The closer I come to the job market, the more I worry about how I’m going to make money with the whole medievalist thing. With Mel Gibson’s current troubles, it’s unlikely he’s going to sign me on as a continuity consultant for Braveheart II: Even Braver Heart, so there goes my backup plan.

The closest that I’ve come so far, excepting the two fabulous gifts my blog has garnered, was a few months back. A college pal who works in advertising sent me an email out of the blue asking if I could provide him with a recording and a phonetic guide to pronouncing the first and last twenty lines or so of Beowulf. I did, and he took me and my wife out for a nice dinner last week at a trendy Thai place to repay the favor.* I didn’t see the check, but I estimate my take was somewhere around $100/hour of reading Beowulf,** rates that even Seamus Heaney has a hard time matching. It would be comforting, if I didn’t have to take all my earnings from medievalism in the form of yarn hats, books, and Garlic Pepper Beef. I don’t think future landlords will look as highly on these as methods of payment.

You’re probably wondering why my advertising friend needed some Beowulf read into a plastic Snap, Crackle, and Pop microphone,*** and that is because I have mastered the narrative art of delaying information to build interest. He was pitching an ad to Universal Studios that ran along the lines of “here’s some crappy idea that a parent thinks would be a good idea for a family vacation… but they should have gone to Universal instead.” Taking the kids to see a reading of Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon was going to be one of those ideas. It lost out to taking the kids skydiving against their will, but I think the whole line eventually got scrapped. If you’d like to see more of this friend’s work, go to his website.

This same friend also does the advertising thing also works on Capital One’s No Hassles campaign, the one that features the Visigoths, and maybe he’ll need me to read some of Walter Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History into my microphone, but I’m not holding my breath.

I was glad to find out that somebody else is making money on medieval things, in this case obscure medieval laws.***** According to the Times of London, a company named ChancelCheck is making at least £11.75 a pop using GPS technology and ancient parish records to determine whether property is susceptible to chancel repair liablilty. According to the article:

Chancel repair liability is a legal leftover from the Middle Ages that enables some parishes to call upon owners of properties on former church or glebe land to fund repairs to their church buildings. Many parishes gave up or sold this right over the centuries, but up to 5,000 may still be able to claim it.

This is a terribly pressing burden for homeowners, since, according the ChancelCheck’s own website, at least 3 parishes have won settlements against unwitting glebe land holders in the last ten years. It sounds like total snake oil to me, but I would never say so, because Britain has some darn liberal libel laws, and I just can’t afford to give any of my Garlic Pepper Beef to the folks at ChancelCheck.

Obscure medieval laws are a double-edged sword, however. They can give you 12 quid per dupe–I mean, per well-serviced customer, sure, but they can also shut down your seized car auction, as Mr. Helliwell of Wakefield discovered. According to the Leeds Today article, the Wakefield Council invoked a royal charter, which granted the town exclusive market rights, banning any rival markets within 6 and 2/3 miles of the city’s markets. It may or may not date to 1204, when King John first set up their maket rights.

When asked for comment, the disgruntled car auctioneer played the cliche card, saying, “This law was made when people were still riding around on horses and fighting each other with swords… It seems that the council is still intent on living in the dark ages.” He’s right, I guess. It’s a well known fact that people on horses make horrible financial decisions. And studies at the University of Wyoming have revealed that common sense decreases as an exponential function of the proximity of swords. It probably has nothing to do with a city government wanting to shut down an obnoxious event where people bid on cars acquired by shafting others.

So there’s hope for me yet. So long as I carry a sword and hang out at equestrian events when I try to sell people on the Organic Medieval Diet (now with 25% more purgatives!).

—
*I know it was trendy, because at the table across from us there was a girl wearing a top hat and a bustier, and yet there was no magician or mesmerist anywhere near her. There was, however, another girl at the same table who had combed her hair all in one direction (and not the direction you’d think). Hipsters.
**I think I may be the first man in history to have read Beowulf into a plastic Snap, Crackle, and Pop microphone (which I got for two box tops plus shipping and handling). I’m considering mentioning this fact on my C.V.
***Those of you who read the footnotes, that is. The rest of you have no clue how cool a microphone I have for my computer and were completely thrown by the reference. That is OK, because you probably thought that I was using the comedic art of disjunctive juxtapositon, whereby a non sequiter is placed within mundane text for humorous effect.****
****Yeah, you’re right, that last joke was too meta for my own good. My head hurts, too.
*****That is, someone other than my Swedish DGS, who got a MacArthur “genius grant” for his work on Gratian’s Decretum. That’s something like $1000 per dictum.

