Yes, yes, the final installment of the month-long blogmasmagoria of images from Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24 is late.* But I saved the best for last. And by best, I mean "most nakedest". We've already seen that this particular illuminator has a thing for public displays of nudity. Remember the guy who played the bagpipes with his backend? And the guy taking care of two calls of nature at once who kicked off the month? Well, meet their friend, naked guy with a tall hat:


OK, I know what you're thinking: *yawn* Nude guy with a tall hat is urinating into a jug, big deal. Come back when he's found a second jug and maybe I'll care. Hell, thanks to your marginalia posts he's probably going to need three jugs and a previously undiscovered orifice before I perk up...

Perhaps it might interest you to know that naked guy with a tall hat is like the Waldo of MS G24.** He's everywhere, and everywhere he is his clothes ain't:


Trying to find the naked guy in the margins of the manuscript is fun for the whole family. Is that him peeking out from behind the foliate border? Or is that him riding on the monkey's back?*** Why, it's hours of fun, I tell you.

Now, because I'm far too good to you, I'm going to close out this month's festivities with one last bonus image. Yes, yes, a naked bonus image:


Is this a naked man locked in mortal combat with a giant rabbit? Or is this a moment of cross-species passion? And most importantly, is that naked guy with a tall hat without his hat? I'm not going to stake my reputation on it, but he does have the same hairstyle and weak chin...

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*Turns out that writing a paper on marginalia (less than a week left till K-Zoo!) can distract you from goofing on marginalia on your blog.
**Members of Gen Y may wish to substitute 'Greased Up Deaf Guy' for Waldo in the referential joke above. Go ahead, I'll wait. Happy now?
***Nope, those are just two other naked guys. Waldo hides near stripy wallpaper or in the company of zebras. Naked guy with a tall hat hides around other naked guys.

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This week's installment of my month-long blogasmicalfragicalamagoria of images taken from Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24 brings my lucky readers not one, not two, not the number that comes after two, but, indeed, the number that comes before five images of monkeys.

All four of these rakish simian fellows are just looking for love. Some might say in all the wrong places.* Our first monkey is actually a monkey dyad, two happy chimps slipping one another the tongue:


It's hard to tell when a monkey is a girl monkey or a boy monkey--I tend to assume all monkeys are boys for some reason--so that image might even be more shocking still. But not nearly so shocking as this one, a monkey having a cutesy tea-party with a demon:


It's all very metrosexual, no? You just know that underneath that blurry smudge, the monkey is holding his chalice with his pinky held out. But perhaps you are one of those who is not scandalized by monkey raconteurs and their droll dinner conversation at tea. To you, I say, how about a monkey getting his ass kissed by a rabbit-headed grotesque?


Still not satisfied? Yes, it does get harder and harder to shock you week in and week out. But the illuminator behind MS G24 always has an extra trick up his sleeve. I submit for your approval (and shocked outrage) a monkey-lover kneeling before the moon.


Oh, did I forget to mention that the moon is someone's disembodied butt sticking out of the top of a woman's hood? I really need to try to pay more attention to detail when I write my blog posts.

Anyway, stay tuned for next week's installment of "It Came from MS G24 *cue spooky music* wooooOOOOooooOOOOOooo".

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*Others, doing Buckwheat impersonations last current in the early eighties might say they are "wookin for nub in all da bong paces."

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Those of you who obsessively follow all the links I post in my blog's sidebar are by now longtime fans of the site Photoshop Disasters, a blog dedicated to tracking down and mocking egregious photoshop-based fail. But for those of you who ignore my erudite elseblog recommendations, it's Photoshop Disasters' job to catch people in the act of doing things like covering up for Christopher Lambert's tragic inability to grasp solid objects by using Photoshop to paste a sword on top of his hand for the DVD case art of that not-as-horrible-as-the-other-sequels-but-still-pretty-horrible Highlander sequel of a few years back. Like so:


It might come as some surprise to fans of Photoshop Disasters to learn that people have been failing at Photoshop since long before Photoshop was invented. Take the image at the top of this blog post. That's the famous portrait of Chaucer from the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. Now take a closer look, in particular, at the proportions of torso to horse. Here's a handy ghost-torso to make it easier:


The illuminator of the Ellesmere manuscript inadvertently gives the impression that Chaucer was either 1) a freakish giant with a torso nearly as tall as a horse, or 2) a midget with stumpy legs that rode around on similarly stumpy ponies.*

Now, given that medieval artists are not known for their skill at perspective and proportion, you might be tempted to think that this is just a bad artist who doesn't know how big horses are.*** But, actually, the problem is that the artist doing a bad copy and paste job from another famous image found in Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes:


Hoccleve was a poet who wrote in the wake of Chaucer and who styled himself as one of Chaucer's students and poetic successors. Whether he actually knew Chaucer or not is a subject of some debate, but nonetheless Hoccleve claims to have known Chaucer well enough that, writing several years after Chaucer's death, he was starting to worry that people would forget what Chaucer looked like in life. To remedy this, he commissioned a portrait of his "worthy master" and had it placed in the margin of a manuscript of his poem. When the Ellesmere illuminator went looking for visual references for his portrait of Chaucer, he seems to have found Hoccleve's version and decided to base his image on it. Here are the two images, side by side, with Hoccleve's portrait mirror-imaged:


The problem with the Ellesmere illuminator's plans is clearly that the original image was a 3/4 portrait, and at some point in the planning of the Ellesmere manuscript it had been decided that all the pilgrims, Chaucer included, would be depicted on horseback in the margin of their respective tales.**** So it fell to the illuminator to sketch a horse in underneath the famous picture. The result is poor compositing, fifteenth-century style. Though, to give credit where it's due, turning the rosary in the Hoccleve Chaucer's portrait into the reins of the horse in the Ellesmere is pretty inspired.

Now, one corollary of this botched medieval photoshopping is that the Ellesmere manuscript has got to be later than Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (circa 1411 or so, last I heard). So those of you trying to push Ellesmere back to 1405 or so need to lay off. Yes, it's a pretty manuscript, but pretty does not authority make. Though, I suppose if you wanted to, you could argue that Hoccleve's artist swiped from Ellesmere (especially since lots of people don't believe Hoccleve knew Chaucer), but if that is the case then we really have to wonder why the Ellesmere artist went with Chaucer the overweight stumpy midget in the first place, and why Hoccleve's artist knew enough to fix it.*****

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*Paul Bettany, who played Chaucer in the tragically under-appreciated A Knight's Tale, seems to subscribe to the second theory. In preparation for the role he was given a selection of Chaucer paraphernalia that included the Ellesmere portrait, causing him to remark on the commentary track to the effect that "Chaucer was apparently some sort of overweight dwarf. I decided to go another way with the character, but I think you can see the inner dwarf shining through."**
**I'll get the exact quote later.
***And it must be noted that several of the other Ellesmere portraits have too-large people atop them, but none so disproportionate as Chaucer.
****This, in itself, is an odd choice, since not all the pilgrims appear to ride horses in General Prologue. It would certainly be weird for some of the poorer pilgrims to be mounted.
*****One final note. For the record, this whole composting thing is not my personal discovery or anything. I first learned of it in a class taught by Derek Pearsall. That it's essentially a case of bad photoshop, that's my only contribution.

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I don't go in much for conspiracy theories, but there's something troubling about the new First Dog. As you may have heard, it's a Portuguese Water Dog, a breed that you probably hadn't heard of until Bo Obama landed on the public stage. If you read news reports about the dog, down around the third paragraph or so you will almost certainly see a sentence like this one below used to explain the origins of the breed:

The Portuguese Water Dog found its way into recorded history in 1297, showing up in a monk’s report of a drowning sailor who had been pulled from the sea by a dog with a “black coat, the hair long and rough, cut to the first rib and with a tail tuft.”

