As I’ve written before, the Middle Ages proves a flexible metaphor for people on the skeptical side of the global climate change debate.

–On the one hand, if you want to deny that humans are causing global climate change, you can point to the Medieval Warm Period as a time of (grape-induced) human prosperity.
–On the other hand, if you want to go further and attack people who advocate reduced CO2 emissions, you can deride them as “medieval environmentalists” who want to take society back to the horrible Middle Ages (when all people had were grapes to comfort them).
–And now,* on the other other hand, if you want to attack people who advocate reducing CO2 emissions through a carbon credit trading system, you can accuse them of being as corrupt as the medieval church. Those aren’t credits, those carbon offset companies are offering–they’re indulgences! Here’s a typical use of the metaphor from Mark Luke at Helium.com:

The parallels between the medieval Catholic Church and Al Gore’s modern religion, the Church of Man-Made Global Warming, get more pronounced every day. […]

And the fastest growing corrupt parallel to the old Catholic Church is the selling sinful indulgences. The Church used to forgive sins if the sinner paid the Church. The Catholic Church used the money for its own indulgences. Al Gore is doing the same today, selling carbon indulgences which he calls carbon offsets. The false prophet is profiting nicely in this exploding $55 million industry, which changes nothing but it makes the sinners feel better.

One interesting thing about the carbon-credits-as-indulgences metaphor is that it appears to have been originated, or at the least popularized, by someone on the opposite side of the climate change debate.

In a 2006 article in the Guardian, George Monbiot used indulgences as to attack carbon credits for not going far enough quickly enough to have any impact on the dangerous threat of climate change:

Rejoice! We have a way out. Our guilty consciences appeased, we can continue to fill up our SUVs and fly round the world without the least concern about our impact on the planet. How has this magic been arranged? By something called “carbon offsets”. You buy yourself a clean conscience by paying someone else to undo the harm you are causing.

Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister and kill and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences. It is pernicious and destructive nonsense.

Poor Monbiot. Even if he can claim to have coined this particular rhetorical flourish, like Frankenstein, he’s lost control of his monster.** Originally used as a call to action for more and deeper steps against human-created climate change,*** the metaphor has been flipped, so that the indulgence is now a means to demonize the climate change advocates.****

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*And by “now” I mean since at least 2006. That’s what this blog promises you: up-to-the-minutetwo-years-ago coverage of all things medieval.
**Or coin–or how about monstrous coin?
***Monbiot is the author of Heat: How to Stop the World From Burning.
****I love the vocabulary of the debate. Climate change advocates advocate the theory that humans caused climate change, and are themselves definitely against the change itself. “Climate change skeptics” or “climate change opponents” are of often in favor of the change (for grape-related reasons!).

My vanity domain is officially online.* Adjust your links as appropriate.

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*And has been for weeks. I just forgot to announce it.

On last night’s Hardball, Chris Matthews whipped out this medieval metaphor to describe Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama:

It was King Arthur coming back from the Crusades to endorse Robin Hood. That‘s what I say.

With all the trouble Matthews has been in lately for things he’s said, I’m not going to go adding to his troubles by engaging in pedantry. Clearly, we’ve got a case of the Camelot of JFK getting mixed up in a metaphor with Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (and then that metaphor dropping out of metaphor and landing on the word “endorse”). No harm, no foul.

I caught this new “medieval”-ism over at the conservative website, The Canada Free Press.

“Medieval environmentalists” attack CO2 in their efforts to derail civilization

The quote in the headline is explained in this snippet:

Nigel Calder, former Editor of New Scientist magazine, refers to much of today’s global warming, anti-CO2 movement as “Medieval environmentalism”. Such alarmists, Calder explains in the film The Great Global Warming Swindle, embrace climate change dogma, saying to themselves, “Let’s get back to the way things were in Medieval times and get rid of all these dreadful cars and machines.” Calder says that for extremists, CO2 is “an emblem of industrialization”, something they oppose with a passion.