A comment to one of my old Da Vinci Code rants reminded me that I let the movie come and go at the theater without bothering to post anything about it.

I went to see it opening weekend with every intention of writing a review and found that it left me uninspired. It was a very competent movie that fairly slavisly followed its source, about like the first Harry Potter movie–nothing overwhelming, just very workmanlike.

I understand why they made the movie. Name recognition and “brand awareness” insured a huge opening weekend and a profitable run. But what a terribly dreadful book to make into a movie, and I don’t mean that as a generic slam at Dan Brown.*** The main action of the book consists of either 1) an expert explaining something that he or she is an expert in or 2) an expert coming to a sudden realization of the solution to a puzzle. Neither of these is visually compelling.

Ron Howard, the director, did his darndest to make it into movie material. So, we’re treated to elaborate CG effects that are meant to represent the inner workings of the hero’s mind as he solves the puzzles. Never has more money been spent dramatizing an anagram. Take this scene from the movie:

On a piece of parchment, scrawled letters glow blue and begin swirling.

In a voice over, Tom Hanks mutters, “Acidic Drunk, Oval Nose… what could it mean?”

An “A” twists out of the scrabble of letters, soon joined by L I V E. A peal of thunder, and the quartet rearrange to form a crimson E V I L. More thunder, several flashes, and it spells out: “AN EVIL ACCORD SKIDS ON U”

A tight closeup on Amelie’s face: “What iz zis? Surely, Francis Bacon would not use ze ‘leet’ speak.”****

“Wait,” breathes Tom Hanks, and the letters reappear: C A R S I C K. A disco backbeat starts up, as the letters groove into position across a mirrored CG ball: A SUDDEN CARSICK VIOLON

Amelie scowls, “But… doez not ze violin have an “i” instead of ze “o”?

Again, the letters reappear, and one by one drop into formation: LEONARDO DA VINCI KUSCS–cue ominous bass chord as the final word begins to rearrange…

“I never knew Francis Bacon hated da Vinci so much…” Tom Hanks proceeds to dance across a giant piano in drag while checking his AOL account in celebration.

“We call him ‘Leonardo,’ because da Vinci iz just where he is, ‘ow you say, from?”

OK, so I just made that up. But you get the point. An overabundance of anagrams does not a taut thriller make.

In other Da Vinci Code news, the movie has been banned by Muslims in Pakistan, Coptics in Egypt, godless communists in China, Christians in Goa*****, and someone in the Russian city of Vyazma.****** I know Ron Howard got down on his hands and knees and cursed his fate when he found out about all the receipts he’d lose his percentage of in Vyazma.

—-

*Please note that you did not say ‘no crosses count’.**
**I know. I find it irresponsible and baffling, frankly.
***I’ve gotten enough of those in already.
****Leet-speak, or 1337-$p34k, is what the kids do on the internet when they’re not at the soda shop buying malts or jitterbugging.
*****The smallest state in India, rich in minerals and ores–and apparently, religious nutjobs.
******Apparently, it was also banned in several other Indian states, Shri Lanka, the Solomon Islands, and so many other places that the humor value of linking to news articles about them was far outweighed by the work of having to cut and paste them into my blog. Oh, and this just in, the United Republic of My Pants just announced that it is joining the boycott. Said a representative of my pants, “Just because there are no movie theatres in our great land, does not mean we cannot ban things we find inappropriate. The Solomon Islands also lack movie theatres, and you know the old saying, ‘If it’s good enough for the Solomon Islands, it’s good enough for your pants.'”

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Translation: I moved for the summer, and they released a new update to City of Heroes–these things combined keep me from posting with my usual amazing timeliness. I’ve got several posts in the drafts section that I’m working on. I’ll release them soon and probably backdate them so that future historians will think that I was more dilligent than I really am.*

But until then, I’d like to post this amazing letter I received from the Post Office explaining why my shipment of books–precious lifeblood of the academic–ended up dented and scuffed:

Memorandum To: Our Postal Customer

Subject: Damaged Mail

The enclosed was found loose in the mail or has been damaged in handling in the Postal Service (whichever is applicable to your enclosure).

