Looking at the calendar today, I realized I've got a little under a month to finalize the readings for an interdisciplinary honors seminar I'm teaching next term.  Begin panic mode... now.

The course is called "Historical Fictions and Fiction as History" and is meant to introduce students to the phenomenon of historical fabrication--that is to say, making crap up and calling it history.  We're going to begin with Geoffrey of Monmouth, some reactions to him, including the various accounts of how England got its name (Hengist's land, Angle Land, Ing's Land, Ingerne's Land, etc.), and a few other select texts from the Trojan legendary.  Then we'll be moving on to Holinshed's Chronicle and Macbeth.  In later weeks we'll read about the Donation of Constantine and its debunking, a bit from the Reagan biography Dutch , some of Hemingway's short stories of the Spanish Civil War and his newspaper columns about the same, and Misha, the recently discredited memoir of a Holocaust survivor raised by wolves.

If the readings so far seem like they're all over the map, that's by design.  One of the questions the course will attempt to get students to wrestle with is how the genre-divisions between things like history, biography, and creative nonfiction get drawn.  Other questions will include what it means for a history to be accurate, the difference between revisionism and due dilligence, and what obligation we have to the dead to get them right. 

Now that I sit down and try to plan out the class discussions week-by-week, I realize that I've got about four weeks left to play with.  So, um, anyone got any suggestions for things to read?  Anyone have a favorite now-debunked historical account they'd care to share?

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In the months since I opened my CafePress store, I have literally made tens of dollars providing the world with monkey-related paraphernalia, most of which I immediately invested back into CafePress by purchasing my own stuff.*  

In light of this overwhelming success and in anticipation of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I've finally gotten around to adding magnets of some of the popular Historic Personals I run in the sidebar. I'm still playing with the design, but I think what I've got now is sufficient to allow you to festoon your fridge** with magnets advertising the fictional romantic availability of hella_loise, hugetractsofland, and amorvincet1282.  This, of course, in addition to all the fine simian products already on offer.

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*A few more sales and I'll have enough to complete my set and maybe, just maybe, to put monkey magnets in my immediate family members' stockings this year--though, perhaps not the one with the monkey evacuating his bowels in front of a bishop.  That one's more a birthday gift, really.

**Or any other metal surface, but if you pick one that starts with an F it'll preserve the alliteration.

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I found this over at the Huffington Post in an editorial called "Why America Feels Like It's Been Ruled by a Foreign Occupier":

America fought a revolution to have its opinions represented by it's government. That has faded in Bush's term. America set up the UN after World War II to set up international law and put an end to military aggression and imperialism. That went out the window. Habeas Corpus was inherited from England where it originated in the 12th Century. Bush in that sense has embraced the morals of the middle ages.

So let me get this straight. By throwing out something that originated in the 12th century, Bush embraced the morals of the Middle Ages? Shouldn't that be "repudiated the morals of the Middle Ages?" Or was habeas corpus some sort of progressive anachronistic moral development that it took four-hundred years or so for society to catch up to?

And since Lincoln suspended habeas during the Civil War, shouldn't that be the go-to historical epoch for habeas-corpus-based unflattering historical comparisons? I'm just saying.

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The week of the election, I posted an image of two knights and their respective ladies.  Astute readers pointed out that the ladies were not ladies at all, but half-human hybrids, clearly some sort of draconic centaurs.  In general, I'm hesitant to ascribe any special meaning to these half-breeds.   The first time you see a bishop with a dog's body or trumpets growing out of his ears, for example, you're convinced you've found something shockingly sacriligeous, a clear indict of the corruption of the church.  But after you've seen that bishop's head attached to roosters, donkeys, camels, dragons, gryphons, and, yes, even monkeys, you are forced to admit that sticking bishop's heads on things was probably about as edgy as putting one of those pissing Calvin stickers in the back window of your pickup truck.

These days, it takes a really spectacularly weird hybrid for me to sit up and take notice.  Like this one, for instance, found in a thirteenth-century Beglain psalter (Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 155):


Ok, at first glance it's just your average dragon with a gloved hand holding a chalice for a head. It's only when we zoom out that the thing gets really weird:*


Look past the giant ornamental tail graft this beast has been given (again, ho hum stuff) and up at the normal dragon in the upper margin.  It's almost like the illuminator is giving us a before and after shot, or a little tutorial on how grotesques are made.  Take a normal household dragon, he seems to say.  Any old dragon will do.  (In a pinch, you can use one of the dragons you're using as line-filler in the main text.)  Now, chop off the dragon's head and replace it with whatever you have lying around.  Do the same with his tail.  Voila: instant puzzle for people to ponder some seven hundred years from now.**

[UPDATE] Another astute reader (one named after a pasta product apparently) asked if this image had anything to do with the main text. In general, my answer to all such questions is "probably not." There are scholars (Michael Camille, Lillian Randall, R. Howard Bloch) who have devoted lots of time to explaining how marginalia is deeply meaningful commentary to the text, but my own view is that the marginal images usually comment more on other images than on the text. This is not to say that there is never any editorial or critical comment going on--in fact, when they do comment, the illuminators are incisive and hilarious--just that these cases are the exception, not the rule.

