Medievalist: the Job Description

This may come as a shock, but there are some people out there who don't know what a medievalist does. More accurately, they don't know what I could possibly do with a degree in medieval studies (yes, friends and family, you know who you are. . .) Well, for your benefit here is a job description and career list for medievalists. So the next time the ladies at church ask Gramma what I'm doing with all that book-learning, she'll have an answer.

Job Requirements:

-- Wasted seven years and many federal dollars on an advanced degree at a university with a medievalish name (eg. Oxford, Yale, Notre Dame)

-- Possesses the ability to decipher dates by the ecumenical calendar in 3 seconds or less

-- Can swear in Latin, Middle English and Occitan

-- Has laughed at the character references in Dante's Inferno

-- Has read Dante's Inferno

-- Able to recite the popes, in order, from Benedict IV to Nicholas V

-- Has critiqued the veracity of at least 5 medieval period movies

-- Knows that J.R.R. Tolkien was not just the author of The Lord of the Rings

-- Has spent at least one drunken weekend trying to build a trebuchet out of scrap timber

-- Has memorized the introduction to The Canterbury Tales. . . in Middle English

-- Has used the words 'fief', 'viscount', and 'barbican' in conversation in the past month

-- Able to recite the script of Monty Python's Holy Grail verbatim

-- Cringes when the word 'medieval' is used as a synonym for 'backward' or 'cruel'

And by popular demand . . .

The Medievalist Career List

-- least favorite history professor on campus

-- author of books and articles that will be circulated amongst a readership of six people worldwide

-- tour guide at the Vatican

-- historical consultant for Medieval Times restaurant

-- King or Queen of the local chapter of the SCA

-- Head archivist of an incunabula collection that only God Himself is allowed to view, if he stands behind glass and wears white gloves

-- the smartest waiter/waitress at Chili's

"Blogger" Needs a Continuity Director

Ever click that little "next blog>>" button at the top of your screen? I'm not sure what the blogging gods are using as criteria for selecting the next blog you view, but they have quite a sense of humor. Today I clicked and was brought to the "Nellie Furtado Videos" blog.* If this is supposed to be representative of a 'blog-milieu' into which Medieval Knieval fits, someone get me a cyanide pellet to bite into.
Surely it had to be a mistake, so I clicked again. I got a South Korean blog of Prada photos. Establishing a link between Medieval Knieval, Nellie Furtado and Italian high fashion is a stretch, but I'm sure I can reason it out. It's like that game where you have to link two actors to one another in three films or less. Don't think I can do it?

How about this:

1)Medieval Knieval includes the word "crap" in a recent post.
2) Nellie Furtado's music is known to be crap.
3) Furtado is a Portugese last name.
4) Portugal is in southern Europe.
5) Italy is in southern Europe.
6) Prada is from Italy.

I should apply this amount of dedication to studying for the GRE. But what fun is that? I plan to post further Next Blog Updates, so stay tuned.

* Your first reaction ought to be: "Who on earth would devote a blog to Nellie Furtado??" After that, choose your own level of shock and amazement.

It's not Fair! Youth in Charge

Apparently,* the short life expectancy during the Middle Ages** may have meant that European society was ruled in large part by the young. This statistic has been used to explain the high rate of violence and general silly behavior exhibited by some medievals. It leads me to ponder a society run by children, and certain facets of the Middle Ages are making more and more sense in this context.

Sleeping naked, for instance. It takes an act of Congress to convince my sons to put on proper clothing in the daylight hours, never mind after dark. Of course, since my teenaged daughters need to be harangued not to sleep fully clothed (complete with shoes), this theory may be flawed.

And courtly love -- what about that? It's hard enough to get a fourteen-year-old to commit to a single radio station for an hour, never mind a mate. No wonder teenaged brides were forever swooning over the jousting arena hotties to the detriment of their geriatric husbands.

The Flagellants? They were the medieval version of emo teens, cutting themselves 'just to feel something.' If they had had iPods, they would have been full of Marilyn Manson and Tool.