We realize your mail is important to you, and you have every right to expect it to be delivered in tact and in good condition. The Postal Service makes every effort to properly handle the mail entrusted to it, but due to the large volume, occasional damage may occur.

When a Post Office handles an excess of 8 million pieces of mail daily, it is imperative that mechanical methods be used to to maintain production and ensure prompt delivery of the mail. It is also an actuality that modern production methods do not permit personal attention to individual pieces of mail. Damage can occur if mail is insecurely enveloped or bulky contents are enclosed. When this occurs and our machinery is jammed, it often causes damage to other mail that was properly prepared.

We are striving to improve our processing methods to assure than an occurence such as the enclosed can be eliminated. We appreciate your concern over the handling of your mail and sincerely regret the inconvenience you have experienced.

Plant Manager

Kids, you can play along at home. Find five grammatical errors and ten instances of beauracratic bullshit! Turn this blog upside down for the answer key.

—-

*I may have to delete this post eventually to further my scheme. Don’t worry. Future historians are suckers; they’ll fall for anything. Not unlike Americanists.

A friend of mine brought this to my attention, and it’s vaguely medieval, if you squint real hard and don’t look at it directly.

It seems that the U.S. Senate is striking a great blow for irony with S.R. 458, a resolution “affirming that statements of national unity, including the National Anthem, should be recited or sung in English.” The resolution itself reads like a high school history report on national symbols–Francis Scott Key’s anthem was in English, and so was General George Washington’s first Oath of Allegiance, and so and and so on. But the best bit is this clause:

“Whereas the original national motto of the United States, `E Pluribus Unum’, meaning `from many, one’, signifies the coming together of people from many foreign countries to form one Nation, was incorporated into the Great Seal of the United States in 1776, is printed on currency of the United States, and inscribed on the wall of the Senate chamber.”

When contrasted against the final conclusion:

Resolved, That the Senate affirms that statements or songs that symbolize the unity of the Nation, including the National Anthem, the Oath of Allegiance sworn by new United States citizens, and the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States, should be recited or sung in English, the common language of the United States.

Logically, this means one of three things. Either,

1) The motto, E Pluribus Unum, is not a statement that symbolizes the unity of the Nation, or
2) E Pluribus Unum is actually English, or
3) They think it’s OK to write on the money in Latin, but you must read your dollar bills aloud in English.

I told some students about this earlier tonight, and they pointed out that Spanish–and let’s be clear, this is all about singing the national anthem in Spanish and not some hypothetical Swahili version of America the Beautiful–is a lot closer to Latin than English is, being a Romance or Latinate language. A Spanish speaker might be able to puzzle through E Pluribus Unum a lot quicker than the unilingual English speaker.

And might I add, the Star Spangled Banner is not sung in the English spoken in America. When was the last time you said, o’er or ’tis?

There are lots of reasons to avoid going to my mailbox in the Medieval Studies department here at my university. It’s on the other side of campus from the English department where my TF** duties are; I might run into my DGS and face uncomfortable questions about my Mario-to-dissertation ratio***; and usually when I check it, the only things in my box are calls-for-papers for conferences with names like “Medieval Lint in the Early 12th Century: New Critical Approaches” or “Guys Named Chuck in Lay Devotional Texts.”

So imagine my surprise and horror to discover that someone sent me a gift back in February, and it’s been sitting in my little cubby hole for three months. And not just any gift–it was a knitted winter hat! Man, I could have used that all winter, which in New Haven lasts for approximately 11.2 months a year. And in .8 months, I’m going to Georgia for the summer, where even Michael Nesmith doesn’t wear his trademark wool cap.

It just goes to prove that old saying: if you complain on your blog about how nobody appreciates you, someone will send you a wool hat. Thanks from the bottom of my heart–I mean, from the top of my head.

—

*I am aware that some people find the word ‘chick’ offensive. For me, ‘chick’ is the female equivalent of ‘dude’. It’s only offensive if you find faux hipsterness offensive.
**TF is Yale for TA.
***Roughly 20.2 to 1.7.

