This week's marginal delight comes from the pages of the Hunterian Psalter, a twelfth-century English manuscript currently held by one of my alma maters, the University of Glasgow, and kept safe and sound inside their appropriately named Hunterian Museum:*


Mermaids are fairly common in the margins of manuscripts, but this one is of a rarer stripe, able to slip out of her fishy bottom to walk around on two legs just like us surface dwellers, as you can see if you look a bit closer:


I'm not familiar with this forgotten talent of medieval mermaids in any other accounts,** but such an ability would answer a question I've always had about mermaids. People say they were dreamt up by lonely sailors away on long voyages without women. But if that's true, why would these horndog sailors give their dream women inaccessible lady parts? Or, to quote Fry from the Lost City of Atlantis episode of Futurama: "Why couldn't she be the other sort of mermaid, with the fish parts on top and the lady parts on bottom?"*** This gal neatly sidesteps the problem. She can be half fish while still remaining all woman.

Oh, and manuscript illustration snobs will descend upon me with teeth bared if I don't add the disclaimer that this lovely lady is technically part of a historiated initial, and thus strictly speaking not marginalia--but it sure looks to me like it's into the margins she's headed once she shucks that tail.****

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*Both named for William Hunter, an eighteenth-century collector of antiquities.
**And, as I allude to in my title, neither was Walt Disney--or, for that matter, Hans Christian Anderson. But think how much shorter their Little Mermaids would be if the titular mermaid could just hop right out of her tail.
***This said after his Parker Posey-voiced mermaid date offers to let him fertilize her eggs with his man jelly while she's out of the room.
****Possibly as soon as she finds some pants.

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This struck me just right when I read it last week. Marvel as T-Rex's "fun facts about St. Patrick's Day" lecture devolves into a discussion of Middle English:


Read the rest of the Dinosaur Comic here.

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More than a few of you have emailed me to give me a headsup about the recent discovery of a marginal note in a fifteenth-century manuscript that mentions Robin Hood and places him in Sherwood Forest in the thirteenth-century. To the scholar responsible for the find, Dr. Julian Luxford of St Andrews, I tip my hat. Awesome find.

On the other hand, to the mainstream media reporters who wrote the articles that have been forwarded my way, I take off my hat, scratch my head, and fall into an awkward silence while feigning a sudden and pressing interest in the hat's interior.

The cause of my consternation is this: the marginal gloss is twenty-three words long. Yet most reports do not include the text of the note. And those who do give the text bury it in the middle or the end of the article, spending the first half to three-fourths of their account describing the find. It's just twenty-three words, already! Here, let me write a reasonable news story for you:

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland -- A manuscript scholar at St. Andrews University, Dr. Julian Luxford, has recently announced the discovery of a hitherto unknown medieval reference to the popular character Robin Hood in a historical chronicle dated to the fifteenth century. It reads: "Around this time [1294-9], according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood, with his accomplices, infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies."

Yeah, the style isn't very newspapery, but it gets to the point, doesn't it? If the subject of your story is one-sentence long, lead with that sentence and save your clever analysis for later in the article.

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You know Lady Fortune, Dame Nature, Lady Rectitude and Lady Justice, the Pearl and Lady Reason and Fair Welcome and Forced Abstinence.* But do you recall the most famous [pair of] female medieval personification[s] of an abstract concept of all?**


That's Synagoga and Ecclesia there, resting peacefully in the lower margin of a manuscript currently held at the National Library of the Netherlands. They represent the triumph of New Law over Old Law, which is to say the triumph of the Christian faith over Judaism. (Ann Coulter would be very proud.) Here's another version from the carvings on the choir seats at the Cathedral of Erfurt in Thuringia, which reminds us that marginalia isn't just for manuscripts anymore:


And while I have your attention, here's another set from the exterior of Strausborg Cathedral (which are technically even further removed from my normal subject of marginalia, but they do hang out on the margin of the south transept portal):

Ecclesia, or The Church, is generally depicted as a woman carrying one or more of the following: a crown, a cross-staff, a chalice of the Savior's blood, a communion wafer, or the orb of the world. Synagoga (also Synagogua and Synagogue) packs her bags with a broken spear, a discarded crown, and/or the Mosaic tablets. Synagoga also wears a blindfold, just like Lady Justice, but unfortunately her blindfold symbolizes ignorance instead of impartiality. Damn you, traitorous double-sided metaphors. For the record, the pig-riding Synagoga in the second image is probably related to the tradition of the Judensau, and doesn't show up near as often as the standing figures.

