As reported by “Totally Jewish.com” news’s Alan Hall…

A German Jewish artist is calling on churches throughout the country to provide better explanations as to why they contain medieval sculptures depicting Jews being suckled by pigs.

The demand comes in the wake of attempts by Regensburg Cathedral in Bavaria to justify its 650-year-old piece, the Judensau or Jewish sow.

If you’re seated on the left side of the blog, you can look out your window to see a real live image of a stone cold Judensau. (The image was lifted shamelessly from the Martin Luther website. This particular one has the advantage of being extra-offensive to Jews, mocking their holy language to boot.) [update 5/1/05 — Martin Luther’s gone MIA, taking his page and my stolen picture with him.]

The Regensburg Cathedral has recently added a sign explaining the significance of their Judensau in response to Jewish outcry. But Wolfram Kastner, aforementioned Jewish German artist, is leading a protest and demanding that the images be removed from all churches because, “For centuries, these depictions have caused murder, robberies, and degradation.”

You don’t have to be a tooth-gnashing Limbaugh dittohead to feel uncomfortable with Herr Kastner’s demands that these offensive statues be removed from all churches. Especially perplexing is his demand that the churches provide better explanations. Isn’t the explanation clear? “In the middle ages, Jews were’t so much respected as not. This is a cathedral that has been around since then.” Will outraged feminists soon demand an explanation for why there were no female apostles?

This is about as absurd as all the hubub around the Passion of the Christ’s depiction of jews being counter to the Vatican II general Jewish Christ-killing-related amnesty. Over and over, the talking heads mentioned that Mel Gibson belongs to a splinter sect of the Catholic church that doesn’t recognize these important reforms. You know who else doesn’t recognize Vatican II (or Vatican I, or much of anything Vatican-related)? Protestants!

I’m highly skeptical that people visiting these German churches know that these carvings are meant to depict jews in the first place. Most people probably discover this when they read the signs that are meant to pacify their offended modern sensibilities. If the outrage over this medieval legacy causes more signs to be put up, then it seems to me like it’ll have the opposite effect: more people will see these carvings as slights against jews.

Apparently, this is a million-selling business phenomenon that I’ve never heard of, which isn’t that strange, since we academics hardly ever hear of anything business-related.

It’s called Kingdomality, and according to its subtitle, it is an “Ingenious New Way to Triumph in Management,” and who am I to argue with a subtitle? I found out about it through an emailed link to their medieval-themed personality test.

According to the authors, there are twelve personality types. I’m the “Shepherd.” Here’s how they describe it:

Your distinct personality, The Shepherd is to tend to your human flock. You understand the needs of those for whom you are responsible. Shepherds are vigilant and reliable. You realize your obligation and commitment to the well being of those entrusted to your care. Shepherds are very dependable. You engender a feeling of comfort and stability to those within your charge. On the positive side, Shepherds can be empathic, caring, understanding, practical and realistic. On the negative side, you may be manipulative, close-minded and sentimentally rigid. Interestingly, your preference is just as applicable in today’s corporate kingdoms.

On the one hand, this is the most perfectly medieval sentiment I’ve ever seen in the business world (and counting this one I’ve seen… one). One of the main tenets of late medieval England (the narrow part of the medieval world I’m familiar with) was that humanity could be divided up into three orders, and that individuals had no important personality outside of their narrowly defined social role. A miller is a miller, a wife a wife, a knight a knight, etc. (Obviously, it was a load of crap even then, but I digress.)

On the other hand, don’t they actually mean Parish Priest instead of Shepherd? What an amazing whitewash of the Middle Age’s Chistian component–unless they really mean that a medieval shepherd was as likely to farm humans as sheep.

Since I’m not actually going to buy this book, I’m limited to reviewing the parts that are free and on the web. The whole thing looks to be pretty standard “the middle ages was a time of tiny kingdoms, brave knights, and ferocious dragons” drivvel. Maybe I should write a medieval self-help book. Unleashing Your Inner Arthur? The Once and Future Middle Manager? Get Medieval on Your Synergies? The Round Table Approach to Conference Calls? There must be a million ways to make money off the middle ages, and here I am languishing in academia.

I found this article on a recent Google-trawl: Heavy snowfall pushes Kashmir valley back to medieval times.

IANS Srinagar Feb 21: Three days of uninterrupted heavy snowfall have pushed the Kashmir valley back to medieval times.Complete electric power failure, non-availability of drinking water, snow-blocked roads and empty shelves at markets…

The strange thing is that the main narrative thrust of this article is how the Kashmiri have abandoned their old non-industrial ways, and they have nothing to fall back on now that the modern world has failed them. So they have no firewood-lit stoves, no charcoal for their kangri/pheran combo*, no spare candes, (no cars, no phones, no motor bikes, not a single luxury). In other words, they don’t have any of those things that they would have had, had they remained “medieval” and not given in to modern convenience. Thus, this snow storm hasn’t pushed them back to the middle ages, it’s pushed them back to the stone age. Or at the least, late antiquity.**

—

*Apparently an earthen and wicker firepot that one puts into a pouch in a loose-fitting garment.
**I’m not convinced that India (or Pakistan–don’t want to take a stance on the Kashmir question) was ever properly “medieval,” though this website claims that it not only was, but that it also rocked while being medieval, with Google-hit-enhancing high points like group sex and spanking.

