Moratorium on Monk Eadwine

I am hereby declaring a one-year moratorium on academic books using "Monk Eadwine at Work on the Manuscript" as their cover art.

I used to like it, but Monk Eadwine's agent should tell him he's over-exposed.

These two scribes are also in danger of being included in my moratorium.

Morning Medieval Miscellany

As you head into your weekend:

• About.com has a medieval terms quiz.*
• The theme for next year's annual Medieval Studies conference is New Directions in Medieval Scandinavian Studies.
• News for Medievalists has an update with four new articles.
• JJ Cohen discusses Karma Lochrie's "Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville's Cosmopolitan Utopia."
• Hammered Out Bits has a post on various kinds of medieval pots.
• A Corner of Tenth Century Medieval Europe has a final report from Leeds, and discusses Cambridge University's 800th anniversary.
• Archaeology in Europe has 19(!) new articles. It'll take me all weekend to read them all.
• Mahdi Karroubi (an ally of Hossein Mousavi) called alleged torture and rapes of protestors in Iranian prisons "medieval torture and corruption."
• My Life After University has a post on the medieval section of Tallinn. I've been there; it's stunningly beautiful. h/t laNiche Music.

*I didn't do too well. Why am I still confused that a Hundred is a unit of land (a division used for taxation purposes, as I recall)? Am I confusing it with something else?

Manly Medieval Men with Beards

This may be the greatest links page ever: Larsdatter has the Medieval Beards page.

My (ironic) favorite is Dürer's Self-Portrait in a Fur-Collared Robe. In that image, Dürer depicts himself as a sort of Christ figure -- thereby being one of a small handful of people I'd punch in the face if I had a time machine. Maybe he was so interested in the Protestant Reformation because he thought Martin Luther might start worshipping him.

Just look at him -- the dude clearly thinks he's the shizznit.* What a douchebag.


*You have now read the first occurance of "shizznit" in my writings. Make a note of it.

Morning Medieval Miscellany

Today we start classes at Troy. Here are a few items to keep me from despairing:

• Archaeology in Europe has over a dozen new posts.
• Cinerati discusses Terry Goodkind and objectivist philosophy.
• The Heroic Age has seven new posts. Don't miss this set of links.
• In the Middle has a post on authenticity and Guedelon.
• Medieval Bookworm reviews Hugh and Bess.
• Magistra et Mater talks about problems with historical fiction.
• Medieval Material Culture Blog has two new links pages: medieval children & children's clothing, and embroiderers at work.
• Muhlberger's Early History has images and video from Pennsic. For those who don't know, Pennic is a huge annual SCA event.
• News for Medievalists has a post on Becket medieval art (with video), and one on an early medieval mill in Ireland.
• The Ruminate has a post on Bede and hybridity.
• Studies of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages announces Kevin Harty's new edited collection, Cinema Arthuriana.
• Gearwor gets in on the discussion of Remi Brague and medieval philosophy, and has an image of the 51 headless Vikings.

Dear World,

Please stop asking me details about the "real" King Arthur, then arguing with me when I say he's a mythical figure and that if there is any historical basis, we're better off talking about King Arthurs, plural.

If you want to insist there's some real bona fide King Arthur and that I'm wrong, fine, but don't insinuate that I'm part of some grand conspiracy to hide the truth from the world.

I mean, really, what purpose would there be in hiding that? And no channeling Geoffrey of Monmouth by saying it's to keep the Welsh down, because I frankly couldn't care less between the Welsh and the English.

XOXOXO
Scott

Morning Medieval Miscellany

After going two weeks without a Miscellany, I hit the reset button on the inter-net-o-web-o-sphere, and here's what's come up since then:

• A Commonplace Book has images from Pennsic.
• Gypsy Scholar has a post on Rémi Brague and medieval philosophy.
• The Lost Fort has a visit to Dunstaffnage Castle.
• Medieval News tells us of a 7th-century city discovered in Turkey.
• Podictionary tells us how the word tawdry comes from the 7th-century virgin St. Audrey. Fascinating.
• There was a ship graveyard found in the Baltic off the coast of Sweden, with ships going back to the Viking age.
• About.com tells us about Pope Innocent III.
• Firefly Studios has a "medieval fact of the week" series to promote their game "Stronghold Kingdoms." It looks like the game is going to be a historically-based MMO.

