Medieval Modern

If you have been paying any attention to The Toast's content this past year, you'll know already that Mallory Ortberg has been killing it with her medieval-themed spoofs and humorous material. One of her recent successes was The Wife of Bath's Prologue. So I handed this piece to this semester's Chaucer students and told them they'd get extra credit for spoofing a different Tale, a la The Toast.

My department is a great place to work. For example, yesterday I got to play a dragon for a colleague. Simon Gatrell is teaching a course on Harry Potter, and he needed faculty "dragons" to guard dragon eggs (a scene you might remember from The Goblet of Fire). Students could win the eggs from us "dragons" if they answered our questions correctly and petitioned us with sufficient aplomb and abasement.

The Toast often does a good job with medieval memes, and with this one, they've knocked the proverbial ball out of the park. I link partially in anticipation of teaching ENGL 3300 (Women in Literature: Medieval Women's Literary Culture) shortly, where we'll read Julian and learn exactly why all things shall be well.

If Julian of Norwich Were Your Professor ...

It's easy to pidgeonhole medieval "science" as a mishmash of superstition and ignorance. (Alchemy? Astrology? Ptolematic cosmos?) But a team of physicists, Latinists, and philosophers at the University of Durham are suggesting otherwise. They've taken the scientific writings of Robert Grosseteste -- thirteenth-century English bishop and mathematical luminary -- and analyzed them through both medieval and contemporary understandings of science, and found that Grossetesete's methods and conclusions aren't that different from contemporary science's understanding of the universe.

What if Lewis Carroll had lived in Chaucer's London? What if his Alice had been an "Alys"? What if he had written in verse instead of prose, if his Alys had known what a fourteenth-century girl would have known, and his dream-vision (for so it is, really) had been populated by medieval rather than Victorian references? Well, it might have looked something like The Aventures of Alys in Wondyr Lond, a new translation of Carroll's story into Middle English.

A little medieval scribal humor (and pain), embedded in a classic Xerox commercial. And you thought the printing press was a major technological innovation...

(with thanks to my 2310W students, who dredged out this wonderful gem!)

Imagine. Lines from classic movies, in Old English. That's what these students from the University of Sheffield have done -- you'll never look at Grease the same way again.

A recent article in History Today remarks upon a somewhat unexpected fashion trend: Parisian designers creating collections inspired by medieval texts, images, and writers -- as well as medieval clothing styles themselves. As Benjamin Wild writes of Vivienne Westwood,

On your arm, even.

See the original Tumblr image at

http://tattoolit.com/post/57158513780/pre-color

What do graffiti and medieval manuscripts have in common?

The Dutch graffiti artist Shoe is finding out, and you can read about his graffiti art, commissioned in celebration of the Lindisfarne Gospels.