As my initial laundry list of female personifications might have already indicated, there was very little that the medieval Christian mind couldn't turn into a hawt chick in diaphanous robes. Perhaps there is something to that whole fevered imaginings of repressed monks theory.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this completely un-scatalogical and asexual edition of Mmm... Marginalia. (Sorry--put more job apps in the mail this week.) Next time, we will return to our normal poop-, monkey-, and/or pooping-monkey-flavored fare.

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*And, lest we forget, the hot foreign chick in the Song of Solomon that somehow represents the Church.
**OK, so maybe Forced Abstinence isn't that well-known a personification, but that whole Rudolph thing*** was the best intro I could come up with this week, so deal. Maybe I'll do a whole series on weird medieval female personifications.****
***And while I'm on the subject, the beginning of the Rudolph song makes no sense, philosophically speaking. If I agree with the initial premise, that I know Dasher and Dancer, etc. and I agree with the second premise, that Rudolph is even more well known than the ones I already have admitted to knowing, then it is demonstrably the case: I must know Rudolph. QED. The question is superfluous.
****As soon as I figure out how to properly acronymize it. All successful web recurring features have an awesome acronym.

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A friend of mine alerted me to the existence of short story "Math Takes a Holiday" from Paul Di Filippo's Neutrino Drag which includes, among other cool things, an imagined cat fight between medieval Saints Hubert and Barbara--precisely the sort of hagiography I can get behind. Why they're arguing is not important right now. Just read this snippet:

[Saint Hubert said,] "You are deliberately obscuring my point, Barbara. I am merely arguing for a proper chain of command and obedience--"
"Because you're descended from the kings of Toulouse! And because you were once a bishop!"
"What of it? I'm proud to have been Bishop of Maestricht and Liege!"
"Certainly, certainly, a wonderful item on your cv. But you were once married as well, don't forget!"
Saint Hubert coughed nervously. "The Church had different policies back in my time--"
Saint Barbara crossed her arms triumphantly her chest. "On the other hand, I am still a virgin. A virgin and a martyr!"
Stiffening his pride, Saint Hubert countered, "I was tutored by Saint Lambert himself!"
Barbara snorted. "I learned my precepts at Origen's knee!"
"I was vouchsafed a vision--a cross appeared between the horns of the stag I hunted!"
"I experienced a miraculous transport from my tower prison to a mountaintop!"
"As Bishop, I converted almost the whole of Belgium!"
"I was one of Fourteen Holy Helpers! You probably prayed to me!"
"You--you insolent young pup!"
"Young pup? I was born four centuries before you!"
"Where's your historicity, though? Not a single documented proof of your actual existence. Why, you're positively mythical!"
"Mythical! You dirty old huntsman, I'll show you what a sock from a mythical Saint feels like--"

Will Jesus intervene? Will St. Barbara get all fourth century on his ass, or will Hubert show her how they roll down in the Ardennes? I'm not going to tell you. You'll just have to read the book and see for yourself. Just drop by your local library, where you can find these and many other amazing booksthat will take you away to a land of whimsy and wonder...*

Or buy the thing at Amazon. The author might not sic the copyright police on me for posting that quote. Hurry, though. As of this writing, there's only one copy left!

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*Butterfly in the skyyyyyyyyy, I can fly twice as hiiiiiiiiiiigh.

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As many of you have emailed to inform me, it is now official: the nation of Great Britain has, collectively, gone off its nut. The final damning evidence was this, the report that a pub in Shoreditch was evacuated because some utility workers found a replica of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in a drainage pipe beneath the street.

