| A bucket for monsieur? |
[Oct. 16th, 2009|06:49 pm] |
If you study medieval history long enough, you eventually come across a manuscript illustration for every aspect of medieval life.
( The Hangover ) |
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| A random question |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|04:18 pm] |
Backpacking in Romania a few years ago reminded me that I usually take for granted the role that animal control agencies play in modern cities. When a city doesn't have a functioning pound or humane society, packs of stray dogs start to congregate in the streets and squares. The sleep on park benches and beg for scraps like furry panhandlers. Sometimes four or five of them will try to slouch after you into a dark side street with the air of hungry coyotes.
It occurs to me to wonder if medieval European cities had the same kinds of semi-feral animals as modern ones do. There are certainly no Tantony pigs in Toronto. What about pigeons? Were wild pigeons quite so common when pigeon was considered good to eat and meat was expensive to come by? |
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| Dance craze |
[Jun. 24th, 2009|12:36 pm] |
Via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kalivor, here's an interesting article that just came out in The Psychologist. It talks about the plague of compulsive dancing that broke out in various cities along the Rhine in 1374 and speculates about whether it could have been a kind of mass anxiety attack. |
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| Kel's First Rule Illustrated |
[Apr. 17th, 2009|05:06 pm] |
Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval posted a great image this week. It's a marginal illustration from Pierpont Morgan G24, a Flemish copy of The Vows of the Peacock from circa 1350.
Does this picture look sort of familiar to anyone else? The nifty thing is that it predates Fiore by a good fifty years and Talhoffer by more than a century.
Ever had one of those moments when you were so intent on getting the fancy footwork right that you forgot the not-getting-hit part? That's me on the left. |
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| Medieval pop culture |
[Mar. 5th, 2009|01:38 pm] |
I don't know whether to celebrate or groan over pop culture's current fascination with all things medieval. On the heels of Carl Pyrdum's post about the Crusade movie Arnold Schwarzenegger never made, I give you Dante's Inferno: The Video Game. I quote:
[The manufacturer's] take still features Dante as the protagonist, but the poet-philosopher is now a hulking veteran of the Crusades. He returns home from war to find Beatrice, the subject of his love and admiration, murdered. When her soul is "kidnapped" by Lucifer himself, Dante dives down to the very depths of hell, armed with Death's scythe, to win her back.
It was bound to happen sometime. |
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| Medieval weirdness returns |
[Feb. 19th, 2009|05:41 pm] |
It's been too long since I last posted any truly strange medievalia. To remedy the situation, I'm going to link to the oddities page at www.medievalcookery.com. Medieval Cookery, you'll recall, is a site with a database of two dozen late medieval cookbooks in translation. I mentioned it last year, but I somehow didn't notice the page. It seems I also missed a few good recipes. Here's my new favorite one, from a fifteenth-century Dutch cookbook.
Sheep's penis for the foodie. Wash it well and clean it. Then take brayed saffron, the yolks of ten eggs and a spoonful of milk. Temper with fat and stuff the penis, but take care that it is not overstuffed. Blanch it, then roast it. Sprinkle with powder of ginger, cinnamon and a little pepper. |
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| Medieval drug culture meets modern science |
[Nov. 14th, 2008|10:49 pm] |
The Medieval Garden Enclosed, a blog run by the keepers of the medieval garden at the Cloisters Museum in New York, has an interesting post from last week on plants of the nightshade family. These toxic plants act on the nervous system and have anesthetic and psychoactive properties. The post connects them with medieval references to flying ointments. The best line comes at the end: "Twentieth-century investigators using a seventeenth-century formula that included deadly nightshade, henbane, and datura claim to have experienced such wild rides as the witches had taken after rubbing their foreheads with the mixture." I would like to have seen the grant application for that experiment. One wonders how these projects get funding. |
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| A classic from the B-list |
[Oct. 23rd, 2008|06:41 pm] |
Some works of literature are just so dreadful, they cross the line into the sublime. While surfing Google Books to see if any interesting legal history had been posted lately, I happened across this gem. It can only be described as a mash-up of Sir Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, with a side-dish of nineteenth-century BDSM. Particularly entertaining is the preface, where the author protests that he's not ripping off Ivanhoe and has no political agenda. (A book about the evils of slavery written in the U.S. in 1855: hmmm...) See also the first line of the story, which is so long, it doesn't end until the next page.
The trial by combat scene at the end shows a surprising amount of historical accuracy. The court and the procedural rules belong to the second half of the fourteenth century, about two hundred years too late for the setting of the story, but considering how little had been published in the field by 1855, that's pretty good research. |
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| Flinging poo in medieval France |
[Sep. 23rd, 2008|06:16 pm] |
In the thirteenth century, Orléans was an important centre for the study of French law. And what, you might ask, occupied the great legal minds of the day? Apparently it was the subject of flinging poo.
The Livre de Jostice et de Plet, a legal textbook, explains what to do when the shit hits.*
BOOK XIX, CHAPTER XVII
1. Vile filth is indeed a misdeed when one flings it without reason. Vile filth is that which is so stinky that it corrupts the air; and that which is otherwise does not constitute it, if one could keep it at home until the next day.
2. He who throws filth on a man ought to make amends.
3. One may ask: if one has thrown filth on a man, are there grounds for trial by combat (point de gage)? And the response is that if a little bit of filth is thrown, and does not draw blood, or injure, or maim, or cause more than five sous of damage, there are no grounds for battle and the choice of proof lies with the plaintiff. But if big filth is flung, which causes big damage, or an injury, or a cut which causes big damage, in that case there are grounds.
