Thank You, Guardian Online… I think

by Carl Pyrdum on January 27, 2012

While I fuss over this week’s Thesis Thursday* installment, why not drop on by the Guardian.co.uk? I usually don’t recommend doing so, but this morning they seem so much more reasonable and credible to me. I wonder why…

Oh yeah, I know why. Computer: enhance and zoom.
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  1. * My increasingly poorly named recurring feature. Don’t worry. I’ll backdate it like a pro. [↩]

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Needs More Naked (Mmm… Marginalia #91)

by Carl Pyrdum on January 26, 2012

I know I probably come off like some sort of pervazoid,* what with all the naked snail-riding,** tree-nesting genitalia, and the rest of the medieval porn lying around the place.*** But it’s hardly my fault. I start an innocent line of research, and there it is, staring me in the face. Like tonight, I was working on a post about medieval and modern framing conventions.**** In need of a fresh image of a blemmyae, I started poking around in the library catalogs, until I stumbled across this:

Oh, sure, it’s just a random naked dude cold chilling in the upper margin. Hardly worth comment, really. I’ve featured far worse than that over the years. It’s just I wasn’t really expecting to find him in the margins of a book described by the Yale Press thus:

Produced for a nun at the turn of the fourteenth century, [...the Rothschild Canticles] served as an aid to mystical devotions in which images played as central a role as the written word. Visionary depictions of Paradise, the Song of Songs, the Virgin Mary, the Trinity, and hundreds of other subjects based on texts ranging from the Bible to the Lives of the Desert Fathers together form a devotional program that transports the reader toward contemplative union with God.

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  1. * My official pervazoid ranking is a rather unimpressive Number 57–hardly in the same class as the esteemed Flopper Mr. Dan McCoy, Pervazoid Number 1. [↩]
  2. ** Not to be confused with naked-snail riding. [↩]
  3. *** Even in the prayer books! [↩]
  4. **** Less boring than it sounds. [↩]

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Newt Gingrich: History’s Greatest Team

by Carl Pyrdum on January 23, 2012

You’ve got to admire the Romney folks for putting out that memo listing the various historical figures that Newt Gingrich has compared himself to over the years. It’s a pretty nifty dig at an opponent, even if it didn’t net Mitt a win in South Carolina.

Now, I know Newt and I have had words before about his historical comparisons, but I’m prepared to let bygones be bygones. Both he and I are Georgians, after all, and when I was but a wee lad I even lived in his district, so you could say we go way back. I’m prepared to take him at his word that these really are the people he sees himself in. [click to continue…]

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Is this link dated?

by Carl Pyrdum on January 21, 2012

…or is it eleven months avant-garde?*

Check out “Traveling Group Of Medieval Mummers Is America’s Top Pick For Holiday Entertainment” at the Onion News Network and let me know.

If I don’t miss my guess, the screenshot there is a contemporary artist’s representation of the Bodleian Alexander MS I use so often in my Mmm… Marginalia thing.** Small world.

[UPDATE BELOW!]
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  1. * Let’s say it’s the latter. Aren’t I nice, the way I look out for you guys? [↩]
  2. ** I like to think of this particular page’s image as having been taken from the opening credits of the Medieval Muppet Show. [↩]

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I Do Believe in Spooks (Thesis Thursday #6)

by Carl Pyrdum on January 19, 2012


As a great man dressed in a mediocre lion costume1 once said, “I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do I do I do I do I do believe in spooks”, words I bring up because the subject for today is ghosts–though mostly metaphorical ones *knock wood* *salt-over-shoulder*.2
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  1. Or, if you’d prefer, a mediocre man in an iconic lion costume featured in an amazing film. I’m not going to force you to validate to my personal obsession with Bert Lahr just to get your permission to quote him. [↩]
  2. *suspicious glance behind shoulder that doesn’t manage to catch the filthy scarecrow waving its broomstick arms and doing a parody of each unconscious thing you do* [↩]

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The Medieval Origins of the Bathroom Reader (Mmm… Marginalia #90)

by Carl Pyrdum on January 16, 2012

Twitter never ceases to amaze. Only a week after TV’s LeVar Burton introduced me to the world of whimsy and wonder you can find at your local library in your kitchen when TV’s LeVar Burton is crashing at your place, my Twitter stream brings word that I’m not the only person on the net obsessed with medieval marginal potty humor.* Behold, courtesy of Kate Beaton’s stream:**

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  1. * And making snarky comments at the same. [↩]
  2. ** Follow her as beatonna@Twitter. [↩]

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Additional Got Medievalist May Be Found Elsewhere

by Carl Pyrdum on January 14, 2012

Poor-quality teaser scan of Medieval Warfare I.3, courtesy of yours truly.

Academic self-promotion is the latest subject to tumble out of the ivory tower and into the zeitgeist.* Blame the MLA for that, and for this post. But I’ve have been up to things elsewhere, even during this blog’s long fallow 2011, things some of you might find interesting.
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  1. * The geist that zeits about academia, anyway. [↩]

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Occupy Canterbury

by Carl Pyrdum on January 13, 2012

I feared I might have missed my chance to add to the Occupy debate, but this morning BoingBoing brought news that a judge has ordered the barriers removed from Zucotti Park, and protesters have returned.* It would be customary for a medievalist blogger to beg apology for drifting off topic and into contemporary politics–but screw that. The way the debate has to this point been framed by Occupy’s opponents deserves the adjective I so often decry when used pejoratively by the press: medieval.

