Last week was a good week for all those people who love to see candidates from the 2000 U.S. presidential election using the Middle Ages as a convenient rhetorical flog. In a bizarre twist of fate, both Al and George made major speeches that trotted out familiar anti-medieval tropes, and in an even more bizarre twist of fate, it was George W. Bush who actually came closer to the historical truth. Sadly, Ralph Nader was left out, probably due to that nefariously partisan Committee for Presidential Medieval Debates.*

In an October 5th speech to the “We Media” conference in New York, Al Gore referenced the medieval twice:

1) He called torture an “abhorrent, medieval behaviour.” No foul there, even though the torture everyone thinks about when they say “medieval torture” is really the Spanish Inquisition.
2) But worse, he said, “The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg’s disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the ‘Rule of Reason.’“

This second is, of course, the standard Enlightenment propaganda. Oh, the terror of the Middle Ages, when only monks could read and only monks had books and damn, don’t you hate the medieval church? Then, to the sound of trumpets, Gutenberg appeared out of the heavens to bring light to the masses.

Such propaganda doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. What was the first text Gutenberg printed? A one-page Bible. So much for destroying the church’s stranglehold on the discourse. And even if he had printed, “Why the Middle Ages are bad and why we should all become Renaissance Men Like Ben Franklin,” if there really was an information monopoly, who would have been able to read it? Books didn’t suddenly create a market for literacy. Literacy created a market for books. The first printers relied heavily on the non-monopolized, quite un-stagnant, but definitely medieval manuscript culture for layout, type conventions, and distribution networks, among other things. My expertise is in England, so I know more about English printers like William Caxton, and many of his early printings actually used employees of manuscript scriptoria to add the sorts of flourishes and decorations that people expected of their books. The fact that people expected anything of books should be a pretty clear indication that information wasn’t monopolized.

Did the printing press help accelerate the flow of information?–sure, but it didn’t create it.

On to Bush. His reference was more oblique, though a few news agencies picked up on it, which is how my usual Google trawl brought it to light. In his October 6th speech, Bush said of the Bin Laden-ites, “The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” Why Spain to Indonesia? It’s not just a reference to the width and breadth of terrorist attacks over the last few years. It’s an indirect reference to one of Bin Laden’s stated goals, coming nearly four years to the day since his most famous reference to it.

On October 7th, 2001, Bin Laden released a tape which said, “Let the whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of Al-Andalus would be*** repeated.” The tragedy of Al-Andalus? That’s when the Islamic Caliphate lost control of most of Spain, around the end of the Middle Ages. And before this defeat, the Muslim-controlled lands did indeed stretch from Spain to Indonesia.

So, for once, someone’s making a correct reference to something medieval. But it’s a deeply troubling reference. Bin Laden’s goal of recreating a unified Caliphate of all Muslims under one ruler is definitely disturbing, but in a way, every time Bush conflates Bin Laden’s goals with every other Muslim terrorist from Bali to Britain, doesn’t it bring us one step closer to Bin Laden’s conception of Muslim identity? Both Bush and Bin Laden assert, from different directions, that all right-thinking (or for Bush wrong-thinking) Muslims belong to one grand enterprise, one grand struggle, and thus the War on Terror becomes indistinguishable from the War Against a Revived Caliphate. Bin Laden wants a Crusade to defeat, like Saladin, and the more Bush argues that the war in Iraq is part and parcel of the war against Bin Laden’s Caliphate, the more the war becomes that Crusade that Bin Laden already claims that it is.

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*Though unconfirmed reports** suggest that Nader did blame Henry IV of Germany for faulty suspension design of the 1963 Chevy Corvair.
**From me, in a joke I just made up.
***I don’t know whatever Arabic language Bin Laden speaks, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it has a subjunctive mood that the translator is rendering very clumsily here.

Thusfar, my blog has had three main features: 1) making fun of Dan Brown, 2) making fun of anyone who uses the word medieval in a Goggleable news article and 3) procrastinating about reviewing that King Arthur movie.

