.

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*Of whom there are many fewer now that Breastowulf is off the front page. Shame on you, and shame on me for trying to take the high road here.
**People using feed readers will probably not see the “Read More.” I don’t disparage my feedees, though. Continue to read unfettered by the need to click to expand the post. If you’re not a feedee, take note of the new subscribe button on the right. You, too, can be fed by me. Like a mother bird, I will regurgitate into your waiting beaks. Except instead of worms, it’ll be… uh… news stories or something.

Via Arthurnet-l:

There’s a medieval manuscript up for sale on eBay right now. As of this writing, the bidding is up to $7,500, with only one bid. The seller describes it as follows…

GENEALOGICAL AND CHRONICLE ROLL, in French, ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM

PROBABLY ONE OF THE MOST SENSATIONAL ITEMS on EBAY ever! Do I exaggerate? FIND OUT:

WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE?A 14 or 15^th century sheet of parchment (125 x 57 cm) which traces the history and descent of the Popes, the Holy Roman Emperors, the Kings of France and of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. SIMPLY GORGEOUS and although part of possible a 10 to 20 meter long scroll, an unique object.*

If it is in capital letters, it must be TRUE. That is the rule of eBay. Be skeptical, for the seller claims the manuscript is in French, but not in FRENCH, however GORGEOUS it may be.

I doubt very many medieval manuscripts show up on eBay, since their categorization for rare books apparently doesn’t have a setting older than “pre 1900.”

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*This description modified to remove insane amounts of superfluous eBay formating tags and scripting from the text I copied and pasted over. If you couldn’t read the first version of this post, I apologize, but blame whatever software the guy who posted this uses to do his eBay auctions.

Following an In the Middle Link, I came across this small aside in a post from Quod She:*

And last night one of my students e-mailed me just to say — I kid you not — that he realized that the American rural regionalism “of a night,” as in “when I lie awake of a night,” is a hold-over of the genitive of time from Old English and early Middle English.

This is why the world needs linguists: they remind us of where we come from.

My mother’s family is from Appalachia, and I’ve spent my life in varying degrees of opposition to the linguistic inheritance that I got from her. As a child, I couldn’t stand it when I heard her or my great aunts say “I seen them that did it when they done it” or “Livin’ at the old house, I wartched clothes down at the crick [creek]” and like Egghead, Jr. from the old Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, I would either bury my head in a book to avoid them, or worse, correct them and then bury my head in a book.

It took me a long time to drop my youthful prejudice against the Southern accent. Going to college helped a lot. In high school the only people I knew with heavy accents were in general ed classes, since the A.P. and college prep track was populated by transplants from better school systems in California, Iowa, and Florida (and with mimic men like myself). Time in the North for grad school helped, too, making me nostalgic for the voices of the people back home. Today, I only flinch a little bit when my mother tells me what she “seen tother day,” and I don’t beat myself up too much when the occasional deep-Southern remnant falls out of my own mouth.

These days, I even like to brag that my Southern roots help me as a medievalist. I’ve never struggled with Beowulf’s Hwaet, I tell people; I just always assume it’s the same as my sister’s starting every story with an emphatic Y’all.** I am perhaps too proud of the day I surprised my professor as an undergraduate by rattling off the details of the Harrowing of Hell in a seminar on Langland. I wasn’t being precocious. I had heard the story while sitting in a pew at one of the First Baptist Churches of Somewhereorother my mother took me to, in a sermon where the event was presented as literal fact.

Most of my Appalachian relatives are dead now. Their children and grandchildren still live in the same places as their parents, but they talk like people who work in Southern cities. They drawl, but they know they’re being funny when they call a creek a crick. The only one left is my great aunt Selma, and at eighty-eight, she’s not going to be around much longer. The last time I saw her, she asked me, half-conversational, half-concerned, “Do you sleep of a night?” It took me a lot longer than it should have to figure out what she was asking.

—

*Possibly, that’s the most medievalist blogs I’ve ever referenced in a single sentence.
**As in, “Y’all! I was at the store yesterday, and you will not believe what happened.” This is not the y’all of direct address. The whole sentence starts again after the y’all, which serves to declare, “Hey, listen to this.”

Just today someone spent two minutes reading about Theodoric of York rather than getting the answer to their question, “What did medieval doctors look like?” This is an easy one:

The image above is a cleaned up version of the Physician’s portrait as it appears in the famous Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, written by that guy that hath a blog.

The Ellesmere portrait is a good example of how the traditional visual vocabulary overwhelmed Chaucer’s text. While Chaucer does mention the blue and red clothes that his Physician wore, he doesn’t describe his Physician as conducting urinalysis while on horseback. But medieval artists, when they wanted to draw a physician, used this stock image: a man holding up a vial of urine to look at it. The Ellesmere illustrator, when asked to draw a physician, uses the old standby, but adds the horse, since the pilgrims are supposed to be on horseback.*

The guy-holding-a-urine-flask image was so familiar that it could be used to make visual jokes with. From the same manuscript as the famous monkey butt-trumpet, I present you with a monkey doctor:**

Monkeys were a go-to for comedy in the Middle Ages, too. In this sense, Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp was a very medieval TV show. I don’t know why the monkey is treating a stork, though, or how a monkey gets urine from a stork. Until Google searches start bringing people with that question here, I’m under no obligation to find out, either.

UPDATE: If you’re looking for more information, see this page. It has many an illuminated urinal-wielding doctor and lots, lots more.