I've been trying for the past week to verify the claim, and I can't. I'll admit to being no expert on Iberian peninsula medieval history, but can't track down the purported chronicle account, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually exist.

Even were I to find it, I don't see why this monk's report is taken as a definite reference to the Portuguese Water Dog. Porties aren't the only long-coated water dogs from the Iberian peninsula. There's also the Spanish Water Dog, a poor neglected breed whose Wikipedia page is suffering a serious case of non-Obama-first-dog-having-itis.*

The earliest reference to the monk's account that I've been able to track down is found in the 1986 book, The Complete Portuguese Water Dog. It is this book that is cited as the source for the official Portuguese breed web page, and from there it's been carried to Wikipedia and then on to the third paragraphs mentioned above--usually almost verbatim. But the original book never mentions the name of the chronicle the account is supposedly taken from, nor does it even indicate where the chronicle was written or its original language.**

It is fun, however, watching how news stories garble this 1986 factoid. They know there's a monk, a sailor, a dog and a chronicle, but from telling to telling the word "Portuguese" (and sometimes "Spanish") migrates from one to the other. People just can't decide whether it's a Portuguese monk, a Portuguese chronicle, a Portuguese dog, or a Portuguese sailor that they're talking about.

At any rate, I remain suspicious. Why would a medieval pedigree suddenly appear in a book published in 1986? If I were to indulge my inner tinfoil hat wearing self, I might suspect that it has something to do with the Spanish Water Dog's first official recognition by the Spanish Kennel Club, which came about in 1985. Faced with the threat of another water dog, Portuguese enthusiasts could have doubled-down on the special uniqueness of their breed. Dog club people are very territorial that way.***

In today's political climate, the distinction between the Portuguese and Spanish Water Dogs is probably of particular importance, since the other name for the Spanish Water Dog is the Andalusian Turk, and as we all know, al-Andalus is the name that the Muslims called Iberia when it was under their dominion. It is quite possible that the Obamas bought a Muslim dog and the whole Portuguese thing is a smokescreen. This is just further proof of the liberal bias of the MSM. If the Bushes had bought a Portie, you know that Keith Olbermann would have been demanding to see the dog's kennel club registration from day one.

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*Seriously, the Portuguese page is about four times as long and has recently received a thorough expansion.
**The only Portuguese chronicles I'm aware of were written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While I might trust them about royal chronologies--who was king when, etc.--I'd be pretty skeptical of the accuracy and authenticity of shaggy dog stories contained within.
***Full disclosure: one of my wife's grandmothers is a Portuguese Water Dog breeder--at one point breeder of the year according to some trade magazine or other. [These are her hands holding one of her dogs, when it was entered at Westminster.] Incidentally, the Portie breeders have known for months that Obama was getting a PWD. A dog breed that rare doesn't just show up at the kennel one day.

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Everyone ready for the next installment of the Vows of the Peacock Blogasmic Extravaganza, or whatever it was I was supposed to be calling it? This week, I'm serving up an extra helping of marginal images from Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24.

One of the recurring themes of the manuscript, as I've detailed before, is people with detachable parts. Like these guys, the flipside of the old two-heads-are-better-than-one saw:


My apologies, but it appears that this is the second week in a row* that Mmm... Marginalia is featuring a sketchy marginal phallus, here drawn in by the illuminator no doubt so that we can all be clear on what battle-tactic the headless body on the left is employing. You've got to fight dirty if you want to get a head, it would seem.

Animal/human hybrids, grotesques and other bizarre amalgamations of parts are all pretty normal for marginal illuminators. If I had a dime for every bishop's head I've seen stuck to a dragon's hind end, for instance, I could afford to pay full price for the horrible X-Box 360 Beowulf game. But otherwise normal people juggling their own body parts is something I've only seen in this manuscript. But that's not all. Detached heads appear to have an independent free-range existence in the margins of MS G24, as evidenced by these two bodiless noggins:

Judging by this image, it would seem that disembodied heads have a natural predator in the fearsome monkey-headed scoop mouth serpent, which is why, I imagine, the head up top has taken refuge in that rather small brick oven.