Let me attempt to branch out by introducing a new feature: the Random Medieval Proverb of the Day. But before I do, let me be extra-clear. There’s no way that someone with my attention span could actually find 365 of these things and manage to put one on the blog every day. So, let’s call it the Random, Occasional Medieval Proverb, which acronymizes nicely to the R.O.M.P.

Today’s ROMP, from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (circa 1200):

“Whoever rides astray will find the sledge-hammer.”

Linguistic erosion on steroids! Judging by his recent statements, Tony Blair has decided that calling something “medieval” isn’t insult enough. Witness this:

“Strip away their [Islamic terrorists’] fake claims of grievance and see them for what they are: terrorists who use 21st century technology to fight a pre-medieval religious war that is utterly alien to the future of mankind.”

I’m willing to come out now and claim this as a victory for Got Medieval. Clearly, the British government is listening to my little snipes and gripes and has chosen an era to malign that lacks bloggy defenders: late antiquity.

Take that, late antiquity! Hahahaha! For too long, you’ve been sitting a little too pretty on your Neoplatonist, Stoicist, Roman mystery cult harboring rear ends.

Occasionally, one of my disloyal readers will email me a link to a site that reproduces the Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition of “medieval,” a not so subtle hint to shut up about the word as adjective and to get off my medieval rear and review that King Arthur movie from last year.

So let me cut that off right now by posting the text myself:

b. U.S. to get medieval: to use violence or extreme measures on, to become aggressive. 1994 Q. TARANTINO & R. AVARY Pulp Fiction 131, I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’m gonna git Medieval on your ass. 1996 Rolling Stone 13 July 85/3 And with the metal-on-metal grinding and old-school synth whoops..Faust and O’Rourke really get medieval. 1999 Washington Post 9 May F1, I have no idea why we’re talking about sending ground troops to Kosovo when we can send a fleet of Ford Expeditions and Lincoln Navigators over there. What’s Milosevic going to throw at them–Yugos? These things will get medieval with Yugos. 2000 N.Y. Times 5 May E8/1 The teenage crowd screamed and cheered–but only when Macbeth got medieval on someone.

So yeah, I get it. There is a metaphorical meaning to the word medieval. Duh.

Now, disloyal readers, explain how I’m supposed to keep all the medieval metaphors straight in my head when I read the New York Times’ review of the Hummer H1 Alpha in ‘If Medieval Suits the Mood‘.

That first impression* fits the personality of this positively medieval-looking vehicle.

The H1 Alpha is a castlelike truck that invites the driver to joust with taxicabs. Its cavernous interior evokes torch-lit banquet halls where varlets spear haunches of meat with their knives.

First, the mixed metaphors: It’s a castle! It’s a horse! It’s a banquet hall! And the first two of those within the same sentence.

I guess it must be hard reviewing automobiles for the New York Times. Very little actual information is available to be transmitted to the reader. There’s price, availability, and options. That barely fills up a paragraph. So what better than creative free-association to fill up column inches?

Other things that the Hummer H1 Alpha reminds the reviewer of: a beast, a Starbucks latte, up-armored Humvees, Iraq, a tin-can-in-a-tornado, a Tonka truck, Butler buildings, a tractor, abstinence pledges, and WWII fighter planes.

So yet again, I’m being a killjoy. I like lots of these metaphors, even if I question all of them press-ganged together in the same column. What I can’t understand is why this article was written at all. It takes as its first premise that no reader of the Times will ever drive the thing. Clearly, the author just wants to make fun of the vehicle and the sorts of people who might drive it. This is journalism? It’s like he’s blogging or something.

For the record, I don’t think the thing is very medieval-looking. Unless by medieval-looking, you mean Tonka-truck-looking. It reminds me of something I–circa 1980–would have loved to bury and unbury in my sandbox. **

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*The first impression that instead of a winch, the vehicle might come standard with a wench. You know, the sort you’ll find selling turkey legs at your local RennFest.
**See, I can make those sorts of jokes, because I’m not pretending to carry actual information, unlike a Times reviewer.