Looting Medieval Churches in Northern Cyprus

Medieval News has an excellent article on how medieval churches in northern Cyprus are being looted through a combination of organized crime and government cooperation. Don't miss it.

Prayer of the Woods

I got an e-mail from someone asking about "Prayer of the Woods." He's seen web sources that say that it is over 1000 years old, and that it was translated from Portuguese.

Surely there's someone in this community who can confirm the origins, and maybe even give us more detail.

Prayer of the Woods

I am the heat of your hearth on cold winter nights, The friendly shade from the summer sun, and my fruits are refreshing draughts quenching your thirst as you journey on.

I am the beam that holds your house, and the board of your table. The bed on which you lie, and the timber that builds your boat.

I am the handle of your hoe. The door of your homestead, the wood of your cradle and the shell of your coffin.

I am the bread of kindness and the flower of beauty. Ye who pass by, listen to my prayer: Harm me not.

The Norton Anthology is neither written by Ed Norton nor an anthology. Discuss.

I've been trying desperately not to blog over the last week, since that would only distract me from putting together my syllabi for the fall semester (as it is doing as I write this now).

Still, I can't help but comment, once again, about the truncated medieval offerings of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which omits tons of extremely canonical Old and Middle English literature from its tiny, tiny medieval Volume A, but which includes so much dull, boring, stuff in the remaining five volumes of modern literature that I'm convinced the editors were paid by the pound.

For example, their Anglo-Saxon offerings:

• Caedmon's Hymn (and the bit of Bede introducing it)
• Dream of the Rood
• Beowulf
• Judith
• King Alfred's Preface to the Pastoral Care
• The Wanderer
• The Wife's Lament

That's it. Really. As a bit more insult, when they added Judith in the 8th edition, they removed Battle of Maldon, as if the extra few pages was going to over-inflate the Anglo-Saxon section.

OK, I can't deal with now ... if you could knock some sense into the editors, what would you insist they include?

Met "Pen and Parchment" Exhibit a Knockout

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting an exhibit through August 23rd entitled "Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages." Here's a rave review from The New Republic, which calls it "the most original museum show in this country since 2002," and "a knockout, at once sumptuous and restrained."

h/t Merlin DeTardo

The Medievalist Place on Earth

I just got back from a day at the Magic Kingdom at Disney World which, for those of you who do not know, is built around a series of areas. Each area has a different motif, and is a "land" within the Magic Kingdom. For example, there's Fantasyland (medieval fantasy motif), Tomorrowland (futuristic motif), Main Street (early 20th-century small town motif) etc.

The overall layout interests me. Cinderella's castle does not dominate Fantasyland as you might expect. Instead, it is the centerpiece of the entire park, the hub around which everything else revolves. Main Street, then, does not open up onto the county courthouse, but onto a medieval castle.

It would be wrong, however, to over-read this as a medieval image. Instead, I think the dominant idea is one of the fairy tale, which is then associated with medieval architecture. The park is innundated with fairies and princesses, but you're hard pressed to find a knight, or happy peasants working the fields, or a monastery, or any of the other popular images associated with the Middle Ages. Fantasyland does have Excalibur in a stone that you can pose with, but there is little else Arthurian.

Consider too the cosplay. Little girls are dressed like fairies and princesses, but little boys dress as pirates -- not princes or knights or kings. Swords are either clearly pirate cutlasses or lightsabers (for nighttime play) -- but consider all the various Prince Charmings, and Robin Hoods, and other fairytale male characters that boys could be dressed as.