Of course, there's probably a defense that could be mounted for the poor hapless utility workers and the bomb squad that took over an hour to determine that the 'grenade' was actually a ' "grenade" '. If it had been lying in the ditch for a while, it might have been crusted with grime and muck, making it resemble--well, come to think of it, it would've pretty much been indistinguishable from a dirty Christmas ornament at that point, and calling in the bomb squad over a dirty Christmas ornament is hardly much better than calling them in over a useless but shiny piece of plastic that is also not shaped like either a hand grenade or a bomb.

I suppose the big question that needs to be answered in order to properly determine just how foolish the workers were is which of the many Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch replicas they found in the ditch. Here are three that I know of:



The one on the top left has the benefit of coming in a nice box. Sometimes bombs come in boxes, right? Granted, if this was our sewer-dwelling hand grenade, it means that the bomb squad was called in over a suspicious cardboard box, and that's only incrementally better than their coming to check out a Christmas ornament. The dual grenades on bottom might remind someone of two sticks of dynamite tied together into a bomb, I suppose, providing one's idea of what a bomb looks like is derived primarily from Dudley Do-Right cartoons. But their being 1) plush and 2) clearly labeled might make mistaking them for bombs even more embarrassing than the cardboard boxed one--and did I mention that one doubles as a whoopie cushion according to its packaging?

That leaves the bomb up on the top right as the least embarrassing by default. Problem with that one is that it's a very expensive prop replica of the Holy Hand Grenade. You can tell it's expensive because it looks like it was thrown together by someone with a glue-gun and some glitter--just like the grenade in the original movie! That sort of swag will set you back two-hundred squids at a minimum, so how likely would it be that the owner of such an expensive piece of movie memorabilia would leave it underneath a fire hydrant in London?

In honor of this impressive police work, we shall now commence a reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:

Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."

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A helpful reader alerted me to this new, bizarre medieval metaphor from ESPN.com's Page 2. Discussing the really odd photo spread that A-Rod did for Details magazine recently, LZ Granderson observes:

It's curious how technology makes it possible for anyone on the planet to pull up A-Rod's photo spread, and yet when it comes to discussing it, we're trapped on some sort of medieval hamster wheel.

"He's on the DL"
"That's supergay"
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, Could this be the gayest pose of all?"

Your first reaction is, no doubt, one of incredulity. What makes this metaphorical hamster wheel which represents the tendency of sports fans to make gay jokes medieval, exactly? Does he mean to suggest that medievals were well known for their very simplistic gay jokes? [They weren't.] Or that they often strapped gay people to their big medieval torture wheels? [They didn't.] Or that they loved their hamsters, but were also paralyzed by the secret fear that their hamsters were gay? [That's more a Late Antiquity thing, really.]

Actually, as it turns out, LZ Granderson has been reading his Boethius. As the Boethius scholars who frequent my blog can attest, Boethius followed his medieval bestseller The Consolation of Philosophy (which featured his meditations on the fickleness of Dame Fortune and her Wheel) with the disastrously under-performing The Consolation of Owning a Pet Hamster, in which Boethius suggested that what appears to be the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune can better be explained by supposing that inside Fortune's Wheel--to which all of humanity is mercilessly strapped in a never-ending cycle of bliss and blunder--there lives a cute, furry hamster. This image is taken from one of the only remaining manuscripts of Boethius's Consolation II:



You see, in this further refinement of his Fortune metaphor, man still passes from regno (I reign) to regnavi (I have reigned) to sine regno (I am without a kingdom) to regnabo (I shall reign again), but the motive energy is provided by the hamster which, unlike the Lady who holds the wheel, does love us very much and wants the best for each and every one of us, but his cage is small and nobody thought to buy him one of those tubes that he could crawl through when he gets bored, so what do you expect him to do except run in the wheel? And the consolation is that if you give him pistachios, which are his favorite, he'll run faster and fast forward you to the regno again.