Just a brief headline for you: Mum Wins Case Against ‘Medieval’ Law Firm.

What did the law firm do to deserve such a horrible adjective? Rape and pillage? Give someone the plague? Support the antipope in Avignon?

They fired her after she announced she was pregnant… six weeks after she announced she was pregnant. A darn shame, surely, but a medieval shame?

They do call it ‘sacking,’ in Britain, and that’s kind of medieval (and absolutely hilarious the first few times an American hears it)*–though not near as funny as when a Brit hears a random American tourist talking about his fanny pack.

Add this to the cabbage taunting, and it’s clear I was being unfair to Christopher Hitchens when I wrote a post on him (and backdated it so it’d look like I actually update more than once a month). Apparently, it’s not just him; all of Great Britain has an axe to grind with the Middle Ages. But to be fair, the Middle Ages did give them the plague, so I guess what goes around comes around.

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*It sure made the opening credits of Monty Python’s Holy Grail funnier when I was 13.

What do you get the medievalist who has everything? Something you stole from them. Actually, the answer is ‘nothing,’ since there is no such thing as a medievalist who has everything. In case you haven’t noticed, there are very few high paying jobs for people who study the middle ages, and every one of them involves Mel Gibson somehow.

So what do you get the medievalist who has several things? Chic-Fil-A has the answer:

Cows in Shining Armor, a 2006 calendar of paintings of cows dressed up like people at RennFests only dream of dressing up. For only $5.00! And if you’re lucky enough to live in the civilized parts of the US, you’ll be able to use the coupons inside, one a month, for free Chic-Fil-A sandwiches or chicken nuggets with the purchase of a medium drink!

As reported in various top shelf media outlets, including Canada.com, the Turkish Daily News, and the National Nine News, Luciano Pavarotti, best known to contemporary culture as the third of the Three Tenors most likely to eat you accidentally, has been awarded the medieval honor of “Freedom of the City of London” for his charity work.

According to the AP source, during Ye Olde Medieval times, the award “allowed recipients to trade within the commercial centre of the British capital [… and] bestowed the right to drive sheep across London Bridge and be hanged with a silken cord if handed the death penalty.”

As my readers (of whom there is a distressing number these days) can well attest, I love lists that juxtapose weird, nonsensical items just as much as the next gorilla caterer, zombie taxidermist, or coincidentally sentient bowl of alphabet soup, but why not also mention that the Freedom of the City was not originally some collection of innocuous commercial honors? Being granted the freedom of a city was more like emancipation. The reason you could trade within the city after being granted it was because you were no longer a bondsperson tied to the financial interests of your feudal lord.*

So my congratulations to Mr. Pavarotti.** Today, you are no longer a 13th century slave. The rest of us, I guess, are not so lucky.

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*The real medievalists in the audience (of whom there is an even more distressing number these days) will be aware that words like “feudal” didn’t really exist during the middle ages, nor did words like “slave” have the same semantic outline. But stop nitpicking me. Picking nits is my job.
**Also, my apologies about the fat joke. It is more an indication of my own deep personal insecurities than of any failing on your part. Also, please don’t eat think poorly of me.

Some time back, an alert reader sent me a link to last month’s Vanity Fair*, wherein Christopher Hitchens made this amazing remark about the siege of Leningrad during World War II:

Leningrad was soon encircled. And it remained that way for 900 days: the longest and bloodiest siege in Europe since medieval times. Medieval times, indeed, were to return during those two and a half years. Human flesh was eaten at the lowest point of privation: a million Leningraders were frozen, starved, bombed, or shelled to death.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that this was a roundabout insult directed at the Medieval Times restaurant chain. I am definitely having problems parsing the role of the colon in that last sentence, but what he seems to be saying is, “Medieval times reigned in shell-shocked Leningrad, due to the triple horror of those most medieval of troubles–bad weather, cannibalism, and explosive artillery fire.”