I’ve got my dad reading this thing, so that’s one. Add my college roommate for two. Then there’s someone who claims to be a historical movie buff (though he may actually be my dad in disguise). And apparently there’s someone who keeps a list of medieval blogs, and I’m actually on it. Three, possibly four readers, after all my hard work. I feel like I’ve won an award.

Now that my dissertation prospectus prospects are looking better, I can afford to spend more time procrastinating about posting on my blog. So, Scriptor, even if you’re my dad, I promise to write something about that crappy King Arthur movie.

On a whim, I thought I’d search www.whitehouse.gov for the word ‘medieval’. I expected to find dozens of pages calling Saddam Hussein a medieval this or a medieval that, and I was surprised to find ‘medieval’ in only a few pages, usually in material quoted from elsewhere. Here are the five times it’s used:

• The first comes from what was apparently a recurring feature, ‘Tales of Saddam’s Brutality,’ a collection of quotes from mainstream news stories about how bad Saddam was. Quoting the May 25, 2003 Time magazine, we find that “Uday’s favourite punishment was the medieval falaqa, a rod with clamps that go around the ankles so that the offender, feet in the air, can be hit on the bare soles with a stick. A top official in radio and TV says he received so many beatings for trivial mistakes like being late for meetings or making grammatical errors on his broadcasts that Uday ordered him to carry a falaqa in his car. Uday also had an iron maiden that he used to torture Iraqi athletes whose performance disappointed him.”
• Also from ‘Tales of Saddam’s Brutality,’ an April 2003 New York Times article describes Saddam’s treatment of prisoners. He cuts them up then allows them to wallow in the infection, creating “a medieval scene in which delirious and dying inmates lay on the prison’s dirt floor screaming from pain.”
• In an interview transcript, Tim Russert quotes President Bush to Dick Cheney, asking about how we can both “pressure Israel and make no demands on our Arab allies to cease the dissemination of medieval, terror-inspiring propaganda”.
• A speech by Dr. Condoleeza Rice to the National Press Club explains that the new post-9/11 security realities entail “a big shift to wrap one’s mind around. But we cannot cling to the old order — like medieval scholars clinging to a Ptolemaic system even after the Copernican revolution.”
• And finally, in a Q&A session about Iraqi currency, we learn that “The front side of the 10,000 Dinar note features Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham (known as Alhazen to medieval scholars in the West).”

A pretty mixed bag. Take the prison scene. On the on hand, it’s a fact that medieval prisons were pretty nasty. In Richard II’s time, someone described the prison of Wysebech as a place where a friend was tossed “among thieves, where, by toads and other venomous vermin, he was so inhumanly gnawn that his life was despaired of.”* Though, I doubt that they meant to imply that toads had anything to do with conditions in Iraqi prisons. (Beware the terror of medieval toads!) On the other hand, prisons did not stop being nasty places once the Renaissance began. In fact, I hear they’re pretty bad even today. Surely, it would be equally correct to call conditions under Saddam to be ‘positively Renaissance’ or ‘wretchedly early Industrial Revolution’.

I have no idea what President Bush meant when he chastised the Arabs for “medieval propaganda”. The only medieval propaganda I’ve come into direct contact with is a Latin pamphlet at the Bienecke of astonishingly bad poetry written to bolster Edward II. I’m aware that there was all sorts of anti-clerical propaganda, but I doubt Bush meant that the Arabs are going on and on about how monks are fat and nuns sleep around.**

Uday’s torture rod sounds ominous, and certainly the medievals were very good at torture, but somehow I doubt that the falaqa is a uniquely medieval invention. Beating people on the soles of their feet with a stick isn’t really a very medieval way of torturing someone. It’s what you do when you want to hide the torture–it’s very painful, but doesn’t leave many marks. (Medieval torturers wanted to leave marks, to make the inner sin visible upon the flesh, etc., etc.) The Chinese are notorious for it. In the west it’s more often called ‘bastinado’, but that doesn’t sound nearly as medieval as an Arabic word.