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*Incidentally, this is why the portrait of Chaucer in the Ellesmere looks like a stubby dwarf. The illustrator copied another artist’s head-and-torso picture of Chaucer and put an out of proportion horse under it.
**I don’t want to become known as ‘that guy who always posts images from Yale MS 229,’ but thanks to a class I took some years ago, I have the whole thing saved to my hard drive, so it’s easy to mine for examples.

Why did all medieval popes have the same name?

Short answer: they didn’t. Duh.

Long answer…

In the early days of the church, popes just used whatever name they were already known by, be it a birth name or a baptismal name. So pope Sixtus II, the first pope to re-use a predecessor’s name, was probably Sixtus long before he got to wear the big pointy hat.* The same goes for the next recidivist, Sixtus III.

After Sixtus III, the next pope to bear a predecessor’s name was Felix III. Wait, what about Felix II, you say? He was an anti-pope, so he doesn’t count.**

So, though there was an Anastasius II, the first pope to choose a new name for himself was John II, born Mercurius. John II changed his name when he became pope because he didn’t want to give the Roman god Mercury, who he was named after, free advertising. It would have been like McDonald’s having a clown named Ronald McBurger King.*** It’s unlikely that John II was honoring John I specifically by choosing the name, since John I was an old man who ruled only three years and spent most of that time imprisoned by Theodoric the Great.

John II probably didn’t establish a tradition of taking a new name, but it’s hard to be sure, since most of the information we have about the early popes amounts to a length of time in office and a description of their death. Certainly, though, after John’s time, the number of roman numerals after popes’ names starts to increase dramatically, and it’s hard to believe that all of those Bonifaces were just coincidental.

Medieval historians had their own story about why popes were allowed to take whatever name they wanted. Godfrey of Viterbo tells us in his Pantheon that the first pope to change his name was Sergius II.

This Pope Sergius, was first named “Hog’s Snout” and because of that changed his name and was called Sergius in his papacy. From that time on, every pope has been allowed to choose his own name for his papacy.

The weirdest thing about this story is that, while the moral drawn is almost certainly a just-so gloss, the germ of the story is true. There actually was a Sergius born with a terrible name. Sergius IV was born “Petro Bucca Porci,” or “Peter Pig Snout.”**** The medievals had just as much trouble as we do keeping their Roman numeraled popes straight, especially with all those anti-popes, and thus the confusion.

As odd as it may sound, it was the Peter in Mr. Pig Snout’s name that was objectionable. Popes just don’t name themselves after Peter. Like Jackie Robinson’s 42, that number is retired throughout the league. Pope John XIV, also born Peter, had changed his name for just that reason. So if Sergius IV had been born “Johnny Pig Snout,” we might have a pope Johnny Pig Snout III today.

It’s been suggested that the name changing really got underway at the end of the tenth century, when two foreigners, Bruno of Carinthia and Gerbert d’Aurilllac, a German and a Frenchman, became pope successively. They were worried that their provincial names didn’t sound Popish enough, so they became Gregory V and Sylvester II. Sadly, Gerbert could not forsee that his name would sound increasingly less popish and increasingly more cartoon catish during the twentieth century. Suffering Succotash.

Still, for one hundred years before the two foreign electees, the popes’ names drew from the already established stock, with roman numerals everywhere. The only exception in that span is Pope Lando, elected pope in 913, who ruled for only six months before he was needed elsewhere.***** Pope Lando was the last pope until Pope John Paul I to bear a name not borne by an earlier pope. And John Paul cheated by picking two previous names.

So, anonymous Google-searcher, I hope this answers your question. Popes didn’t all have the same name, but they started using a very small supply of them in the eighth century, for reasons that nobody’s clear on, but possibly related to a guy named Peter Pig Snout. There’s no official rule stopping a pope from keeping his own name, or from taking a name from some of the lesser-used popes.

I hope that during my lifetime we see popes dipping deeper into the papal reserves. Sixteen Benedicts, twenty-three Johns, twelve Piuses, thirteen Leo’s, sixteen Gregories, fourteen Clements, and thirteen Innocents is just starting to look a little desperate. We haven’t had a II since Marcellus II, who incidentally, was the last pope to keep his name when he became the pontiff.******

Who would want to be Benedict XVII when they could be Zosimus II? Hormisdas II? Agatho II? And since there have now been five Sixtuses, the name Sixtus the Sixth is up for grabs. And finally, let’s not forget poor Pope Saint Hilarius, the patron saint of this blog:

Doesn’t this man deserve a namesake?

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*A figure of speech. Popes didn’t start wearing the pointy hat until after 1000. Sixtus II died by beheading, so it’s all moot, and probably best not to ask him what hat he was wearing when he was beheaded when you meet him in heaven.
**I’ve already made the obvious joke in another post, that anti-popes explode upon coming into contact with popes. So, instead, some information: Felix II was made pope while another pope, Liberius, was exiled by the Roman emperor. When Liberius returned, Felix II was forced out. Since you can never have more than one pope, the loser always becomes, retroactively, an anti-pope. Poor Felix III didn’t know his numerical predecessor was an anti-pope, though, so had to lug around that extra minim for nothing. Think of what he could have saved on engraving fees had he known.
***Little known fact: The Burger King’s real name is Hardee’s New Double Thickburger Available at All Participating Locations.
****It’s important not to confuse your Sergii. Sergius III is the first pope who ruled during the “pornocracy,” or the Rule of the Harlots. I would discuss this at greater length, but as I’ve said, I’m trying to decrease the proportion of hits I get from people looking for porn.
*****Presumably, a galaxy far, far away had a job opening for a cape-wearing smooth-talking smuggler.
******I’m not counting John Paul II, who, as John Paul I before him, cheated by taking two popes’ names.