But the psalm on the page here is Psalm 128, which goes like this:

I will praise you, O LORD, with all my heart; before the "gods" I will sing your praise. I will bow down toward your holy temple and will praise your name for your love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word. When I called, you answered me; you made me bold and stouthearted. May all the kings of the earth praise you, O LORD, when they hear the words of your mouth. May they sing of the ways of the LORD, for the glory of the LORD is great. Though the LORD is on high, he looks upon the lowly, but the proud he knows from afar. Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the anger of my foes, with your right hand you save me. The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O LORD, endures forever—-do not abandon the works of your hands.

As you can see, there's a lot here about both hands and being made. So, at the least, this illuminator probably caught the word hand in the main text and decided to build a grotesque around a hand, or add one to a grotesque he'd already started.***  And perhaps this may even confirm my initial reading of the two images. This illuminator sees a passage praising God's creation of man and decided to put on a clinic demonstrating his own creative process.

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*My apologies for the resolution of the second image. The Pierpont Morgan Library is a bit stingy with image size.
**Or, possibly, this is evidence of the shoddiness of medieval matter transporter technology. You never know what's going to step off the pad when medieval Scotty beams you up.

***Though the hand he drew looks to me like a left hand, not a right.

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There's a news story making the rounds about the disovery of a fourth-century* "direct ancestor" of Monty Python's most famous sketch--you know, the one that features the line "THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!"



Apparently, the joke, which is found in a Greek book of 256 jokes called the Philolegus (loosely, The Joke-Lover), goes something like this:

Slave Owner: The slave you sold me yesterday died.

Former Slave Owner: By the gods! When he was with me, he never did any such thing.

I say "apparently," because none of the news outlets carrying the story give this purported  ancestor joke in full--likely because they're all cribbing from the same press release for a new "multimedia version" of the Philolegus which doesn't give the whole thing, either.**   I suspect that the joke is being selectively quoted in order to make the similarity more pronounced, especially given how poorly the release represents the Dead Parrot sketch itself, describing it like so:

In Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch, written 16 centuries later, a pet-shop salesman makes similar excuses when a customer complains that the parrot he has just bought from the shop has died. The seller adds that the parrot, a Norwegian blue, is "pining for the fjords".

There are a lot of versions of the Parrot Sketch floating around--a medievalist might be tempted to say that it is extant in many recensions--but none of them feature a shopkeeper making an excuse similar to "he never did that when I had him," because the basic premise that drives the sketch is not the parrot's death, but that the shopkeeper refuses to admit he's dead.  Indeed, the fact that the parrot is dead is pretty much irrelevant to the Pythons' joke.  The humor comes from Palin's slimy delivery of increasingly absurd excuses in the face of Cleese's increasingly irate tirades.  You can replace the parrot with anything, and the joke stays the same.

In fact, the Pythons did just that, about twenty-five episodes later, in the Cheese Shop sketch.  Palin plays a slightly more good natured version of the shopkeeper, and Cleese goes for a quieter rage as the customer, but it's pretty much the same sketch with the dead parrot replaced with an absence of cheese.

As it turns out, the Pythons have been interviewed many times about the Parrot Sketch's origins. See this You Tube video for one such interview.  (The discussion starts at around 4:00.)  Here, they freely admit that the Dead Parrot Sketch was a revamped version of a sketch Palin had done for an earlier show, How to Irritate People,  which featured a car salesman instead of a pet shop owner.

If you want to trace the descent of the Dead Parrot back a bit further, Cleese and fellow Python Graham Chapman had worked on the earlier BBC sketch comedy special At Last the 1948 Show, which featured a Bookshop Sketch that is essentially the Dead Parrot Sketch in reverse.  There, Cleese plays a shopkeeper who tries to accommodate the increasingly absurd requests of a customer (Grate Expectations by Edmund Wells, Rarnaby Budge by Charles Dikkens  with two Ks, the well-known Dutch author, etc.), eventually building into full on "wakey-wakey this is your nine o'clock alarm call" mode by the sketch's end.