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So, yeah, Unlocked Wordhoard has already mostly covered this one, but if you haven't heard already, there's this archaeologist* out there who claims to have discovered the skull of a lady vampire in a mass plague grave in Venice that dates to the end sixteenth century. Most of the sites that have picked up the story insist on calling this a "medieval vampire" for some reason. 1576, the date of the plague in which this "vampire" "died" is a bit late for "medieval," especially in "Italy," which by the 1570's has been printing "Home of the Renaissance" on their license plates for over a "century."***

How does the intrepid archaeologist know this skeleton belonged to a vampire? According to the article, it is a well-known folk belief that vampires can be stopped from rising from the dead by being buried with bricks in their mouths. Why Bram Stoker didn't mention this is beyond me. But then again I've never heard of such a thing happening in a medieval story, either.

Now, you may be asking, "Were there medieval vampire stories?" Not really, but people sometimes point to Walter Map and William of Newburgh, twelfth-century English chroniclers who mention returned-to-life corpses that terrorize people when they're looking for medieval vampires. Newburgh's is the closest, I think, to qualifying. He writes of a man who, suspecting his wife of adultery, hides in the rafters to catch her. When he does catch her, he's so shocked that he falls to the ground and hurts himself badly, but is convinced by his wife that he'll be fine and doesn't need to call the priest in to perform his last rights. The poor guy dies without having taken the Eucharist and, apparently, returns to prey upon the living because of it. When the townsfolk have had enough of him, they go to his grave for a little mob justice. William describes the event thus:

They grabbed a pretty dull spade and headed to the cemetery and began to dig. While they were digging, they worried they might need to dig deeper, but suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, they uncovered the corpse, swollen and enormously fat ... the shroud it had been wrapped in nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, were angry, not afraid, and wounded the unmoving corpse, causing blood to flow out in such a stream that you might have thought the corpse was a leech filled with the blood of many people. They dragged it beyond the village and quickly made a funeral pyre. And one of them said that the diseased body would not burn unless its heart was torn out, so the other one tore open its side by repeatedly hitting it with the blunt shovel, and then, thrusting his hand in, pulled out the accursed heart.

I'll admit, it reads a bit like the script to a grindhouse vampire flick, especially the continued insistence on the dullness of the shovel they're using.**** Nevertheless, while William does suggest the dead cuckold somehow consumes the blood of the living, the thing that causes the townspeople to mob together and go digging for Draculas is not a sudden increase in the overall paleness of the town's supply of hot chicks who happen to like hanging out in diaphanous robes near the open windows of large castles by night. Rather, William tells us that this proto-vampire has taken to beating up people that he catches out on the roads at night--not drinking their blood, just beating them black and blue.

As far as I'm concerned, it just ain't a vampire story unless there's a hot chick having her blood drained on camera (so to speak). For that sort of thing happening in a medieval context, we really don't have to look any farther than the Quest del Saint Graal in the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian stories. In that romance, Perceval, Bors, Galahad, and Perceval's sister come upon a castle inhabited by a woman suffering from leprosy. It is the custom of the castle that all maidens passing by must fill a (presumably quite large) silver dish with their blood and offer it to the lady of the castle so that she may be healed. Perceval's sister, for reasons I've never quite understood, but which probably have something to do with an obscure point of Cistercian theology (don't ask), acquiesces to the request and is drained until she dies. On the up side, her blood does heal the countess of the castle, and somehow this allows Perceval and company to achieve the grail... for some reason.

So, there you go. Somewhere between William of Newburgh's revenants and the Grail story's blood-draining countess lies the medieval vampire.

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*I don't trust the guy one bit. The picture he has on his website is of him holding a (presumably non-vampiric) skull all thoughtful-like, posed in front of a wall of skulls. Follow the link if you don't believe me. That would be like me suiting up in chain mail** to have my blog profile picture taken.
**Actually, given the usual focus of the blog, I supposed it'd be more like me having my picture taken with a monkey or a man with a bagpipe coming out of his hind end. And since both of those sound like excellent ideas, I retract my skepticism. Now, where's that camera?
***OK, OK, I'll stop with the air quotes before I get accused of making a dated Dr. Evil reference.
****And this from the guy who accused Geoffrey of Monmouth of lying out of an inordinate fondness for lying.