Now, there is one context that you often see disembodied heads in manuscripts, and that is in decorated initial capitals, sometimes called portrait capitals.** I might be going a step to far with this one, but, to me, it looks like this headless bishop in the image below is providing us with a demonstration of how portrait initials are made:



We seem to have caught him either 1) preparing to attach his head to one of the initial capitals, or 2) retrieving his head from said decoration, possibly so that he may attach it to a dragon's hind end a few pages later.

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*But, I vow: no marginal phalli for at least a week after this. Maybe two!
**As longtime readers might recall, I discussed the fun that the Yale Lancelot illuminator has with these a while back.

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Theme months--they're what the kids today are into, yes?* Excellent. I'm all about jumping on the trends while they're hot. If I were any trendier, I'd be twittering the hell out of this post in 140-character chunks.

Actually, here's the deal: I realized I've got about a half-dozen or so images from the same manuscript that are metaphorically burning a hole in my pants**--or, possibly, my blog's metaphorical pants*** and rather than spacing them out with filler, I've decided to just devote the whole month to them.

The manuscript in question is one that I've drawn from before, Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24, a fourteenth-century Flemish manuscript which includes, among other things, a copy of Jacques de Longuyon's Vows of the Peacock (AKA Les Voeux du paon), a late chanson de geste that is only read these days because it contains a very early (and possibly the first) catalogue of heroes grouped into Nine Worthies.

So, without further ado, let me introduce the first of April's marginal curiosities from MS G24. This guy:


I always do manage to find the classiest images, don't I? This week's touch of class is doing exactly what it seems like he's doing: number one and number two at the same time. Luckily for the people who have to clean up the messes in the margins of manuscripts, he thought ahead and brought two appropriately-sized matching pots with him.

This little fella is probably going to make it into my upcoming presentation at Kalamazoo, because in addition to having his carefully-orchestrated double bowel movement, he also appears to be reading the text that he's placed next to. I'm not sure if he's doing it in a "wow, that's so interesting it can even tear me away from my complicated business" or a "wow, that's so interesting it made me poop and pee at the same time, lucky I was already naked and was on my way to throw these two pots into the recycling bin" kind of way. I suppose I should get that nailed down sometime soon.

And in case you're worrying that this month-long theme is going to lead to stagnation and tedium, you really should trust me more. I promise, this manuscript is so odd that I could easily do a year-long feature and still not exhaust its strangeness. Already, it has provided such joys as the ass-kissing Templar, the ass-utilizing bagpiper, and the naked men disassembling themselves, and together these four are but the tip of the weird iceberg of weirdness.****

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*The kids today sure are crazy, with their music that diverges from the music that I am fond of and their opinions on the optimum positioning of one's waistband and/or hemline that differ from my own preferred norms.
**Which, as I indicated before, are worn with their waistband at the appropriate elevation, not like those crazy kids.
***Yes, my blog wears pants. Or metaphorically wears them. But unlike me, my blog is hep, man, hep, and wears its pants all freaky-deaky like you would not believe. Unless you're one of the kids today, in which case you would find the distance between the top of its pants and its metaphorical belly button to be quite acceptable.
****Possibly an anal-fixated iceberg, come to think of it.

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Medieval calendars all agree that, like March, April has something to do with trees. Earlier calendars say it's time to get your plant on and put some of those bad boys in the ground. Later ones suggest planting flowers at the same time. Still later ones suggest that the flowers and trees you're planting might be a good gift for a potential lady love, which leads to the calendars giving up on work for the month and urging you to get your romance on instead. So, April is the time for lovers to plant trees and flowers and then sit under the trees while giving each other flowers. Make sense? April = beer me that romance.