All of which leads to my point -- are fairy tales necessarily gendered feminine? Most of the medieval/fairytale images at the Magic Kingdom are gendered feminine. Even though it's called a "kingdom," there's no king to be seen, not even a Mickey & Minnie in a crown. Instead, the castle is Cinderella's Castle (Snow White's at Disneyland, I think), named for the princess rather than the monarch. Who is the king/queen? Since it's the "happiest place on Earth," and since Cinderella is awake, presumably it's not Malificent (the evil stepmother/queen). Are we to assume the kingdom is ruled by the newly-crowned King Charming?

I'm not trying to pretend that Disneyworld has a functioning political monarchy. These slippages, though, are big, and I think work to show the way the fairy tale is gendered (at least in the Disney conception of it). The only truly important part of the Middle Ages to Disney World is the princess -- the image of the princess is the hub around which everything else revolves, just as the castle is the hub of the park.

Morning Medieval Miscellany

Having just returned from vacation, I found a lot of medieval items clogging the pipes of the Inter-web. Here are some of them:

• News for Medievalists has five new articles. Really, you should be going there on your own without me telling you.
• Medieval Cookery will be at GenCon.
• Gearwor has Beowulf fitts 14 & 15, and talks about three-word alliterative clusters and the word hilde in Beowulf.
• A Stitch in Time has some photos and video from her exhibition.
• Steven Till has the cover and publication info on Robin Hobb's Dragon Keeper.
• The Ruminate has a bibliography for Codex Boernerianus, and talks about the job market.
• Podictionary discusses the Old English origins of the word drive.
• Per Omnia Saecula has the latest on the "acts of lust" contest promoting the new EA Dante game, and watched Eragon so you don't have to.
• Got Medieval also has details on the Dante game.
• Old Norse News has a recent books round-up.
• Apparently there was a recent medieval Dr. Who episode.
• MEMO has two CfPs for K'zoo.
• Magistra et Mater continues blogging Leeds.
• Eileen Joy is blogging ISAS.
• JJ Cohen has three links you should have: The Global Middle Ages Project, MappaMundi, and the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages.
• Also at In the Middle, the BABEL Working Group is on Facebook.
• DARC blogs two museum visits.
• Heroic Dreams reviews the documentary Reclaiming the Blade, which I really liked as well.
• The Heroic Age has almost a dozen CfPs, links, and other announcements.
• Heavenfield has a CfP on plague and famine, and talks about Bede's account of his meeting with Adomnan.
• The British Library will be getting the Macclesfield Alphabet Book. h/t The Cranky Professor, who also has a link to a slide show of MS images.
• A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe has a post on notaries' anthropomorphic animals symbols.
• Archaeology in Europe has about eight new articles.
• Matthew Gabriele has links for his Podcasts on Medieval Texts.

Morning Medieval Miscellany

Light (if any) blogging for the next few days. In the meantime:

• Archaeology in Europe has over a dozen new posts, many medieval.
• Another Damned Medievalist is looking for an August host for Carnivalesque. If you've got a blog that hasn't received much notice, hosting a Carnivalesque is a great way to let people know you're out there.
• Cinerati discusses the marketing of the World of Warcraft movie. Easily Distracted talks about the problems of making a game movie.
• A Commonplace Book discusses 15th-century shield use vs. modern reenactors' use, and has a 15th-century episode of Spanish chivalry.
• Dame Eleanor Hull discusses the painstaking research that has to take place before publishing medieval textual criticism.
• Got Medieval talks snail porn. The sad thing? I googled "snail porn" just to see what would happen, and his post isn't even the first hit.
• The Heroic Age has over a dozen new posts.
• DARC discusses iron mandrils.
• In the Middle has a post on gender in Middle English studies.
• The Lost Fort has images from the island of Staffa.
• Magistra et Mater discusses gender and history at Leeds.
• The Medieval Garden Enclosed has a post on chicory.
• Medieval Material Culture blog has an article on the service records of medieval English soldiers. News for Medievalists has more info on that database. So does About.com.
• About.com also has posts on the Vinland Map controversy and a metal detectorist's late-medieval find.
• Muhlberger's Early History has a post on Bernard of Clairvaux and the Knights Templar.
• Musings from a L.O.O.N. has a post on a medieval fortress being built in Arkansas. She was kind enough to send me some contact information, so I hope to have a post of my own on this after I return from vacation.
• I just bought a new cologne, but Per Omnia Saecula makes me regret my choice!
• Podictionary discusses the medieval origins of the word Wednesday. If you've never understood my bizarre references to Odin every time I post a Miscellany on Wednesday, this ought to clear it up.
• Obama is in league with Loki. h/t Poliblog.
• The Ruminate has a bunch of stuff.
• Steven till has a post on Old Wardour Castle, and the medieval history term of the week is reliquary.
• A Stitch in Time has a manuscript image of shoulder straps.
• Wormtalk and Slugspeak passes along a Tolkien CfP.