4. One can initiate legal action against someone who resides in a house [from which poo is thrown anonymously?], but it is not the same as accusing a man.
5. Pierre has thrown some filth on me, by which he has done me injury and ten sous worth of damage; and he saw this. And if he says that he did not see this, I am prepared to show and swear as I ought. And Pierre could counter with such denial and defence as he ought. And one would say that Pierre is liable to bear law and to recognize that it was seen or to counter the charge with battle.
6. Concerning damage, one cannot accuse without guarantors, and with guarantors one can.
*The quick and dirty translation is mine |
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| Engineering pranks, before there were engineers |
[May. 21st, 2008|11:58 pm] |
Another celebrated clash between the city police and the University of Paris has come to be known as the affair of the Pet-au-Deable (Devil's Fart or, more substantially perhaps, Devil's Turd), a name it takes from that of a colossal boundary stone, which, on an autumn day in 1451, some University students dragged away from outside the house of the widow of one of Charles VI's notaries and re-erected, as a sort of totem around which to frolic and roister, on the Mont St Hilaire. Within a week of the theft, the widow had reported her loss to the city authorities, and the stone was with great difficulty removed from the Quartier Latin to what was thought to be the safety of a courtyard of the Palais Royal. But before the end of the following week the Pet-au-Deable was back in the students' quarter.
--Andrew McCall, The Medieval Underworld (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979), 167-8.
The French poet François Villon wrote a romance about that incident, but sadly it has been lost to history. I wonder if this qualifies as the earliest evidence of an engineer prank? For that matter, at what point can the University of Paris be said to have begun teaching engineering as a subject? |
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| Do not want? |
[Mar. 28th, 2008|11:36 pm] |
I just ran across this nifty site, which lets you search the English translations of two dozen late medieval cookbooks online. Naturally, I went looking for the stranger recipes.
From the Goodman of Paris, a late fourteenth-century book of instructions written by a Parisian burgher for his young wife, here are a couple of miscellaneous delicacies.
Hedgehog should have its throat cut, be singed and gutted, then trussed like a pullet, then pressed in a towel until very dry; and then roast it and eat with cameline sauce, or in pastry with wild duck sauce. Note that if the hedgehog refuses to unroll, put it in hot water, and then it will straighten itself.
Squirrels are singed, gutted, trussed like rabbits, roasted or put in pastry: eat with cameline sauce or in pastry with wild duck sauce.
Another one, from the Liber Cure Cocorum, written in England around 1430:
Stewed pigeons. Take pigeons and hew them in small morsels. Put them in an earthen pot. Take peeled garlic and herbs anon. Chop them up small before you do anything else. Put them in your pot and don't leave out the good broth with white grease. Add powder and good verjuice. Colour it with saffron and some salt. Put all these things in your pot and you shall stew your pigeons.
The pigeons probably weren't caught on the street. Medieval people often kept domestic pigeons in cotes.
On the other hand, what to make of this recipe? (Warning: click at your own peril!) |
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| Exit, ----ed by a bear |
[Feb. 11th, 2008|09:36 pm] |
I think this one belongs in the medieval weirdness collection.
"One admired eleventh-century ludus histrionum (play performed by actors) is reported to have featured a tame bear, an actor's naked membra and honey!"
--John Southworth, The English Medieval Minstrel, p. 7, citing Richard Axton, European Drama of the Early Middle Ages, p. 18. |
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| Medieval zombies |
[Jan. 24th, 2008|03:55 pm] |
I heard a lecture today on the horror/worship relationship that medieval sources had with lepers. Halfway through, as the prof was describing people's disgust at the sight of shambling beggars losing their extremities, I had sudden visions of a George Romero film set in medieval Europe.
I wonder if any of the common tropes from zombie movies have their origins in medieval literature? This calls for Serious Academic Research. |
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| New ways to put off essay marking |
[Nov. 27th, 2007|08:28 pm] |
I have a marvelous new source of distraction: Stephen Tomkins' regular web column Loose Canons. It's a miscellany of some of the more bizarre characters from church history. All your favourites are there: the pillar saints, the Cadaver Synod and good old Saint Wilgifortis.
See also The Twelve Days of Kitschmas on the same site. |
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| On monkeys |
[Nov. 21st, 2007|08:40 pm] |
Monkeys show up quite often as pets in the Middle Ages. I wonder why they're no longer popular? Are they hard to housetrain? |
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| Things to do on the weekend in medieval Paris |
[Nov. 15th, 2007|08:24 pm] |
Remind me never again to lead five tutorials and deliver a two hour lecture on the same day. My brains are now leaking out of my ears.
On the upside, my research for today's lecture on medieval urban life provided the following anecdote for my collection of medieval weirdness. It comes from an anonymous Parisian diarist writing in 1425.
On the last Sunday in August, an entertainment was given at the Hôtel known as the Hôtel d'Armagnac in the Rue St. Honoré. Four blind men wearing armour and each carrying a club were put into an enclosure in which there was also a strong pig. They were to have it if they could kill it. They fought this strange battle, giving each other tremendous blows with the clubs -- whenever they tried to get a good clout at the pig, they would hit each other, so that if they had not been wearing armour they would certainly have killed each other. On the Saturday before this Sunday the blind men were led through Paris, wearing their armour, with a great banner in front of them with a picture of a pig on it. In front of this went a man bearing a drum. *
Sadly, this snippet didn't make it into the lecture.
*David Nicholas, The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500, quoting a source that I'm too exhausted to look up and cite properly, p. 302. |
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