Morning Medieval Miscellany

I'll have some guests for a few days beginning tomorrow, so everyone try not to write anything interesting about the Middle Ages for the next week, OK?

• Steven Till asks what we think about Christian Bale as Robin Hood.
• Mary Kate Hurley has a post about Beowulf and love, or the lack thereof. I'm with MKH on this one -- I'm not feeling the love.
• News for Medievalists has several new posts, including one telling us that Dante is no longer exiled from Florence. If they really meant it, they'd exhume him, clone him, and then make the clone mayor.
• The Naked Philologist has a few new posts as well, including one on "The Humerous Later Life of St. Æðelðrið," a post on Templar trial papers, and a bleg for feedback on a paper proposal about Archbishop Wulfstan. My own opinion: The paper looks quite interesting, but I think Wulfstan is so cool that I'd listen to a paper speculating on Wulfstan's favorite color, so I'm not the most objective judge. Being as objective as possible, though, it looks pretty good to me.
• Jonathan Jarrett has a post on problems working with charters of Cluny, and includes this phrase I intend to steal in the future: "Preservation by neglect."
• OK, this isn't really medieval, but the word "dwarf" made it appear on my fantasy mytho-medieval radar. This article really ticks me off -- how is it relevant that the woman was a dwarf? The subtext of the piece seems to be something like: "Hey, look at that! A dwarf pimp! I wonder if she whistles while she pimps? *snicker* Let's now all imagine kinky sex with dwarves!" The dwarfism has nothing at all to do with the charges against her ... they just seem to have thrown it in for puerile interest.

Ever have one of those days that you despair about how much there is to know about the Middle Ages, and how easy it is to forget? Yesterday I stared for five minutes looking at a poem that I used to be able to sight-read, and now I was stumped in the first 10 lines and had to look in the glossary. Sure, as soon as I saw the word, I smacked myself in the forehead and immediately remembered it, but there's just so much to forget, you know?