I think this shows a subtle development in the rhetoric of the climate change war. Usually, when the word “medieval” is invoked in a global warming debate, it’s followed by “warm period.” In fact, Nigel Calder is very fond of pointing to the Medieval Warm Period as evidence that humans are having little effect on the climate. The argument goes like this:

Premise 1) It was warm in the Middle Ages.
Premise 2) So warm that they were able to grow wine grapes in southern Britain.
Premise 3) No, really. Grapes. Can you imagine that?
Premise 4) Yeah, the kind you make wine out of.
Preimise 5) There was no CO2 being added to the atmosphere by industrialization in the middle ages.
Premise 6) But there were grapes. Lots and lots of grapes. Of the wine-making variety.
Premise 7) No, I don’t know what type of wine. Maybe a chianti. That’s a type of wine, right?
QED: Humans aren’t causing global warming.

I’ve been accused in the past of making things up for comedic effect,* but do not be so quick to accuse here. Grapes are a vital part of the argument against human-influenced climate change. If you google ‘grapes in britain,’ four of the first five hits are links to climate change discussions invoking the Medieval Warm Period. I know this, because when I’m googling for odd uses of the word medieval, I almost inevitably get back links for press-releases from the Orwellianly-named C02Science.org, whose mission statement is:

“to document the magnitude and spatial and temporal extent of a significant period of warmth that occurred approximately one thousand years ago. Its goal is: to ultimately provide sufficient real-world evidence to convince most rational people that the Medieval Warm Period was: (1) global in extent, (2) at least as warm as, but likely even warmer than, the Current Warm Period, (3) of a duration significantly longer than that of the Current Warm Period to date, and (4) full of delicious, delicious grapes.”**

So you heard it here first. If you’re a climate change opponent, medieval grapes are out; medieval environmentalists are in. Adjust your strawmen appropriately.

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*That accusation? Made up for comedic effect.
**Go ahead, accuse all you want. You can’t stop me. I’m out of control.

On a whim, I decided to register the domain name GotMedieval.com.* I was pretty amazed to find it was still available. I used GoDaddy.com, not because it’s a good deal, but because the last time I had to register a domain name it was in the wake of that much touted Super Bowl ad,** so I have an account there.

When you register with GoDaddy, they helpfully suggest other domain names that you might want to snap up at the same time, both names that are currently still available, and names that GoDaddy is squatting on speculatively. The latter they call “Premium Domain Names.”

The script they’ve developed for suggesting available names is apparently synonym-based, so they offered me TookMedieval.com (and variations like MyTookMedieval.com, TookMedievalOnline.com, TookMedievalPro.com and so on).

My favorite suggestions in the list: GotSexyOld.com, closely followed by GotBlackOld.com.

As for “Premium Domains,” I learned that GoDaddy.com is sitting on MedievalWoman.com, and is willing to part with it for a paltry $1,550. MedievalPeople.com costs $1650, which is frankly insulting, because it means that adding the non-female half of the world’s population to your domain only costs you an extra $100. Talk about a bargain. It makes MedievalKing.com seem gratuitous at $1500.

But more valuable than Kings, People, or even Women, is MedievalFlail.com, which’ll set you back a full $1850. GoDaddy.com’s market research reveals a huge trend in internet-order flails coming soon, I guess.*** Update your stock portfolio appropriately.

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*Don’t go adjusting your links until I’ve set the forwarding up.
**Not the tasteless one with the midget and Danica Patrick, but the more refined 2005 vintage.
***And they said that Web 2.0 was out of ideas!

I just inhaled Steve Martin’s new autobiography of his stand-up years, Born Standing Up, on a two-hour flight to Chicago. Martin’s prose is spare, workmanlike and often awkward, except when he’s discussing the specifics of his act; there everything coalesces into a taut clarity that makes the whole worth the read.

I bring this up on my blog because reading about Steve Martin’s youth reminded me of why I’m still in academia. He writes, just before revealing the effect that Lewis Carroll’s logic-poems* had on his developing routine:

“I continued to pursue my studies and half believed I might try for a doctorate in philosophy and become a teacher, as teaching is, after all, a form of show business” (86).