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I've never quite been sold on the identification, but the good people over at the Pierpont Morgan Library assure me that these little guys with big hats crawling around the margins of MS G24 are supposed to be Templars:

If it's not clear, the one on the right is the "Templar". The guy on the left is just your average gryllus, though one who appears to have been beaten recently (note the scourge at the Templar's feet).*

What do you think? On the one hand, Templars tended to wear crosses prominently on their outfits. And they occasionally wore tall hats. On the other hand, there are surprisingly few records of their engaging in bukakke & bondage parties (with or without sickle-wielding monkeys). Like so:



The manuscript these images are from is usually dated to the middle of the fourteenth century and was likely produced in the border region between modern day France and Belgium. The 1350's or so is a little late for anti-Templar propaganda, seeing as Philip IV rounded up most of them in France in 1307 and had them executed and burned.

But maybe jokes about how heretical those Templars were** managed to stick around in the public consciousness for a few generations. Like how cartoon animals are still slipping on banana peels and hitting each other with anvils even today, though the original objects referenced in the jokes have themselves long since departed the zeitgeist.

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*I imagine that for a gryllus (a head with legs, essentially) a spanking is the scariest possible punishment. They're basically 1/3 ass by volume.
**Possibly overheard during Bob Hope's Ninth Crusade USO Tour?:

Man, I tell ya, those Templars sure are heretical.
(How heretical are they?)
They're so heretical they scourge a guy's butt just so they can kiss the boo-boo better.
They're so heretical they defecate in front of monkeys. After the monkey ties them up, I mean. Did I mention the monkey has a scythe? Wait, let me start over here...

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I'd never heard of HowItShouldHaveEnded.com until a fortuitous series of YouTube see alsos brought me their way. Hopefully, you can guess their shtick from the URL. They've got a laugh to click ratio of about 1:5, which is probably slightly above par for YouTube.

"How Braveheart Should Have Ended" isn't their funniest video, but it is their medievalest.* So enjoy.**

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*Wait, check that. Looks like they did Beowulf recently. So please correct the above sentence to "it is among their more medievaler".
**It doesn't really become worth it until the 0:50 mark, so you'll have to trust me and hang in there. But probably you've already either hung in there or closed this window in disgust well before you got around to reading this footnote,**** so the point is moot.
***Or not reading it--for those of you that closed the window in disgust, I mean. But then, you're also not reading this footnote, either,**** so who am I correcting for?
****I could have had this footnote read "or this one," but that's tempting an infinite regress, now isn't it? So we'll leave it here.

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If this Condé Nast Daily Traveler article is correct, I may have to put a new definition in the old sidebar. Describing Carnival (or, rather, Rosenmontag) in Cologne, they write:

Seven thousand miles east of Rio, Carnival's epicenter in the Teutonic lands is the Rhineland capital of Cologne, with its forbiddingly dark Gothic Cathedral and its almost medieval party-till-you-die ethic. This time of year, Cologne is the un-Germany, playing a role not unlike that of New Orleans in America--the steam valve, the free city ruled by Bacchus.

For once, the word medieval gets a positive spin. Paaar-tay! Wooooooo!

Memo to frat guys (who may or may not be preparing to celebrate Ragnar Hairy-Pants Day 2009): Toga! Toga! Toga! is out. Baldric! Hauberk! Wimple! is in.

Unfortunately, the 2009 Rose Monday parade in Cologne was several weeks ago, so you'll have to wait until February 15th, 2010 for your next chance to get almost medieval and almost party-till-you-die like the medievals did. Until then, you'll have to console yourself with these pictures of medieval-themed Carnival floats I stole culled from Flickr and elsewhere:*

Just to be clear on this, only a few of those are from the actual Rosenmontag parade. This is, instead, a collection of Carnival/Rose Monday/Mardi Gras/Pancake Day's Eve floats. Several are from the Krewe of King Arthur and were made for the New Orleans parades. The most awesome ones (the top right image, for instance) come from Viareggio's Carnival celebration.