Put aside the question of whether “medieval” could accurately describe the things done to various Occupy protesters across the U.S., because my agenda is not so mundane as all that.** Rather, I say that the Occupy opposition’s frame narrative is medieval, because it relies upon many of the assumptions and ways of thinking that were current in England in the fourteenth century, a time we American medievalists tend to study obsessively.
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  1. * The first draft of this post originally had a self-effacing footnote here about how pathetic it was to get one’s news from BoingBoing, but so far (and it’s just after noon EST as I revise this footnote) the news has not made the front page at the NYTimes, Fox, CNN, or MSNBC. [↩]
  2. ** Also because I do not wish to indulge in the use of medieval-qua-verbum that I so often decry, and because there really can’t be any argument that there’s not been an unfortunate amount of physical and mental brutality directed the protesters’ way. [↩]

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There Must Be Dragons Around Here Somewhere (Thesis Thursday #5)

by Carl Pyrdum on January 12, 2012

Each Thursday, I’ll be stringing together some of the disconnected thoughts I’ve had about the subject of my dissertation in a feature I call “Thesis Thursday“. Length continues to be a problem, fortunately for my dissertation’s chances, if not for your chances of getting through Thursday without the risk of eyestrain.  This week, at long last, features an appearance by Mr. Uther J. Pendragon himself, the actual focus of my project. Consider yourself warned once more, for

Here Be [Pen]Dragons

So far I’ve made a lot of noise about Geoffrey of Monmouth, but I worry my point may have been lost in all my enthusiastic asides.1 So here’s that point, which also will serve as a quick summary of the first three linked posts,2 for those joining my series late:

The first guy who tried to write a life history of King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth, fashioned a larger history of the entire island of Britain out of bits stolen shamelessly from everywhere he could in order to find a way to contain the cultural capital that had accrued around the name Arthur by the beginning of the twelfth century. The History of the Kings of Britain was designed as a vehicle by which to transfer that capital to the highest Anglo-Norman noble or ecclesiastical bidder, those who ruled Britain’s multiply conquered ‘native’ British peoples who were, not coincidentally, also the main source of said cultural capital. In return for his effort (and in return for this story we now find so amazing and compelling), poor Geoffrey, then known as Geoffrey Arthur, was rewarded only with a backwater bishopric, a place so lackluster that rebellion and war probably kept him from ever setting foot there before he died.3

This take on Geoffrey is, I admit, kind of anti-climactic,4 but that disappointed feeling and the way we respond to it are integral to the way I read Geoffrey’s History. We wish for so much more from the man chiefly responsible launching Arthur’s literary career.5 So amazing was Geoffrey’s ultimate success, we are rendered unwilling to accept the more pedestrian explanations, however plausible.
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  1. Which I don’t always have the good judgement to bracket off in a footnote. [↩]
  2. Excluding Uther’s Christmas Knight, which would appear much later in my project, after I’ve moved from Geoffrey to introduce the second version of Arthur’s father that arises out of Robert de Boron’s response to Chretien de Troyes’ anxiety about Geoffrey’s Arthurian origins. [↩]
  3. When Geoffrey was elected to the office, the bishopric had only been consecrated by the Norman kings for less than a decade. Geoffrey held the post for two years before he died, and the year after his successor was driven from it by Welsh rebels looking to strike at their Anglo-Norman lords. It was sacked and burned half a dozen times in the years that followed. [↩]
  4. As some anonymous soprano remarked in a comment to last week‘s discussion of Geoffrey’s game. [↩]
  5. Launching it in the non-Brythonic literary world, I mean, a qualification I add in hopes of appeasing temporarily the various stripes of Celticists who no doubt consider Culhwch and Olwen (which we will speak of soon, I promise!) and the Welsh Triads to have at least as much claim on Arthur’s success. [↩]

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The Secret Language of Bears (Mmm… Marginalia #89)

by Carl Pyrdum on January 9, 2012

This week’s marginal image is found in the lower left corner of a page from a late 14th-century English breviary.* Those in the know might bristle at my casual use of the indefinite article, as this is not just any psalter, but one likely commissioned by Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex.** The Bohun family is important for medieval art historians as regular employers of some of England’s finest miniaturists, but the rest of the world knows them instead for their part in the historical soap opera that inspired Shakespeare’s second historical tetralogy, the plays Richard II, the two-part Henry IV, and Henry V.

When the titular king of Henry IV was still going by Harry Bollingbroke, he married a girl named Mary de Bohun, who gave him a son who would go on to become a titular king himself. This breviary may even have been Mary’s, and though she died before Bollingbroke usurped Richard, the book may have bounced around the royal households of both Henrys during all that sound and fury that Shakespeare immortalized. If only it had eyes, it would have been an eye witness to so much costume drama worthy history. Alas, no eyes, unless we count those owned by the people and beasties living in the margins.

But heck, why not ask them? What would these marginal people say if they could speak?*** Or if you find my flight of fancy to be dangerously close to dissociative identity disorder, we could just ask this bear, who was kind enough to write his thoughts down:****


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  1. * The British Library’s MS Egerton 3277, f. 13v, to be precise. A breviary is a collection of psalms, hymns, prayers, and other religiously significant material for everyday use, most often used by clerics and others with official religious responsibilities, but layfolk had them too. [↩]
  2. ** Either the seventh or eighth Earl, both of whom were named Humphrey. [↩]
  3. *** I imagine it’d mostly be poop jokes, given what usually seems to preoccupy marginal people. They’re mostly just tiny illuminated Kevin Smiths and brothers Farrelly. Except with extra anuses. And anuses in places you don’t usually expect them. [↩]
  4. **** Man, that’s the longest intro to a marginal image I’ve ever written. Curse you, history, for you interesting but inconveniently intertwined factoids. [↩]

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