Dr. Rice’s pat analogy, comparing detractors of the administration’s security views to “medieval scholars clinging to a Ptolemaic system even after the Copernican revolution” is a little insulting. As a would-be medieval scholar, I’d like everyone who reads this blog (i.e. no one, except occasionally my dad) to know that we medievalists are fully on board with the Copernican revolution. Now I hear you out there saying, “she means actual medieval-era scholars, people alive during the Middle Ages,” but that’s not possible. Copernicus published De revolutionibus in 1543, well after many Renaissance high-water marks like the major works of Michelangelo and Raphael, the Spanish Inquisition, Leonardo da Vinci’s entire career, Christopher Columbus’s ocean-blue-sailing expedition of 1492, etc. Real medieval scientists were either dead or very, very old by the time Copernicus wrote. That pope who denounced him was a Renaissance pope, not a medieval one. Now, I know that people make this comparison all the time. Just as they say, ‘back in the middle ages people believed that the world was flat’–which they didn’t, but that’s an issue for another time. But still, I expect better of Dr. Rice. If not our doctorates, who is going to stand up to the double-standard of the Renaissance? (On another side note, Copernicus was actually wrong about a lot of things. Most importantly, he said that the sun was the center of the universe, which it isn’t. It’s the center of the solar system.)

Perhaps Dr. Rice ought to read up on the medieval guy who’s on that 10,000 Dinar bill. You know, Alhazen, the guy who wrote a seven volume series of optics and who developed analytical geometry by establishing the linkage between algebra and geometry. (For the record, I don’t study Muslim scientists, so I have no idea if the accolades laden upon him by whitehouse.gov are deserved or not.) If the Middle Ages is to be forever stuck with Ptolemy–a Greek, no less. Wasn’t the Renaissance supposed to be a reflowering of Greek ideas?–I demand we immediately get credit for analytical geometry. Henceforth, whenever someone asks you to perform some analytical geometry, whatever that is, say, “Oh, you mean medieval analytical geometry? If I must cling to that backwards science, I suppose I must. But isn’t there some better Renaissance geometry I could do instead?”

This is the sort of story that made me start this blog in the first place. In today’s New York Times Op-Ed page, Nicholas D. Kristoff goes out of his way to bitch-slap the middle ages for no good reason in “Our Not-So-Free-Press.”

In May, Iran’s secret police detained me in Tehran and demanded that I identify a revolutionary guard I had quoted as saying “to hell with the mullahs.” My interrogators threatened to imprison me unless I revealed my source. But after a standoff, the Iranian goons let me go. Imprisoning Western journalists for protecting their sources was too medieval, even for them. Let’s hope the U.S. judicial system shows the same restraint as those Iranian thugs.

Things that did not exist in the middle ages: 1) Newspapers. 2) Western journalists. 3) Any notion of an obligation for #1 or #2 to protect sources.

Sure, the middle ages had horrible plagues, an intermittently insane transnational religious hierarchy, a collection of brutal political systems, famines, etc. It also had Islamic people. As a medievalist, I probably ought to apologize personally for the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the last King Arthur movie. But one thing the pre-printing press middle ages did not have was a band of thugs tossing newspapermen into jail for refusing to reveal their sources.

Additional props to Mr. Kristoff for using medieval and Islamic interchangeably, a modern press habit that is definitely on the rise, even if I’m too lazy to track down examples of it.

It was online sites like Slate that made me think this whole blogging thing wouldn’t be very hard to keep up with and would, indeed, bring me a cultlike following. And then they go publishing an article like Historical Fiction: How do medieval-themed restaurants get it wrong? Just the sort of thing I would have liked to have written if I actually had the attention span for blogging.

LEXIS/NEXIS is the blog-writer’s crutch, and here I am using it for my first real post. Consider this the inaugural edition of a feature on the use and misuse of medieval as an adjective. Today’s sample comes from the Ottawa Citizen:

Two people were crushed to death and 16 were hospitalized when an IKEA store opened recently in the Saudi Arabian town of Jeddah.

In a scene one eyewitness called “medieval,” nearly 20,000 shoppers lined up to be among the first 250 shoppers and receive vouchers worth 500 riyal, or about $133. An 18-year-old security guard, who’d been spraying perfume into the faces of shoppers who were overcome by the crowds, described for Arab News the death of a Saudi man crushed in front of him:

Nothing strange here, right? People die senselessly, and the word medieval naturally springs to the mind. The Middle Ages were horrible, weren’t they? But wait, it’s not the crushing deaths that are being called medieval–it’s the “scene” of 20,000 shoppers lined up in front of an IKEA.

Just what is medieval about people in a queue? Surely it’s not the sheer numbers. I doubt 20,000 people lined up for much in the Middle Ages except maybe to fight in a battle. Consumer frenzies strike me as a relatively modern phenomenon. Certainly, medieval Swedes weren’t known for their furniture making abilities.

Maybe it’s just a chain of association. It seems like “medieval” is starting to mean “Muslim, in a bad way” in the press. Still, it is really weird to call an unruly Muslim mob caught up in a modern, hyper-consumer scramble “medieval”.

It’s been a couple of months since I touched this. I guess a month before you get married is not the best time to start a blog. But if you do decide to divert wedding-stress into an internet project, try not to have your PhD oral examinations right after you get back from your honeymoon.

After 4:00 today, zero hour for my orals, I’ll either have more time, or much, much more time to fool around with this site.

My many readers, wish me luck.