Of course, I'm now fairly deep into a blog post and have only managed to trace the joke back about two and a half years,**** well short of the sixteen centuries the guys with the press release are claiming in order to hawk their brand new digital multimedia online downloadable web 2.0 super-absorbant individually-packaged editions of the ancient joke book, which is why, I guess, I am not in marketing.  However, to end on a medieval note, let me say that if you do happen to be in the market for a several-century-old analogue of the Dead Parrot sketch, I think the ending of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess is close enough, and certainly much closer to the spirit of Python than the dead-slave joke.

In The Book of the Duchess, "Chaucer" has a dream vision in which he meets a Black Knight grieving over the death of his lady. Always the dolt, the "Chaucer"-dreamer proceeds to completely misunderstand what the knight is sad about. At first he thinks it must be a hart that the knight has lost in the woods. When he realizes it's a lady, he assumes the knight must mean he lost her romantically--i.e., she broke up with him. This goes on for some time, until finally the knight loses it and says exasperatedly, "She's dead!" After the climactic outburst, everything wraps up in a few short lines, just like in the Dead Parrot sketch.*****  Of course, the Knight's speeches are far too long for back and forth rhythm of Cleese and Palin, but Palin's oblivious confidence is a pretty good fit for the Chaucer dreamer.

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*Though the fourth century is a bit out of bounds for this blog, the Python angle puts it squarely under my purview.  1/5 of the on-air Pythons were, after all medievalists.  And didn't one of them teach Latin...?  And yeah, I know this story's a week old.
**The edition seems to combine a new translation with videos of the jokes being performed by a former British game show host (a steal at only £5.95!).
***The Cheese Shop sketch also reuses the joke of having Palin announce he's going to "have a look around in back" while standing still.
****And Now the 1948 Show came out in 1967, its name a joke on how long the BBC kept shows in the can back then.
*****At least, like the version of the Parrot sketch that ends with the shopkeeper and the customer going back to his place. Like I said, multiple recensions.

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Sorry about the unannounced week off, readers.  Deadlines, etc.

At any rate, I came upon this week's marginal treat while tracking down grylluses (more on those later).  It comes from the Pierpont Morgan Library's MS G24, a mid-14th century French collection of 13th-century verse romances.  In the right hand margin of one of the manuscript's texts, a chanson de geste called The Vows of the Peacock, we find this strange fellow hanging out:


We all know that two heads are, in general, better than one.  But this illuminator reminds us that having two heads presents problems of its own.  For instance, you have to decide which head to wear on your shoulders on any given day.  This poor naked marginal guy apparently can't decide which to go with, so he's carrying both around.  The serpentine grotesque nibbling on his leg is probably not helping, either.

People disassembling themselves is a favorite subject of this particular illuminator, for reasons that escape me.  Presumably, he just thinks that people with detachable pieces are awesome.  (And they are.) Here, a few pages later, is a man who's taken off his own leg and is waving it around:


BONUS: Last week or so, Scott Nokes over at Unlocked Wordhoard warned that I might one day run out of marginal monkeys.  Don't listen to him.  I've got so many monkeys on tap that I don't even need to crop out the one above.  Consider it your simian lagniappe.

I don't know why the monkey in the bottom margin near our first piecemeal man is trying to attract the gryllus's attention to his eye, though.  Possibly, it's a parody of the ubiquitous images of King David pointing to his eye before God.  Or, maybe, he's just picking his nose, and really wants the gryllus to know about it.

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Feeling stressed over the outcome of today's election? Is the suspense getting to you? Consider this image from the Bodleian Alexander MS:


Here we have two knights barreling towards one another, caught in the final second of their joust. One moment more, and one of them will be other ground with a splintered lance sticking out of him, and the other will be kneeling before the lady who graces the center margin, receiving the victor's crown.

If we follow the floral margins beneath the two knights, we find the artist has also included images of them from some time before the joust, receiving their respective helmets from their respective ladies. The perfect symmetries of space and time here collude, I think, to enhance the sense of suspense and tension in the center of the image. Everything is coming down to one last moment. Everything hangs in the balance.

But follow the righthand border just a bit longer, and the tension is undercut:


Frequent readers of Got Medieval will no doubt recognize, even at this distance, that the interloper in the right hand margin is a mischievous little monkey. It may be a little hard to make out what he's doing, however, so here is a closeup:


Up above the fray of the long-fought chivalric contest, our monkey friend is free to indulge in an idyllic hobby, chasing butterflies with a knotted up hood (no doubt stolen from the marginal peasants playing blind man's buff a few pages back).

Today's electoral battle is going to play out how it's going to play out. Until the lances are splintered and the crown is bestowed, take a moment to indulge yourself in your own idyllic hobby.

This is a monkey, and he approves of this message.

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