Left-Handedness in the Middle Ages

This comic strip (which I suspect is supposed to be about homosexuality) depicts the medieval church as being intolerant of the left-handed.

I've heard this idea before -- that left-handedness was somehow associated with evil or witchcraft in the Middle Ages. The problem is that I can't recall ever having run across any such reference.

I asked a historian friend of mine who's done a bit of work in witchcraft and sorcery from the late-classical/early-medieval period, and he too had never seen any good scholarly reference for this idea.

So, folks, is it true? Can someone give me an actual medieval reference -- or is this like the "fact" that people in the Middle Ages didn't eat tomatoes because they thought they were poisonous: just a load of bunk?*


h/t Ninalog

*For those who don't know, tomatoes are a New World plant. Medieval Europeans did not eat tomatoes because they had never seen (nor even heard) of them, yet somehow this myth won't die.

Sam Raimi to Direct World of Warcraft Flick

I gave up playing World of Warcraft about a year ago, and never regretted it, until now.

Morning Medieval Miscellany

Pushing the envelope of what can be considered a "morning" miscellany:

• Wraetlic has headed off early for ISAS, and has a post on poetry entitled "Puffins and Computers and Digital Anglo-Saxon."
• A Stitch in Time has a finished hairnet.
• Medieval Silkwork has an image of a dress in progress.
• Think all this sewing is just for women? Muhlberger's Early History shows that at least some knights did their own sewing.
• Mark Lord has a post on medieval myths about witchcraft, h/t Steven Till.
• Speaking of Steven Till, the medieval history term of the week is Danelaw, the featured historical fiction novel is Housecarl, and casting continues for the "Song of Ice and Fire" series.
• The Swain has a post on "DiGlossia in Anglo-Saxon England."
• Per Omnia Saecula has an image of Dante sand art.
• News for Medievalists has about a half-dozen new articles.
• There's been some discussion on listservs and elsewhere about this: A scholar at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts is declaring the famous (notorious?) Vinland map genuine.
• Modern Medieval had a couple of posts, but kept crashing every time I went to a permalink. Normally it works fine, so I'd suggest heading on over there and seeing their new Tweetboard feature.
• Medievalism has a post on the book Queer Movie Medievalisms.
• A Commonplace Book has a post on cutting pikes in battle.
• The Heroic Age has a CfP for "Thinking Small: Scale and Meaning in Medieval Art."
• DARC and Hammered Out Bits have several new crossposted items on their current projects.
• Just because you don't exist doesn't mean you can't blog, as Crispin Guest demonstrates.
• Eileen Joy has the second installment of her impressions of Leo Bersani.
• Magistra et Mater is blogging the International Medieval Congress in Leeds.
• Medieval Bookworm discusses Twilight of Avalon and Pope Joan.
• Here are a couple of sources that came through my e-mail: A bibliography of manuscripts of medieval Latin chronicles, and the Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi.
• In medievalist architecture, the North Bay Road Castle was damaged in a fire.

A New Saga

The Onion has another medievalist offering, this time about a new saga.

Morning Medieval Miscellany

Here's a Miscellany for your Wednesday morning. Since I'm writing this Tuesday night, and Leeds is ongoing, the Miscellany will be about 6 hours old when you can finally read it.