I know that I haven’t posted much in a while, and I have made vague excuses about conference papers and thesis chapters to cover for it. But now I feel that you’re all old enough to know the truth. It was for your protection, like when Tom Wopat and John Schneider had to take that season off from the Dukes of Hazzard so that Jimmy Carter wouldn’t have to tap the nation’s Strategic Awesome Reserve. Really, the worst thing that I can do for you is to become one of those insanely committed bloggers who posts every single month.

Allow me to explain–though even this explanation contributes to your peril. Lots of interesting things came out of the Da Vinci Code copyright case–which is by now old news, just old enough that it makes this post only 95% likely to harm you irrevocably. But as you well know, Dan Brown was being sued by a crackpot historian, Michael Baigent, whose book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Brown shamelessly ripped off to write the Da Vinci Code. Brown’s main defense was to claim that he ripped off lots of people, and besides it was mostly his wife’s fault, because she was his main researcher anyway, and he had lots better things to do like coming up with the clever puzzles that drive the plot.* But the judge provided him with a tertiary defense during the cross-examination of Mr. Baigent.

At issue was Dan Brown’s bungling of the date of the founding of the Priory of Sion. Brown says it was founded during the Second Crusade, in the reign of Baldwin II, but HBHG claims it was founded in 1099. As anyone with access to Wikipedia knows, the Second Crusade was called in 1145, and Baldwin II died in 1131. As the judge pointed out in the case, “Well, he certainly didn’t get it from you, because you wouldn’t have made the date error that he has.”****

There was some other legal mumbo-jumbo in the decision handed down last week, something about how you can’t copyright history even if you’re an insane crackpot, but I think it was clear that the real thing that saved Dan Brown was our most precious natural resource: ignorance about the Middle Ages. It’s what Medieval Times was created to foster, one giant turkey leg at a time, m’lord. And this blog is a threat to that.

Just think about that the next time you’re being tried for plagiarism or killing a hobo in England. You won’t be able to rely on the wrong date of the Second Crusade to save you.

To undo any damage that I’ve done by posting my Wikipedia-gleaned “facts,” let me direct you to two repositories of useful non-facts. Some Adult Film execs are putting together a grand timeline of porn. Here is the Middle Ages, as far as erotica is concerned:

1st century BC – Kama Sutra was created
1440 – Gutenberg Press Invented

It was a pious time. But it was also a time filled with Predator feasting rituals, at least according to The Movie Timeline, a site devoted to listing the various historical facts passed on to us by the movies. Watch 500 years go by, movie style:

500 Badon’s Hill, Hadrian’s Wall – Arthur wins the Battle of Badon’s Hill (King Arthur, 2004)
504 October 10: Predators arrive for their feasting ritual on xenomorphs and humans (Alien vs Predator)
604 October 10: Predators arrive for their feasting ritual on xenomorphs and humans
704 October 10: Predators arrive for their feasting ritual on xenomorphs and humans
804 October 10: Predators arrive for their feasting ritual on xenomorphs and humans
859 The House of Flying Daggers rises to oppose the governing Tang dynasty in China (House of Flying Daggers)
871 Alfred The Great becomes king (Alfred The Great)
904 October 10: Predators arrive for their feasting ritual on xenomorphs and humans
922 The last Neanderthal tribe dies out as one Arab and twelve Viking warriors kill the Queen and War Chief (The Thirteenth Warrior)
932 Arthur gathers knights for a quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python & The Holy Grail)
993 Hogwarts school founded (Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone)
1004 October 10: Predators arrive for their feasting ritual on xenomorphs and humans

For the rest of the Middle Ages, you’ll just have to visit the site. But now you don’t know. And don’t knowing is half the battle… in court.