Marginalia. Reminds me of my tenth-grade biology notebook -- beside my notes on natural selection and the Krebs Cycle, one could find caricatures of my teacher having his arm bitten off by a rabid macaque. Anyone who doesn't see the parallels needs to visit Carl Pyrdum's marginalia gallery at Got Medieval. Strange monkeys with overlarge nether-regions, monks being violated in the bum by unusual instruments . . . in short, this must be the work of teenagers given over to the scriptoria against their wills. I wonder how many of those monkeys were meant to symbolize the local bishop?


Medieval art in general shows a notable lack of reality and perspective. Those "young, kicky kids"*** of the medieval art scene were too busy getting high at the apothecary's to be dragged down by a bummer like realism. Except Giotto, of course, who always stood by his media statement that "that potable gold wasn't mine -- I don't know how it got into my travel bag."


* according to certain medievalists that shall not be cited herein due to extreme laziness

** certain other medievalists, also not cited here due to extreme laziness, report that there are problems with the assumption of short life expectancy during the Middle Ages, since infant mortality rates were so high (wow, this post is already becoming quite academic, isn't it? alarming!)

*** to quote my art history professor, whose name shall be omitted to protect the innocent

On Sheep, Crap, and the Hobo Next Door

In those rare moments of self-doubt (okay, so they're frequent, whatever) I wonder to myself why anyone would want to read a medieval blog written by a neurotic woman given to rare moments (okay, frequent!) of self-doubt. Then I take a look at the other blogs* out there and I'm no longer experiencing said self-doubt.
Have a look at MoutonBenzene Luxe, an artsy site which my mediocre French translates as 'Gasoline Sheep with trendy-sounding-final-word-I-didn't-learn-in-high-school'. A moment of silence to digest that, please.
Okay.
Ready?
Then there is The House Next Door, which just freaked me out in general because I'm not sure which of my neighbors is posting it. Is it Crazy-Shirtless-Hedge-Pruner-Dude on my left, or is some hobo with a laptop posting from the vacant house on my right? Now I'm spending valuable blogtime watching the empty windows for lights.
I found The American Thinker amusing in that its staff put the two words together as if they were mutually exclusive. American AND thinker? Wow. Imagine that.
Cory Doctorow's Craphound. With so much aforementioned crap in the blogging world to "sniff out"**, and most of it published without such a helpful disclaimer, I found the blog name refreshing. Well, as refreshing as anything that's related to the word 'crap' can be. But I have to say I felt misled, because Craphound turned out to be okay. And I was really looking forward to some crap. Oh well . . .
The Orcinus Orca Collective raised an eyebrow as I passed it on Blogs of Note. Are we expected to believe that aquatic mammals can type? How do they use their laptops without laps, and most especially without electrocuting themselves?



So, dear pilgrim, what do all these ruminations signify? Have I been keeping you from that pithy new reality series and the accompanying crusty TV dinner for no reason at all, you wonder? I can only answer with a resounding



Yes.



Sorry to disappoint.



* in case the reader is not aware, there are blogs other than this one. But you don't want to read those other blogs, now, do you? . . . unless they're medieval in nature, of course.

** you may not have noticed the juvenile play on words there. I'll give you a minute. Got it? Okay, you can resume reading.

Canterbury Tales for Teens

Okay, since I'd rather not be cleaning my house right now, try this on for size. In the spirit of my last post, here's a little exercise in dumbing down the world's great literature. I call it, The Canterbury Tales for Teens. For those of you not familiar with the prologue to Chaucer's great work (which begs the question 'why on earth are you prowling history blogs??'), here you are. I have represented it in Original and Teen formats.

Whan that Aprille with his shores sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
(And palmers for to seken straunge strondes)
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelonde, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

Okay, the Teen version, translated by Bringoutyourdead:

Like, in springtime stuff grows n crap
Birds n stuff wake up
N people start kickin it all over England (which is, like, this country really far away where they drive on the wrong side of the frikkin' road and omg my sister met this way hot guy from England once or was it Ireland i don't remember but it was 'somethin'land and i remember he was wicked hot n we couldn't understand him n we said what language is that n he said english n we said IS NOT!)
N so the Englandpeople wanna go C this dead guy's grave
Cuz he did somethin cool
Whatever.