• Age of Perfection compares Leeds and Kalamazoo.
• JJ Cohen and Eileen Joy are live blogging Leeds. Ooops, here's another Cohen post that came up while I wrote this Miscellany.
• Archaeology in Europe has an article on the search for the tomb of Suleiman I.
• The Bitter Scroll muses about depression, Tolkien, and the Anglo-Saxon worldview.
• Another Damned Medievalist is blogging a monasticism conference.
• A Commonplace Book has a recreation of the Pas de la Belle Pelerine to be held at Pennsic, and a post on shield construction.
• A Corner of Tenth Century Europe has a post on fiscal land, and a post on some recent readings.
• The Cranky Professor has a post (and image) about a statue of Virgin and Child made around 980. The statue was made then, not the post.
• Got Medieval has a knight confronting a snail.
• Henchminion responds to the snail image, and the weird similarity between Richard Scarry and De Nominibus Utensilium.
• Heavenfield discusses the symbolism of the number 300 in medieval battles, and shows us where to win free tickets to Brendan and the Secret of Kells.
• The Heroic Age has over a dozen new posts.
• Heroic Dreams discusses an upcoming book on castles, and the new Wheel of Time book.
• Humanities Researcher has a CfP on blogging and medieval studies.
• Lingwe discusses Tolkien Studies 6 and a planned Lewis/Tolkien collaboration that never took place.
• The Lost Fort has some beautiful castle images.
• Lost in Transcription has some Pearl-Poet Society CfPs for K'zoo 2010.
• The Medieval Garden Enclosed has a post on grain harvesting.
• Medieval Material Culture Blog posts some new exhibits.
• Medievalism announces that the Studies in Medievalism conference deadline is extended, and discusses the Post-Historical Middle Ages.
• Modern Medieval discusses the construction of the "Dark Ages" and "Renaissance."
• News for Medievalists has four new stories.
• Per Omnia Saecula watches In the Name of the King so you don't have to.
• Steven Till discusses the Battle of Barnet and interviews Victor Verney.
• Getting Medieval discusses some medieval skeletons.
• Gearwor discusses the Beowulf on the Beach kerfluffle, and has Beowulf, fitt 13.
• Medieval Research with Joyce discusses books on medieval manuscripts.

Hammered Out Bits has two posts on a glass bead making furnace. It's a cross-post from the Dark Ages Re-Creation Company blog. I knew of the existence of DARC, but not the blog, so I'm updating my RSS feed accordingly.

Sir Gwilym of Many Conquests

Here's a news* story about Gwilym of Many Conquests, and his many descendants.

I see they've interviewed that publicity hound Lucas Pearson of Cardiff University.


*wink, wink

Morning Medieval Miscellany

Circumstances have conspired to keep me from a full-bore Miscellany, but here's a little bit:

• Medieval Cookery has a post on the importance of a single word difference in manuscripts.
• Gearwor has Beowulf, Fitt 12 and a comment on sunflowers.
• There's a medieval manuscript illuminations exhibit at the National Museum of Art, entitled "Heaven on Earth." h/t About.com.
• Studies of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages has the medieval-themed offerings of TCM for July.
• A Stitch in Time discusses beeswax as a medieval sewing tool.
• The Medieval History Term(s) of the week are trivium and quadrivium.
• Yesterday was the Feast of St. Benedict.
• Owlfish went to a modern opera about a 12th-century troubador.
• The International Congress on Medieval Studies CfPs are up.
• In a new installment of Medieval Literature I Didn't Know, the Swain has Codex Boernerianus.
• Dr. Virago discusses pedagogy issues and Chaucer's placement in the curriculum.
• How did you spend Independence Day? Jeff Sypeck spent it listening to a Welsh woman retelling stories from the Mabinogion.
• News for Medievalists has an interview with Axel E. W. Müller.

Not even close to being caught up, but I put a little dent into it. By the way, here's a medieval blog called Medieval Times. Update blogrolls, etc.