—

*Dan Brown’s main technique for puzzle-crafting was to create the character of Sophie Neveu, a professional cryptologist who is nonetheless stymied by such crafty codes as messages written in mirrored characters and anagrams. Naturally, she has to have these explained to her at great length by the book’s hero. Don’t get me wrong, the book is a page-turner. My wife and I listened to it on a very long car trip, and there was a mad scramble to switch out the CD’s every time we reached the end of one. But the central puzzle in the climax of the book is the sort of thing you’d see on Wheel of Fortune–and not even as the final puzzle where you only get to buy five letters and a vowel. We’re talking the warm up puzzle that they do to decide who gets to spin the wheel first, the puzzle Vanna doesn’t even bother to flip the letters for. The book’s hero, the Harvard symbologist**, has to race against time to answer the crossword puzzle clue: Newton’s orb. Five letters. And it only takes him thirty pages to do it in.***
**I have no clue what journals a symbologist would publish in, but I desperately want to be one. Apparently, being one means when you go to conferences, you get put up in the best hotel in town. When I go to conferences, I stay at the Day’s Inn.
***Quick clue: It rhymes with that soft-drink that Wendy the Snapple Lady used to do commercials for.
****Even quicker clue: That soft-drink rhymes with Blapple.
*****Keep in mind that they’re arguing over the date of an organization that doesn’t really exist.

It’s obnoxious when something you saw months ago but were too lazy to blog shows up on someone else’s blog. Such is the case with Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog, which was featured at Boingboing.net today. In my defense, it’s gotten a lot funnier since I last read it. To my detriment, I haven’t written much that’s funny since I read it. I’ve been busy juggling a conference paper and a thesis chapter.

This has been sitting in my drafts folder for over a week now, because I’ve been hard pressed to come up with a joke that can compete with the actual quote. You’ve probably heard that the President of Iran, Mr. Ahmadinezhad, has accused the U.S. and other Western nations of being “medieval” for not wanting Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

I know that I don’t need to tell you that medieval literature and law is full of attempts to stop people from acquiring nuclear weapons. During the First Crusade, both the crossbow and the LGM-118A Peacekeeper nuclear missile were banned by Innocent II’s Second Lateran Council.*

Cheap jokes aside**, it’s refreshing to see that Middle Eastern leaders can mangle references to the Middle Ages just as well as their Western counterparts. Here is the best part of the mangle in question:

It is not right for you to make something up [the Holocaust] and then say “no one has the right to speak about this, everyone should repeat what we say”. These people think they are living in the medieval age when they could call a scientist and tell him “abandon you ideas for the earth is not moving.”.The scientist would say “I swear by the prophets I have the scientific argument that the earth is moving.” They say: “No! Here is the guillotine . Either abandon your views or go under the guillotine.” This is the same form of thinking. The difference is that they have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The situation is therefore more dangerous. In those days they only had the sword and the guillotine, today they have nuclear weapons.

As I learned a long time ago in the Choose Your Own Adventure book Blade of the Guillotine,*** guillotines weren’t invented until the eighteenth century. But, as I repeatedly tell my undergrads, there’s nothing more medieval than a good anachronism, and Ahmadinezhad goes that extra mile toward medieval authenticity by working in an allusion to the trial of Galileo, which happened in the seventeenth century. He’s a very committed medieval re-enactor, President Ahmadinezhad.

—

*Or maybe just the crossbow. My Latin is not the best. [Return]
**Though not for long. And hey, check the new handy footnote index system.[Return]
***Actually, it was a Time Machine book (from the Publishers of Choose Your Own Adventure!), which, according to a review I read just now on the Internet, is hampered by the pointless inclusion of “the option before the story begins of bringing or not bringing a red scarf.” Isn’t so much of life similarly hampered? [Return]

You may have heard this by now, because I often start articles and then don’t finish them for weeks. But it’s official: The people who created South Park hate Jesus’s mom. And Catholics. And you. This is why The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights demanded that Comedy Central pull the rerun of the December 7th episode “Bloody Mary,” in which the denizens of our favorite redneck white bread mountain town discover a statue of the Virgin Mary that projectile menstruates.

Making fun of Jesus has pretty much been job one with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, South Park’s creators, ever since they circulated the Spirit of Christmas short that launched their whole entertainment empire. The League has been after South Park since at least 2002 for the episode, “Red Hot Catholic Love,” so it’s strange that Comedy Central decided that this was the issue to cave over. But cave they did, removing the episode from their repeat schedule.*

Alright, so what has this got to do with the Middle Ages? Plenty. The first thing I thought when I heard about the episode was, “Wow, other than the projectile part, that’s a pretty medieval-sounding miracle.” And if the modern Catholics at the Catholic League for Denouncing Entertainment in a Humorless Fashion are consistent in their ire, they’re no doubt working on a boycott of the entire medieval era for the way that they treated Jesus, Mary and the sacred traditions of Catholicism.