Amongst the medieval dates of most importance in the time of April are being:

• April 3rd, 1043 -- Edward the Confessor is crowned King of England.
• April 12th, 1204 -- Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, falls to the forces of the Fourth Crusade, who were supposed to be headed to Jerusalem, but, hey, what's a little besieging and looting between coreligionists?
• April 15th, 1450 -- The French defeat the English at the Battle of Formigny. Cannons are involved in some capacity or other and this is very important to military historians.
• April 17th, 1387 -- Chaucer and 29 pilgrims set off for Canterbury. Some tales are told. Or should that be Tales?*
  
• April 23rd, 1014 -- Brodir the Viking kills Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, ambushing him while he prays in his tent after the Battle of Clontarf. According to Njals Saga, Brian's brother Wolf the Quarrelsome tracks Brodir down shortly thereafter, cuts him open, and ties him to a tree with his own entrails, leading me to wonder if quarrelsome is really a strong enough epithet for the man.
• April 23rd, 1343 -- The St. George's Night Uprising starts in Estonia. It lasts for two years, but they refuse to change the name to "The St. George's Night and the Next Two Years Worth of Nights After That Uprising"
• April 23rd, 1348 -- The Order of the Garter is founded by Edward III of England. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
• April 28th, 1192 -- Conrad I of the Crusader State of Jerusalem is assassinated by the Hashshashin. Or should that be hashshashinated by the Assassins?**
• April 29th, 1429 -- Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orleans.
• April 30th, 1492 -- Christopher Columbus gets his commission from Spain to head out on the ocean blue.

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*Yeah, probably not.
**Yeah, probably not.

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I know updates to the old blog have been fairly scarce of late. Once again, I have entered into one of those spells where I am so busy with non-blog stuff that my blog posts are abandoned and consigned to the Drafts folder about halfway through, right after I realize that I've been spending half an hour doing something other than the oppressive crap that I have to get done.*

So today I decided to just bite the bullet and push those posts out the door. Half-assed posts are better than no posts, right? Right? But I've left the posts with their original dates, to honor my best intentions and to frustrate those blog Puritans who demand strict honesty in blog chronology. Frequent readers know that I pull this crap all the time, so this note is really for the Got Medieval newbies. If you're offended, just pretend this is all one big April Flogs Day joke.

However, looking back on my quickly finished posts, I realize that it may seem like I'm complaining about all the people who email me medieval news to post about.** Let me assure you, that's just the offblog stress talking. Please keep using the old contact form up in the upper right of the blog to send me things I ought to blog about. Clearly, I can't promise to do it in any sort of timely fashion, but I do appreciate the mail.

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*Full disclosure: my recent purchase of an X-Box 360 might also have contributed a little bit. But on the upside, you can all look forward to a review of the Beowulf game sometime soon.
**And, in part, my sudden spate of productivity was spurred on by realizing that visits from people just checking the page real quick to see if I'd written a post on the thing that they'd emailed me about had become about a third of my blog traffic, threatening to overtake Google searches for "medieval pr0n" as my top incoming traffic source.

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According to medieval calendars, April is the time to begin the Spring Cleaning of your local hellmouth. It's important to get a start on that before the April rains set in, or your hellmouth will get soggy and lose its fetid air of despair and hopelessness. Also, racooons are notorious for crawling into hellmouths for the warmth during the winter months, and let me tell you, you don't want to be cleaning racoon scat out of the mouth come July.

Among the more important April dates in medieval history:

• April 1st, 1066 -- Tostig, Leofwine, and Gyrth Godwinson convince their brother Harold to send William the Bastard of Normandy one of those fake cans with the springy snakes that spring out and scare the recipient. In response, William conquers England. And Tostig refuses to apologize, because of all the times that Harold made fun of his name with lame puns on the word "Toasty." Also, technically, he [Toasty Tostig] had been dead for three months. But would it hurt the guy to apologize?
  
