Morning Medieval Miscellany

If it seems that I don't have much original posting here lately, that's because I'm working on my tenure & promotion package, a process designed to systematically lower the IQ of applicants. Hopefully I'll get less dumbified* as I finish the package.

• CyberMedievalist reviews the "Pilgrims & Pilgrimage" interactive CD-ROM.
• The not-so-Weird Medieval Animal of the Week is the cat.
• The Heroic Age has a whole mess o' links.
• Medieval Material Culture has several new posts, including one on whether medieval peasants ate better than us (*hint* -- it depends entirely on what you mean by "better"), and one on whether or not the English invented kilts.
• The Naked Philologist is having some sort of weird technical problem I've never seen before preventing me from linking directly to the post, but head on over there anyway and read the second part of the Hilarious Death of St. Eadmund.
• Also, there's an article entitled "Bird-Worshipping Cult in Cornwall," but the title is a bit misleading. My reading suggests that there was some sort of bird sacrifice ritual going through to the early modern era -- not exactly the same thing as a "bird-worshipping cult."** h/t Naked Philologist.
• Finally, here is a little comic by Kate Beaton about how hard it is to be Chaucer. h/t Miss Medieval and The Medieval Geek's Guide.

*"Dumbified" is like "stupified," only dumber.
** The article reads, "Having failed to find any parallels so far, Jacqui has decided the pits might be connected with the Cornish St Bridget or St Bride, the patron saint of brides, who has the swan as her symbol. “My own theory (and it is only a theory),” she says, “is that maybe if you got married and did not get pregnant in the first year, you might make an offering to St Bride of a feather pit. If you finally got pregnant, you had to go back to the pit and take out the contents and burn them and set the spirit of the swan free. If you never got pregnant then the pit remained untouched.” I can think of a few medieval English fertility rituals from the Lacnunga and Bald's Leechbook manuscripts, but none involving fertility and birds.