Every time I get up in front of a group of students, it’s a little song and dance number. When I plan lectures, I think to myself, “Ok, so the Aristotelian definition of tragedy is a good ten minutes of material, then I can follow that up with part of the old Wheel of Fortune routine. Now I just need a good opener…” And when a class really clicks, it’s invigorating. I can understand how performers get addicted to applause.*

Now, to make this post relevant to this blog’s mission statement, here’s a link to a YouTube video of Steve Martin’s Saturday Night Live appearance as Theodoric of York, the Medieval Barber. (And for the YouTube impaired, here’s a link to a transcript.) Google’s Blogsearch tells me that you’ve probably already seen this link through Anachronista or Quod Ero Spero.

My favorite bit has to be this speech:

Well, I’ll do everything humanly possible. Unfortunately, we barbers aren’t gods. You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter’s was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.

I’m often asked**** how accurate Theodoric’s take on medieval medicine is. I can’t speak about the toad, but he’s mostly right about the bleeding; if your humours are out of balance, the only solution is to curb the excess. His technique is a bit sloppy, though. Medieval doctors were not only concerned with how much blood to take from the body–where the blood was drawn from and when it was drawn were just as important. Thus medieval doctors had to consult elaborate charts that took into account the connection between various veins and the signs of the zodiac. (When the moon is in Capricorn, bleed them from the knees; in Taurus, go for the throat!) Here is a less than stunning example of one of those charts, but it’s the best I could find on short notice:

It’s a combination vein man and zodiac man. For larger individual examples of each, see here and here, respectively. True Steve Martin fans will enjoy the first link, where it looks like the medieval illuminator drew a banjo instead of the expected esophagus/stomach combination.

Blood-letting wasn’t the end all be all of medieval medicine, however. There were also purgatives, laxatives, and emetics to prescribe. If you got sick in the Middle Ages, you could expect that something disgusting was going to soon be forced out of some part of your body, one way or the other.

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*For those too lazy to follow my carefully Googled links, here’s how Lewis Caroll’s logic puzzles work:
1. Angelina Jolie dipped in gold body paint must be in all movies based on medieval texts.
2. Yet, all unsuccessful Hollywood blockbusters misunderstand medieval texts.
3. All really good movies employ the Got Medieval Guy as a fact checker.
4. No movie that misunderstands medieval texts features the gold-body-paint enhanced charms of Ms. Jolie.
5. No successful Hollywood blockbusters have employed the Got Medieval Guy.
Therefore, all really good movies are based on medieval texts.
**And unlike performers, when it doesn’t click, I can always give someone an F to make myself feel better.***
***Let me assure any former undergraduates of mine who’ve stumbled across this page that I am completely serious. If you don’t laugh at your professor’s jokes, you have only yourself to blame for all that red ink on your next essay. Be a good audience, or else.
****Mostly by my father-in-law, who will not let go of an idea once it enters his head.

Wow. A month has passed since I last posted. Ah, the good old days. Don’t expect anything new for a while. I’m at that point with the thesis where every waking thought I have that is non-Mario related* is interrupted by “Your thesis ought to be done by now.”

But so that my readers don’t think I’ve become an ex-blogger again, I’ll share a short anecdote. Last week I took my class (English 129a: The European Literary Tradition) to the Beinecke manuscript and rare books library and gave them a lecture on the history of the book.

Once again, I overprepared for the lecture. I had lots of notes that I didn’t look at once, and I ran out of time and didn’t get to show off several of the items that I had paged, including the indulgence scroll that promises to shave 28,000 or so years off of the bearer’s Purgatory sentence.** I always forget how much time it takes to handle the basic questions, like:

–If vellum was so valuable, why did they leave such big margins in their books?
–How did the scribes write so straight and neat?
–You mean bookworms are real and not just cartoons?
–Why do they let someone with your qualifications handle that thousand-year-old priceless artifact?

And last, but not least,

–What is that monkey doing with that trumpet?

Bring your class whatever you want. I brought mine (among other things) a 12th-century boy’s Latin school book, an Inquisition manual, the only extant copy of a the Abraham and Isaac non-cycle mystery play, a folding calendar, and a copy of the First Folio–but I’m pretty sure that for most of them, the visit is filed away in their heads under Monkey Butt-Trumpet.***

I don’t relate this to shame my students. Gothic marginalia is powerful stuff, and I have to remember that when I plan my lectures.