I was recently at an academic talk where a brief fight broke out between professors over the number of Holy Prepuces (The Greatest Genital Relic Ever Sold) littering medieval Europe–that is, how many churches claimed to have the bit of foreskin that Jesus had cut off during his circumcision. An offhand estimate of twenty-six was shot down in favor of a more conservative dozen. But regardless of how many foreskins Jesus had and where he left them, it’s the sort of medieval hilarity that’d make a pretty good episode of South Park. Imagine: Wendy Testaberger could return from wherever she’s been lately wearing Jesus’s foreskin as a ring and claiming to be married to Christ, ala Catherine of Sienna (1347-1380), a medieval woman, a rare female doctor in the church, who did just that. Jesus could come to Stan and company and ask for help getting this psycho-Bridezilla off his case, explaining that this sort of thing happens every few hundred years.

But back to the horrible sacrilege of the actual South Park episode. I couldn’t find any examples of the Virgin’s menstrual blood being venerated in the Middle Ages, unfortunately, though not for lack of trying.** The closest I could get was to her menstrual cave. As all good Christians know–especially those at the Catholic League of Stuff and Things–the Bible is very specific about menstruating. At that time of the month, a woman should remain in a cave in order to keep from making things unclean, and since Mary was a good Jew, she retired to a cave with a handy mikveh, or purification bath, which you can still visit in Nazareth today. The best part is, the whole site is under the control of French Franciscans for some reason. I imagine there was some kind of draft for holy artifacts around the time of the Reformation. The Templars got the number one first round pick, on account of having been completely eradicated, and they drafted the Holy Grail. The Franciscans had unwisely traded away most of their picks for miracles-to-be-named-later, and so the menstrual cave was just all that was left by the time they got to go.

As it turns out, the Virgin Mary’s menstrual cycle was an issue of great concern to medieval theologians. It’s a subject that deserves a longer treatment than I could give in a blog entry, but the main conclusion was that yes, she did indeed need to go to a cave once a month. In order for Christ to be born a human, the Virgin had to menstruate, else there would have been no matter for the body to be created out of, and no milk for the baby Jesus to drink once he was embodied.*** While no menstrual blood was collected for worship, phials of the Virgin’s milk we venerated at Walsingham and Oviedo among other places in the middle ages.

But for truly outrageous Virgin source material, Parker and Stone would need to look no farther than the Chester Cycle of Mystery Plays. In the Nativity play, two midwives attend Mary. One doubts that a virgin could give birth and sets out to prove it. Here’s the stage directions, in translation:

Then Salome [the midwife] shall attempt to touch Mary in her private parts, and at once her hands shall dry up and be withered.

The N-Town**** version of the same scene is even more explicit. So explicit, that I’ll have to quote it in Latin to keep your web browser from being used against you by the Catholic League for Headline Grabbing. Hic palpat Zelomye Beatum Virginem.

It’s hard to imagine a form of popular entertainment today that could get away with showing people fondling or attempting to fondle the Virgin Mary’s magic dehydrating private parts. Even in cardboard cutout form, with lots of bleeped swearing. But maybe if South Park would try, then Stan and Kenny and Cartman could just blame this weird medieval blog they stumbled upon. And maybe then the taco that craps ice cream could come by and introduce his new oddly-shaped stilt-walking girlfriend.

—

*Since I started writing this a few weeks ago, Comedy Central did refuse to remove the episode from both future repeat dates and the ultimate DVD release, so the Catholic League’s victory was temporary at best–not that you’d get that impression from reading their press release.
**For the record, typing ‘menstruate’ and ‘virgin’ and ‘worship’ into Google and JSTOR is as hard as I may try.
***Menstrual blood becomes mother’s milk, according to the medieval authorities.
****N-Town was not a town brought to you by the letter N, as the heathens at Sesame Street would have you believe. Rather, the plays in question were designed to be put to use in any town, unlike the Chester, York, and Wakefield plays, which were attached to a specific locality.