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*Deciding what counts as "medieval" and what counts as "weird Mardi Gras stuff" proved harder than I'd expected when I came up with the clever idea of a post full of medieval carnival floats,** because the main float aesthetic (other than neon, bright colors, and semi-clad bosoms) is anachronistic pastiche. If I used my original standard, "stuff with dragons, crowns and/or jesters," I'd have 12,000 pictures instead of 12.
**And as the old saying goes, when the going gets tough, the not-so-tough cheat, so I also included a couple of non-Mardi Gras, non-Carnivale floats from some English medieval carnivals, to fill out my little collection.***
***And, for the record, though Hulk Hogan is dressed as a gold-plated Roman gladiator (ala Ridley Scott), he's standing on a medievalish throne. On its own, a throne isn't medieval enough--but a throne with Hulk Hogan on it is so medieval it busts through the other side of medieval and becomes modern again.****
****Or, possibly, I just think Hulk Hogan is hilarious. You be the judge. That's him as King Bacchus at Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 2008.

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Here's an interesting fact I discovered today. Arnold Schwarzenegger spent the better part of the 90's, off-and-on at least, trying to get a medieval movie made. It was to have been titled Crusade and even went into pre-production at one point, only to be canceled when it became clear that it was going to seriously exceed its $100,000,000 budget.* This teaser poster was made but (mercifully) never used:


According to Variety, the film was meant to go something like this:

Schwarzenegger long has been expected to play the hero, Hagen, a reluctant warrior who begins the film as a prisoner set to die. He's freed when he burns the image of the cross into his back during a visit by the pope, and he's drafted to recapture Jerusalem. The 11th century drama has shades of both "Conan the Barbarian" and "Braveheart."

According to other rumors, Hagen was going to reclaim the True Cross once he got to Jerusalem!

Man, we medievalists really dodged a bullet on this one. As if Kingdom of Heaven wasn't bad enough, I'd hate to have to be the one to break the news to a student that the First Crusade wasn't actually led by a cigar-chomping, one-liner spouting former body builder with a penchant for bad puns and self-mutilation.

Nevertheless, Arnold still has the rights to the script, and he mentions it every now and again in interviews. Back in 2003 he told Entertainment Weekly, "I will get it done no matter what. I will be 105 years old and I'll have to be strapped to the horse, but I see it happening." To me, that reads more like a threat than a promise. Thankfully, Arnold has sworn off movies until after his gubernatorial term ends, so we still have a few good years ahead of us yet.

You can read more about the movie, including excerpts from the script, at TheArnoldFans.com.

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*As a cost-cutting movie, the studio decided to axe one of its two big budget productions that year, and Crusade was the victim. The film that was spared? Cutthroat Island!

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According to medieval calendars, March has something to do with trees. Either you're supposed to prune them, like the gentleman on the left, or you're supposed to ambush them with an axe like the guy on the right. Even though the trees will never see you coming, it's probably best to stick with pruning, lest you be confused with someone knocking acorns out of the trees for their hogs. That's so November.

Important and/or interesting medieval dates in March include:

• March 4th, 1152 -- Frederick Barbarossa, AKA "Freddie Red Beard" is elected king of the Germans.
• March 6th, 1079 -- Omar Khayyam, the Persian jack-of-all-trades (with help from some less-famous Muslim mathematicians) completes the calculations for the Persian calendar. It's officially adopted a week later.
• March 7th, 1277 -- The Condemnations of 1277 are issued. Among the things condemned, or officially banned upon pain of excommunication: Andreas Capellanus's On Courtly Love and huge swaths of Aristotelianism, including the beliefs that "The only wise men in the world are philosophers" and that "It is impossible to refute arguments of the philosopher concerning the eternity of the world unless we say that the will of the first being embraces incompatibles." You've got to hand it to the medieval Church. Faced with losing an argument against Aristotle, they pass a law that makes his arguments illegal.
• March 11th, 1387 -- The Battle of Castagnaro is fought between the Paduans and Veronese, another victory for John Hawkwood, most famous of the condottieri.
• March 16th, 1190 -- Over 100 English Jews commit suicide in York by self-immolation rather than be forcibly converted by a rioting mob.
• March 25th, 1306 -- Robert the Bruce becomes king of Scotland. I'm done with gratuitous Braveheart references, though, so you'll have to provide your own this month.
  
• March 26th, 1484 -- William Caxton prints his edition of Aesop's Fables.
• March 27th, 1309 -- Pope Clement V excommunicates the entire city of Venice. To be fair, the Venetian armies were beseiging him at the time.
• March 28th, 845 -- Paris is sacked by the Vikings, led by Ragnar Hairy-Pants. They pay him a lot of cash (7,000 pounds of silver) and he goes away to terrorize the rest of France instead. If you need an excuse to get drunk and stumble around the streets in March, might I suggest Ragnar Lodbrok Day? Admit it. St. Patrick's Day is played out, and how many other chances do you get to break out the old horned helmet?
  

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It actually disturbs me a little that I was able to correctly identify the manuscript in the tiny, low-resolution picture used to illustrate the recent BBC story about the cybernetic William the Conqueror clone from 2055 as the Macclesfield Psalter. Probably some of my readers thought I was just making things up, as I am sometimes (entirely without warrant) accused of doing. But here's the two page spread that, according to the BBC, somehow demonstrates how linguists use manuscripts to study the evolution of English:

Here's the BBC clip art for comparison:



See? Same image. If I recall correctly, I last saw this page during a search for pictures of medieval archers shooting people in the ass. You know, pretty much my normal day-to-day routine. The Macclesfield spread didn't quite fit the pattern I was looking for at the time, because as you can see this archer (pictured on the righthand page) isn't shooting a normal ass:



He's shooting the ass of a man who has a dog's head for an ass.* Though, I suppose it might just as accurately be described as a dog that has a man for a body. Sort of like the cynocephali, only different. And, arguably, the archer might be aiming at the ass of the man who's getting a piggyback from the man with the dog's head for an ass. So you can see why I went with the Alexander MS picture instead.

Across the page and up the margin from the piggyback pair, the illuminator has drawn in a picture of John the Baptist. You can tell it's John, because he's 1) pointing at a picture of a lamb, which symbolizes Christ, and 2) dressed like he's batshit crazy:**



I think modern Christians tend to gloss over the fact that John the Baptist was a crazy desert hermit, more like the guy who lives in a van down by the river than the pairs of well-scrubbed Mormons who go door to door. John the Baptist in the picture Bible I had as a kid, for instance, looked a lot like Fred Flintstone, the sort of guy who sends his animal-skin robe to the cleaners twice a week. I like the medieval version better.

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*If you're a new reader here and find yourself ready to swoon over all this salty talk, I advise you to develop a plugin for Firefox that changes all instances of ass to arse. And make sure it's context sensitive, because I plan future articles on Hemingway's short story "Black Ass at the Crossroads" and a five-part retrospective on Arvid from Head of the Class. You don't want to look silly at the water cooler talking about Head of the Clarse.
**You might want to add an "s-word*** to poo-poo" setting to your filter, while you're at it. When you're done swooning, I mean.
***Also, I have plans to one day make "sword" mean something horribly dirty. It'll be the most powerful dirty word ever, because you won't be able to euphemize it to "s-word".

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Hey hey! I got linked by the Language Log today. Also, the boys at the Flophouse Movie Podcast read my gushing fan letter this week during their Academy Awards Flopstacular 2009 and linked me on their site. Together, they have brought more new eyeballs here than the PC Magazine ranking has since December, and it's only been a day. So take that, print media!

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