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*For the record, Super Mario Galaxy is the Hamlet of video games.
**Sorry, class. If you find yourselves in Purgatory for an extra 28,000 years, know that you have me and your own non-deadly sins to blame.
**Or possibly: Butt-Trumpet, Monkey. I suppose it depends on how organized their mental filing cabinets are.

I went to see Beowulf at the IMAX theater last night. The 3D effects were very nice, especially after the first hour, when the director was finally convinced he’d included enough shots of gratuitously long and pointy objects held out in front of the audience to justify the extra six bucks for an IMAX ticket.

If you are spoiler sensitive, stop reading blog posts about the movie you’re so worried about getting information on. It’s just common sense. People with nut allergies always politely turn down invitations from Mr. Peanut, no matter how lavish and spectacular the ball he is throwing. Nonetheless, consider this gratuitous picture of Angelina Jolie your last warning.

Now onto the movie. As we all know from reading the Anglo-Saxon poem, the action takes place at Heorot, the grandest mead hall in all of Denmark, owned by King Hrothgar, a notorious drunk who likes to parade around in a toga (Anthony Hopkins with about 75 extra digitially added pounds). The hall is attacked by the giant flame-belching monster named Grendel (Marty’s dad from Back to the Future) who was born with several unfortunate birth-defects, including skin turned the wrong-side out* and an ear drum that’s on the outside of his head that makes him especially sensitive to the noise caused by all those drunken warriors at Heorot. During the initial attack, Unferth, Hrothgar’s Wormtongue (John Malkovitch, who has first dibs on all slinky hate-filled roles in Hollywood), proves his cowardice by hiding inside a large pool of water that Hrothgar had installed at Heorot so that people might prove their cowardice by hiding inside during monster attacks.** Also, our Grendel is the illegitimate son of Hrothgar, gotten on a certain mysterious golden dragon/mermaid/lady thing (eventually played by Angelina Jolie). Beowulf, a nudist with Tourette’s Syndrome (Ray Winstone, who had 75 pounds digitally subtracted), journeys from Geatland to Denmark to kill the monster, accompanied by his good friend Wiglaf and several other warriors. We know that they are brave warriors because they shout half of their lines for no apparent reason.

Before dinner, Unferth drunkenly insults Beowulf for losing a swimming contest with Brecca. Beowulf retorts that the reason he lost the contest was that he was fighting sea monsters at the time, big cycloptic flying snake sea monsters that he slew by climbing inside, gouging out their single eye from the within, then climbing out through the bloody hole where the eye used to be. Also, he slept with a mermaid while underwater, but he doesn’t mention that to Unferth. Later, at dinner, Beowulf flirts shamelessly with Wealtheow, Hrothgar’s unhappy bride who loathes her husband because of his secret shame (Robin Wright Penn, who displays the full range of emotions from wearily disapproving to icily disapproving). Beowulf says his famous catchphrase, “THIS IS SPART–I MEAN, I AM BEOWULF!!!” several times to good effect and caps off the night by flashing the queen (who is flusteredly disapproving).

After a big fight in which Beowulf punches Grendel in the eardrum repeatedly and does Matrix-style flips, all while nude, Beowulf cuts off the monster’s arm by slamming it in the door until it falls off. Unfortunately, Grendel’s mother, who speaks pidgin German with a Transylvanian accent, attacks, first invading Beowulf’s dreams in the form of Wealtheow (who even manages to look disapproving while trying to seduce the hero) and then killing all his men except for Wiglaf while they sleep, hanging them from the rafters, throats slit, ala Braveheart, spurring Beowulf and Wiglaf on to follow the demoness to her cave. Wiglaf wisely chooses to remain outside. Guided by a magical dragon-shaped horn that glows in the dark, Beowulf meets with the extremely seductive water demoness(/mermaid/dragon/ghost) and rather than killing her, sleeps with her, because she promises to make him king so long as his magic drinking horn stays in her cave. Beowulf returns, pretends to have killed the sexy monster, and becomes king of the Danes when Hrothgar commits suicide. Beowulf takes Wealtheow as a bride, grows old, and conquers many lands, though victory is hollow, because as king he is not allowed to take part personally in battle, and because his success is all secretly due to the water demon’s magic.

