No snark today, just a few pretty medieval pictures interspersed with thoughts on this whole War on Christmas thing that you hear so much about these days.

At heart, I think, the War is a matter of incompatible perception. One camp looks at Christmas and sees this:

British Library MS Additional 52539, f. 2 (click-expandable)

And the other, this:

British Library MS Egerton 2045, f. 95 (click to expand)

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Christopher Hitchens is no more.

I know my blog did not break the news of Christopher Hitchens’s death to you, its current reader, but I like the look of the sentence alone atop the post. His fitful yet sincere struggle for public atheism frankly demands we now be sparse and let go the usual sentiment that attends the deaths of those who lived public lives.

Christopher Hitchens was, and now he is no more. All that remains are remains, his two bodies: one a hunk of meat, much abused, first by him and later by disease–soon ash; the other, his work, equal parts lively and learned, clever and cutting, and–it must be remembered, even now that he molders–boorish and bone-headed.

I don’t mourn him, exactly. How could I? I never knew the man, only the work. His writing made me burn with rage at the way he deftly wielded complicated names and academic esoterica to preempt rebuttal, envy at his famously speedy turnaround, and, more often than I’d like to admit, the grudging but sincere flush that comes at seeing another’s words fall into place divulging no hint of the effort that got them there. His words will retain most of their punch and verve for the rest of my body’s time on this rock–fading, certainly, as tastes change, as the language drifts, as his references follow him into obscurity, and as other, lesser writers wear the edge off the techniques he honed so fine. But for you and I, whoever may be reading this now, we were close enough to the source that the slip will be almost imperceptible, hardly felt. If anything, that small loss to come is all I mourn.

In the early days of my blog, I cobbled together a demonstration of how Hitchens wielded the word ‘medieval’. Reposting the link now is hardly tribute, but at the least it can serve to show that I do deserve this disquiet I feel today. Hitchens has been in my head for some time, and I’ll carry him forward there with me until I, too, am no more.

When Gary Gygax died, I began with this, my favorite medieval statement on our time here together, and I will close with it now, for Hitchens:

Memento, homo, quod cinis es; et in cinerem reverteris.

Remember, man, that you are but cold ash; and that to cold ash, you return.

The response to my (Bad) Medieval Movie Club announcement has been quite flattering so far, if somewhat overwhelming at the same time. But don’t get me wrong, that’s overwhelming-in-a-good-way, with proper amounts of gratitude and hopefulness buttressing it up. Once-a-month might not prove often enough to contain such enthusiasm.

So far, here’s what my readers have to look forward to in the weeks and months ((Months is probably the better way to think here. So many movies. I can’t spend every waking hour watching them, can I?)) ahead, in no particular order and certainly not in order of expected release:
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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“.  You’ll have to pardon the length, as dissertations don’t easily fit the bloggy mold. To begin things properly (and meta-tastically), the subject for this week is beginnings and origin stories.

As you might have independently surmised from my recent Thor review, I can’t stand most Hollywood movies based on comics. It’s not that I hate Hollywood, movies, or adaptations per se, just that I can’t stand movies built around origin stories, and the first Hollywood movie about a comic book hero ((As if there were non-Hollywood movies about comic book heroes.)) invariably begins before he ((And it is always a he. Even Wonder Woman can’t lasso her way out of development purgatory.)) was a hero and plods through the same heroic journey every other comic book movie has plodded before. ((Look here, see our everyday schlub hero’s flaws as he struggles through a day-to-day routine like yours, but make sure to notice how he saved that cat just now so you don’t think he’s without redemption. Enter love interest and heroic catalyst in almost back-to-back scenes. Add a few bits of hero using his powers for good and a few of him acting all selfish. Make sure he refuses the quest, pile on the complications until the dawn that everything’s darkest before comes. Cue CGI battle in which hero accepts his mantle and saves the girl. Don’t forget the teaser after the credits!)) You have to wait until the second movie before anything interesting happens. ((And by the third, the number of villains appearing smothers the whole thing, forcing a reboot that, once again, goes back to the origin.))