In my medieval studies career, I need to seriously consider translating incunabula into 'Teenish'. It's an untapped gold mine in the middle school sector.

Pilgrimage, the Reality Series

Fads are cyclical (look at bellbottoms). What if pilgrimage were to come back in vogue? It’s not so hard to imagine, given the current price of gas. But if modern Man were to reinvent the medieval walking tour, what would it be like?

First of all, I wonder who would be going. The Canterbury Tales featured its cast of medieval Everymen (and Women). Who would represent the 21st century on a pilgrimage? The concept of a months-long sabbatical would probably be easiest for college professors, and it would sure free up time to finish that lecture on Dante. The outdoor life would appeal to those escaping the flourescent world of an office cubicle. But we don't want to overrepresent the preternaturally pale and bookish types. In the spirit of diversity (and modern people are all about diversity, right?) -- how about a dairy farmer, a vascular surgeon, a housewife, a lawyer and a real-estate agent? There would (undoubtedly) be a photo journalist along to document the trip, and a travel agent could find the best hotels. At least one politician would show up for the good press (I'm having disturbing visions of Newt Gingrich in a tunic and hose). And anyone who’s watched a reality show knows that there’s always one disgruntled misfit to stir up drama -- the pampered out-of-work actress will do.

In Chaucerian fashion, the producers of The Pilgrimage would assemble this cast at a tavern in London (is the Tabard still standing, I wonder?). At a medieval-style feast of hogheads and blood sausage, which the cast would be challenged to eat in the hopes of winning a plasma-screen TV, the rules of NBC’s The Pilgrimage would be spelled out. The true medieval pilgrim traveled toward some holy site in the hope of salvation from their sins, so the modern version is all-too-predictable. First one to make it to the plaster-of-Paris bones of Ed Sullivan will be allowed to tear up the envelope containing a description of their darkest deed -- not any ordinary sin, but something worthy of Jerry Springer, mind you. The losers have their sin read on live TV, with simulcasted reactions from their spouses, lovers, and parents.
Each week, Pampered Actress would cry in close-up segments about the difficulties of finding good sushi or the loss of her favorite loofah, whilst she seduces Cubicle Guy into pulling her across the Alps in a rickshaw.

Mother-of-Six from Akron will give birth to her seventh as she crosses the Rhine, thus taking her out of competition but assuring her the talk-show circuit that week. College Professor would be unanimously voted off the show in week three for his constant ruminations on how medieval pilgrimages were nothing like this. The Politician, who unwittingly insults the mayor of Constantinople in a tragic drunken interpreter accident, winds up recruiting Personal Injury Lawyer’s help to get out of a Turkish prison. I can already hear the silky-voiced allusions to the Fourth Crusade: "Constantinople hasn't seen this wild a time since the thirteenth century, folks. . ." The drama really heats up in week five, when a group of mock Vikings (hey, since when has Hollywood been historically accurate?) attack our pilgrims at a checkpoint in Norway. One of the more zealous Norsemen takes his part a bit too seriously, and Real-Estate Agent gets a spearhead embedded in his carotid artery. Yet Vascular Surgeon steps in to save the day, performing televised surgery with nothing but a sharpened stick and some shoelaces.

Farmer and Photo-Journalist are neck and neck by the final episode, but Photo-Journalist gets held up documenting the atrocity of finding a parking spot in Jerusalem. Farmer arrives at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre first, only to find that Pampered Actress has also been seducing the show’s producer, and had insider information on the location of Ed Sullivan’s bones. There is a mad dash for the crypt, in which Pampered Actress breaks a nail and collapses in a blubbering heap. Farmer wins the vacation to New Zealand, $25,000, and a year’s supply of Dr. Scholl’s inserts.

If you think that's exciting, stay tuned for highlights of next season. . .