• April 1st, 1099 -- The Priory of Scion thinks it'd be a real hoot if they hide the relics of Mary Magdalene beneath a Roslyn Chapel nearly 500 years before it's built.
• April 1st, 1312 -- Pope Clement V thinks it'd be a real hoot if he sends a fake order to Philip IV to round up all the Knights Templar and burn them at the stake for heresy. When Philip does just that, Clement merely shrugs and says, "You know the old saying, 'Templars--you can't live with them, you can't live without them, unless you're the pope and you have the ability to order their excommunication and burning.' Oh, wait, I am the pope. Awesome job, me!"
• April 1st, 1313 -- Pope Clement V becomes the first pope to wear the big pointy pope hat. He explains the significance thusly: "You see, it's big and pointy, like an inverse vee. And I'm Clement the Fifth, or Clement V. So it's like I'm wearing myself on my own head. Cool, right?" When people tell him that, in fact, it isn't cool, he has them excommunicated and burned.
• April 1st, 1316 -- Pope John XXII issues the bull Hootimus minimus which makes the intentional seeking of "hoots" a crime punishable by excommunication and burning.
  
• April 1st, 1337 -- Due to a misunderstanding that was totally not his fault, Philip the VI of France puts some real vomit on the throne of Edward III of England, instead of the hilarious fake rubber vomit he bought at the joke shop (long story) . The result? The Hundred And Sixteen Years War.
• April 1st, 1437 -- Due to a mix up at the plant that, again, was totally not Philip the VI of France's fault, the commemorative Hundred and Sixteen Years of War collectible plate set is printed up as the commemorative Hundred Years War plate set. They decide to just go with it, because they figure what's the chances somebody's going to check the math?
• April 1st, 1582 -- Pope Gregory XIII, aka His High Gregorianishness, issues the bull Inter gravissimas** which results in the creation of the Gregorian calendar.
• April 1st, 1583 -- The precursor holiday to April Fools Day is first celebrated. On "April Flogs Day," cheapskates who refused to buy new Gregorian calendars and insisted on using their old Julians are publicly flogged as a "joke". Pope Gregory XII reportedly approves of the "joke," saying to the man next to him*** while trying to cough back his laughter, "It's funny because they're being flogged!"
• April 1st, 1584 -- Finding no more Julian holdovers to flog, the celebrants of April Flogs Day flog the hell out of some Puritans.
• April 1st, 1585 -- Gregory XIII dies. Nobody believes the news until April 10th, because they're pretty sure it's just one big April Flogs Day joke. When his body is found, the floggers are all like, "Hey, Popekeepers, why didn't you tell us?" and the Popekeepers are all like, "Hello?! Because you were flogging us!? Duh!"
• April 1st, 1586 -- Lorenzo Valla's lost treatise De Voluptate Vapulorum or "On the Joy of Flogging" is rediscovered by a Belgian cheese shop employee who wandered into an old library containing lost treatises of Lorenzo Valla's while looking for--oh, I don't know... some cheese, I guess. Yeah, cheese. So, anyway, he finds this treatise--under wheel of Venezuelan Beaver Cheese--and it turns out that in classical Latin vapulo, or "to flog" is more accurately translated as "to make a bad joke" and in really really extra double classical Latin the joke has to be obligatory. April Flogs Day is renamed April Fools Day, and the forced frivolity begins.

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*Yeah, I know you're trying to play it cool now, but you all know that I know that you fell for my clever ruse. April Flogs Day starting in 1583? Ha! Everyone knows that dates to Dionysius Exiguus.
**Its first line Inter gravissimas pastoralis officii nostri curas roughly translates to, "Man, being pope is HARD!"
***Reportedly, Napoleon.****
****Though the reports are somewhat suspect.*****
*****Though not as suspect as reports that there was a wheel of cheese inside the Lorenzo Valla Memorial Library.******
******Library rules clearly stipulate that each patron is allowed only to bring a pencil (no darker than #4), loose leaf paper (or a 7 1/2" x 32" notepad), and no more than a half-pound of a locally made spreadable cheese.*******
*******And that joke only makes sense if you read my footnotes out of order, something I have expressly forbid you from doing, Dr. Nokes. Oh yeah, I know all about how you read my posts.

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