The cult of the “pre-sold property” owns most of the blame for the flood of by-the-book comic book movies.  In the quest for the holy blockbuster, Hollywood has come to rely almost exclusively on characters with bankable fan bases in other media–which makes the origin-regurgitation all the more perverse, if you think about it. If a large enough slice of the ticket-buying population were somehow unaware that Superman is the last son of Krypton who hides his powers under a bumbling reporter’s mask, ((Or that Batman swore to enact gadget-based vigilante justice upon the criminal scum of Gotham after losing his parents to tragedy, or that Spider-Man does whatever a spider can while juggling a crappy job, the guilt from his uncle’s death, and a series of inexplicably hot girlfriends.)) then Hollywood would not have thought him bankable enough to warrant buying the movie rights. But never mind that when it’s time to write the first movie’s script; everyone knows that hero stories start at the beginning.
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I don’t intend to regularly delve into the personal and professional matters I laid bare here in that post a few weeks ago, but I allude to said post now as a way of ramping up to the introduction of the newest recurring feature to my blog: ((Joining Mmm… Marginalia, the (Bad) Medieval Movie Club, Google Penance, the Calendar posts† and that thing I never named where I make fun of the way people use the word ‘medieval’.
† Which will resume, eventually, worry not.)) Thesis Thursday. ((And given how often Medieval Marginalia Monday tends to slip its Monday deadline, even when I’m on my game, maybe its best to think of it as Thesis Thursdayish.)) This announcement does mean that I have decided to complete my dissertation in the coming year. Here’s how it’s going to work.
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I’ve decided to close down my shop over at CafePress. I never made much money there even at the height of the store’s popularity, only a couple of bucks a month, so it’s no huge loss. Apparently, I overestimated the public’s need for medieval monkey paraphernalia.

But fear not, those of you who still desire a coaster or a tee-shirt emblazoned with a medieval monkey (or the occasional non-monkey image). ((But who never ponied up for one at my outrageous 1 dollar markup.)) I’m going to post a gallery below of all the images I ever designed ((Design usually meant ‘cropped out of manuscript images from libraries’, but I did have to do some color correcting and fixing of blemishes on occasion.)) for the store, so if you still want to use one of my files, go wild. They’re high-quality scans, many large enough to be used not just on on tee-shirts and coasters, but also on clocks, magnets, thongs, baby bibs, water bottles, and whatever other weird product CafePress is letting people put images on this week.

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The guys behind South Park have been refreshingly upfront about their indebtedness to previous artists. While they’re not unique in that, I can’t think of another cartoon that has devoted an entire episode to their own anxiety of influence.  That’s why I believe they won’t be too upset with me for pointing out that they ripped off one of their more famous scenes from a 700-year-old manuscript:

Once again, I find myself featuring an image found in the Bodleian Alexander (MS Bodl. 264), an early fourteenth-century deluxe manuscript so lavishly illuminated it could support a blog all on its own. ((Some might say, given its frequent appearances here, that it already does.))   The subject? A gentleman’s dispute among disabled beggars. Or, as Matt Stone and Trey Parker put it some ten years back, ((Good god I’m old. When exactly did South Park cross the threshold into venerable institution?)) a  cripple fight. ((A phrase which probably should be capitalized to simulate a fifth grader’s gleeful bellow and followed by many exclamation points.  Precisely how many I leave to the discretion of the reader.)) I feel compelled to point out–with some weird version of disciplinary pride?–that the medieval manuscript version of the theme boats three brawlin’ beggars to the cartoon’s two, a net improvement of fifty percent over South Park.  And it’s way bloodier than they dared, to boot (which you can see more clearly if you click to expand).

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Welcome to the first in what will hopefully be a regularly recurring series of posts, the (Bad) Medieval Movie Club. ((The spiritual successor to Bad Medieval Movies, the two-part blog crossover I had last year with Jennifer Lynn Jordan of the now dormant (and much-missed) Per Omnia Saecula. (Part One here; Part Two here.)) Each installment, I’ll be bringing in a guest reviewer to help me wade through the staggering backlog of medieval movies I’ve never gotten round to talking about here at the blog.

First up, we have Bettina Bildhauer, an academic from Scotland whose publisher kindly sent me a copy of her new book, Filming the Middle Ages, to review. ((Note to publishers: free stuff is awesome and I need more of it.)) Since reviewing books is way more difficult than watching a movie and grousing about it, naturally I invited her over to watch a movie and grouse about it, instead. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to slip into the faux dialogue style of these posts…

Carl, the Got Medieval Guy: Welcome to the blog, Bettina. Pardon the mess. We’re still unpacking from the move.

Bettina Bildhauer: Thank you for hosting me, and welcome to the glamorous world of film, which is full of free goodies for celebs like you. Oh yes, and also, there is no such thing as a bad medieval film to my mind, so thanks for the brackets around bad.

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Though the first entry has already been posted, I still thought I should throw up a quick explanation of what this whole (Bad) Medieval Movie Club thing is about. ((And I’ll be backdating this post so that it doesn’t knock Thor off the top of the page just yet, so it’s almost like I did explain at the appropriate time. Future historians will, hopefully, look only at the post date and not the footnotes.)) So here we go.

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