Christianity comes to Denmark. Beowulf has a poignant meeting with Finn of Frisia then retires to Heorot to celebrate Beowulf Day, the holiday thrown in his honor, by watching midgets re-enact his fight with Grendel. Then Unferth, who has by now become a Christian monk, brings Beowulf his magic drinking horn, found by a slave on the moors. This means that the deal between Beowulf and Angelina Jolie’s breasts is off, and so Beowulf’s illegitimate bald gold-skinned son turns into a dragon, flies out of the cave, and burns up the kingdom, including Unferth’s family. Beowulf raises an army and then goes to fight the dragon with Wiglaf at his side, but when they get to the cave, Wiglaf remains outside. Beowulf fashions a grappling hook out of an axe and a chain and rides the dragon back to his castle, stabbing it over and over. Ultimately, Beowulf cuts off his own arm so that he can reach into the dragon’s chest and pull out its heart. The dragon and Beowulf die after sharing a small moment of familial recognition. Beowulf is burned on a pyre at sea, and the magic horn and the seductive water demon come to Wiglaf, who is torn between hatred of the demon and the fact that she has computer animated Angelina Jolie breasts and a fondness for gold body paint.

OK, so there are a few minor differences from the original. As a medievalist, I can’t really fault the makers of an adaptation for not remaining true to the letter of their source material. If medieval authors had shown that sort of fidelity, my dissertation would be very short. Nevertheless, I prefer adaptations that allow the characters the dignity that they had in the source material, so I was annoyed to see Hrothgar prancing around like a fool and Wiglaf sitting on his hands while Beowulf fights the dragon. And to reduce Beowulf’s vaunted wordhoard to “I AM BEOWULF!!!!”… it boggles the mind.***

The main problem with the movie is that it is a bog-standard dumb action extravaganza created by people who think that they have instead made a very smart film. I put the blame mostly on Neil Gaiman, because he has a solid track record for taking well-worn cliche’s, stock characters, and stale plots, adding some black-eyeliner, and calling it Deep, Dark, and Meaningful. He thinks that he’s some sort of revolutionary for making a movie where the evil woman is a slinky seductress and the virtuous woman is an ice queen. I’m not saying that we need to see Wealtheow in a string bikini, but it’s a little absurd that Grendel’s Mom’s breasts are such a big part of the film that they probably had their own trailer on the set, while Wealtheow’s wearing some sort of medieval minimizer. And how subtle to have the evil woman live in a cave shaped like the only part of Angelina Jolie that they didn’t computer animate.

So in the end, the lesson we learn from Beowulf is that sex has consequences–huge, negative, eat your friends and break all your furniture consequences. Sleeping with a gold-dipped centerfold may seem like a good idea at first, but all it will bring is a few moments of sexual bliss followed by fifty years of prosperity and power. Sooner or later, your golden son who can turn into a dragon will kill you in a really awesome fight scene.

Now a few random thoughts before I sign off:

• Am I supposed to think that Grendel has magic spear-controlling powers? In the second attack on Heorot, Grendel knocks a spear away from a warrior, and the spear turns end over end and lands on its former wielder, impaling him. Or is it just that Neil Gaiman loves him some unlikely irony?
• Why is it bad to have sex with mermaids who offer you power and wealth to go with your hanky-panky, but OK to have sex with mermaids who only offer sex? Or is there another Beowulf, Jr. swimming around in the ocean waiting for a sequel?
• Why do we have to be treated to a long scene of “foreshadowing” in which the hero learns exactly how to defeat the big bad guy? Lucky that Hrothgar didn’t like drinking out of a rhinoceros-shaped drinking horn, or Beowulf wouldn’t have known to stab the big glowing “stab here to kill me” spot on the dragon.
• Why are dragon’s hearts so tiny and in their throats?
• And why does Beowulf get so pissy when he finds out that there’s a second monster he has to fight. Sure, it’s funny to have him say, “Does this Grendel have any uncles or nephews I need to slay while I’m out?” but nearly half of his lines to that point had been some version of “I’m here to slay your mon-stah,” “I will slay your mon-stah for you,” or “Hey, get a load of how weird I sound when I say ‘mon-stah,’ ” so this sudden reticence is just out of character.
• It was nice to see that Gaiman or the other screenwriter read the introduction to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and so knows the weird theory Tolkien had about Beowulf meaning “bee-wolf.”
• It was also nice to see the cameo by the original text, recited by the scop while two midgets flailed around in a pantomime show during the “Beowulf Day” celebration.
• And speaking of scops, why does the movie treat them like the fifth-century equivalent of bloggers? Have the scops spread the news of our victory! And tell them to stop singing about cats who cannot speak English properly. That is so fourth century.

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*Like Slim Goodbody, only… evil!
**Or maybe it’s a jacuzzi. I can’t be sure.
***I expect that Richard Noakes is rather upset that he’s going to have to change the name of his blog to Unlocked I AM BEOWULF!!!

The blogger behind ExecutedToday.com asked me to post a link to his blog today, as November 13th marks the 1005th anniversary of the St. Brice’s Day Massacare, when Aethelred–not yet the Unready–is said to have massacred a huge number of Danes who lived in England.

I’m no expert on pre-Norman England, but I am an expert on talking medieval babies.* That is why I had no idea that there was a massacre named after St. Brice, but I did know that he had the magic power to make babies talk. According to the Golden Legend, also known as The Bumper Book of Weird Medieval Saints,** St. Brice took over the bishopric formerly occupied by St. Martin of Tours and was well-known among his flock for being a lech. This all came to a head in the thirtieth year of his bishopric, when…

A woman who had taken religious orders, who did Brice’s laundry regularly, had conceived and borne a child who all the people said the bishop was the father of, so they assembled at his gates with stones, and said: We have long suffered your lechery for the love of St. Martin and for his pity, but now we will no more kiss your accursed hands. But he denied the charge and the deed completely and said: Bring to me the child. And when the child was brought he was only thirty days old. And S. Brice said to him: I conjure you by the Son of God that you shall say to me before all these people if I have engendered you. And the child said: You are not my father. And the people, yet not content, asked him to ask the child who his father was. And the bishop said: That appertaineth not to me to do.

I cleaned up the translation a little to remove some of those eths and ests and such, which you can find in all their glory at the link above. I kept the last, though, as this is my new motto: That appertaineth not to me to do. I’m going to put it on tee-shirts and coffee mugs. And when my wife asks me to do the dishes, I’ll just point at the (dirty) coffee mug and nod knowingly.

For what it’s worth, the crowd isn’t pleased with the talking baby antics and burns St. Brice in a fire for sorcery. Fortunately for him, he is fireproof, because of his holiness. What can we learn from this? Primarily that saints had odd ideas about what makes for compelling evidence of innocence. Nothing’s more convincing than a talking baby!

I only know about St. Brice because his is an analogue of some of tales told about Baby Merlin. When Merlin’s mother is going to be buried alive for sleeping around, as related in the Vulgate Lancelot Cycle, Merlin takes the witness stand at one month old and explains that not only is his mother innocent, the judge’s mother is herself guilty of sleeping around. The mother is brought in to testify and, lo and behold, Baby Merlin is as right as he is cute.

Anyway, my point here is that The Family Guy isn’t just ripping off the Simpsons. It’s ripping off The Adventures of Young Merlin. Talking babies are so thirteenth century. Oh yeah, and go visit that dude’s blog. You’ve got four hours until it’s the anniversary of St. Somebody Else’s Massacre.

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*Though I often neglect to put this on my CV, ‘talking baby expert’ should go right between, ‘expertise in European intellectual history’ and ‘experience teaching world literature in translation.’ If you have one of my CV’s, please amend it appropriately.
**At least to me, anyway.