A more dutiful student of the middle ages would now proceed to demonstrate conclusively that cannibalism was more a concern during the British Empire’s height than during the time of the Crusades, and that the trench sieges of World War I were much worse than anything that happened, siege-wise, during the Middle Ages, but instead of doing that I just typed the words ‘christopher hitchens’ and ‘medieval’ into Google to see what I got.

And what I got was conclusive proof that Christopher Hitchens has a major bone to pick with the middle ages in general and the medieval church in particular. Among the things to which Christopher Hitchens attaches the word as epithet:

The American Left: who have”an alliance with woman-stoning, gay-burning, Jew-hating medieval theocrats.”
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and all terrorists who want to “turn Islamic society into a medieval but still-lethal dust bowl.” [A novel distinction. Medieval dust bowls must usually be nonlethal.]
Mother Teresa’s theology: “a crude medieval vulgarity” […like shouting ‘God’s Wounds’ when you stub your toe, presumably]
Setting Fire to Oil Fields: “a ghastly, quasi-medieval siege tactic” [not sure if the quasi is better or worse for the medievals]
The Dalai Lama: who supports “feudalism and unsmilingly inflicted medieval punishments such as blinding and flogging unto death”
The Vatican’s Position on (Not) Pulling the Plug on People like Terry Shiavo: “Monstrous, medieval rubbish.”
The Soviet Union: enveloped by “a choking medieval nightmare of plague-dread, xenophobia, and persecution.”

The only notable positive he grants the middle ages that I’ve found comes in a discussion of the Abu Ghraib torturers, where he credits them with remarkable insight:

But the vice of the torturer is that he or she produces confessions by definition. And soon, the whole business of confession has become polluted with falsity and madness. Even the medieval church was smart enough to work this out and to drop the practice.

[Ah, silly US policy makers, even the doltish, clumsy, tyrannical, bloody medieval church realized that torture was bad for confessions. If those morons could figure it out… I mean, really, it took them a thousand years to discover America…]

Don’t take this little catalogue as my disagreeing with the blame Hitchens lays at the feet of various parties. I’m not inherently pro Taliban, torture, or Teresa. I, like my alert reader, just find it interesting that when Christopher Hitchens wants a synonym for despicable or non-Western, what comes out is “medieval”. Maybe he was just really, really, really influenced by Pulp Fiction, and the press selectively quotes him, editing out his “Royale with Cheese” references in favor of his getting medieval.

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*It wasn’t last month’s at the time, but bear with me, I’m a grad student with a dangerous addiction to video games featuring Italian plumbers.

There. That headline ought to increase my Google ranking, and possibly my score on Blogshares. Now on to the news:

According to this week’s Star Magazine (Breaking Celebrity News First!):

Even in a robe and curlers, Angelina Jolie is drop-dead gorgeous! On Aug. 18, the mom of two got set to shoot a scene on location on Long Island, N.Y., for her latest movie, The Good Shepherd, co-starring Matt Damon.

What does that have to do with the middle ages? Read on, dear read on-er. Also from Star Magazine:

Once that wraps, she’s set to play the queen of darkness in a computer-animated adaptation of the epic poem Beowulf.

I’m confused for two reasons. 1) There’s no queen of darkness in Beowulf. The closest it’s got is Grendel’s mother, who’s more twisted hag at the bottom of a lake than queen of darkness. And 2) why would anyone want to cast Angelina Jolie in a computer-animated movie? Her number one asset is her drop-dead gorgeousness.*

If this report is accurate–and since I believe everything I read in magazines I pick up at the gym, I have to say it must be–then either I’ve been mistranslating Beowulf or misunderstanding the appeal of Ms. Jolie.

*Assets number two and three are usually found nestled snugly in a low cut dress. I suppose they could computer animate those, but that would hardly require her voice. So just like in Shark Tale, Angelina will be appearing sans-breasts: topless.