Medieval

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August 3, 2011

God’s Cods: Relics and Reliquaries at the British Museum

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While I was in London last month, I went to the British Museum’s special exhibition, Treasures of Heaven, on medieval relics. If you’re not a medievalist, it’s probably a pretty weird exhibition: lots of jeweled boxes and intricately detailed statues holding things like a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, breast milk from the Virgin Mary, or my personal favourite, a piece of Thomas Becket’s skull. If you are a medievalist…well, it’s still pretty weird, but it’s also fascinating to see in person. Relics were such an integral part of medieval theology—the thinking was that by viewing or touching or praying over these things with physical connections to a saint, or Jesus, or whoever, you were growing closer to God yourself. And, unsurprisingly, having a really good relic or a collection of relics became big business for religious houses, since having a good enough draw would mean big bucks from pilgrims coming to your church, donating money to view the relic, staying in the area, etc, etc. There was an amazing cabinet on display that tried to make up in number for what it lacked in wow factor—it holds about two hundred different teensy relics.

A couple random thoughts: as always, a display on medieval religious history makes me spit on the ground at the thought of Henry VIII, who is responsible for the paucity of relics from Great Britain. (He is also why so many gorgeous statues and church decorations have been destroyed. NEVER TRUST A GINGER.) Also, I think the exhibition gets a bit weaker when it tries to draw in later “relics”—a ring holding a then-forbidden image of Charles I is interesting, but not really the same sort of piece as a knucklebone of John the Baptist, you know?

I think what I liked the most about seeing all these relics and reliquaries is how it brought home the physicality of medieval spirituality. It’s one thing to read about people making pilgrimages to Canterbury Cathedral—or even to have been there myself—but seeing a jeweled box with a piece of Becket’s skull that people would have gazed at in prayer is a whole different beast. For a culture that was very invested in the transience of this world, there’s a weird obsession with the importance of our bodies and the bits of them that are left behind that was really intriguing to see in person.

Anyway, irritatingly, there was no photography allowed, so I can show you NOTHING. So go see it yourself, or failing that, wait for the exhibition catalogue to go on further sale. I know I will. Maybe I’ll even craft a reliquary for it in the meantime. You can knit a reliquary, right?

 

July 6, 2011

Winken, Blinken, and Longbows

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge, Medieval | Tags: , , , |
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Back when I was at university, I remember one of my professors telling me that medievalists are the dorkiest of the history/literature crowds because we always take that step too far in getting involved in our subject area. Like, would you expect someone specialising in the Victorian novel to work as a chimney sweep at the weekend? Or for someone especially interested in midcentury fiction to be super into their aspic recipes? Of course not. But a medievalist…odds are high they have a broadsword stashed away somewhere, or have taken a class on making chainmail, or have tried out a Viking recipe for gingerbread. (I have ticked two out of those three boxes, and I’m not telling you which ones.)

All of this is a long intro to mentioning that at a work do earlier this week, I got to try my hand at archery. Like so many other little girls, I’ve often dreamed of massacring a fleet of French soldiers and Genoese mercenaries on the fields of Crecy, so this was exciting for several reasons. And I’ll put it out there right now, I did hit the center of the target on one of my three shots. However, it turns out there’s a tiny little step involved in archery I wasn’t expecting: so apparently, if you are a right-handed person, aiming correctly involves closing your left eye. And guess what I struggle to do? I can wink my right eye totally fine, and I have a long and fruitful history of blinking. (Weirdly, it turns out my twin sister is the opposite: she can wink her left eye and not her right.) But tell me to close my left eye and left eye only, and I look a little like my dog when he’s got a smear of peanut butter on his forehead: aware of what physical action needs to be taken, but a bit stymied on how to accomplish it.

It turns out that around a third of people have the same problem, and so if any of them get into archery they wear an eyepatch to compensate. This leaves me with a dilemma. On the one hand, I’m pretty sure with some concentration I could get the winking thing down. I taught myself to whistle when I was about seventeen, so I think when it comes to plowing through random minor physical abilities by sheer grit, I’m your woman. But then again, if I don’t figure this out, I could pick myself up a new hobby that involves the prominent use of an eyepatch, which is a whole other area of badassery I have yet to explore. Decisions, decisions…

 

June 15, 2011

iWaste Land

Posted by meghanpurvis under 1920s, Article link, Historical, Medieval | Tags: , , , , , , |
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I usually find attempts to make literature all modern and techy and NEW MEDIA! a little desperate, but this Salon article’s description of a digital version of "The Waste Land", complete with audio performances and visual aids of Ezra Pound’s edits, may have just changed my mind. I remember having to create an annotated version in high school, and having to write in teeeeeensy-tiny letters to fit in all my notes on classical references, earlier drafts, and connections to contemporary history.

I also—and this is probably coming out of my recent viva-studying and associated academic pretension—think it’s particularly fascinating because of how it might provide a workaround for the marginalia dilemma. Notes in the margins or footnotes can often provide useful information for a reader, but the act of providing side information simultaneously distracts the reader from the actual text and places the text underneath the commentary in a hierarchy of time and/or knowledge. Oh god, and there goes my scholarly voice, I REALLY CAN’T STOP IT—but anyone who’s struggled to stop themselves from automatically checking every last gloss, even when they already know what the word being glossed means, knows what I’m talking about. There’s something about providing background knowledge that assumes the reader needs that knowledge, which I think has the potential to create quite a misleading relationship between the writer (or editor, or translator) and the reader.

To be able to provide a text that offers historical or linguistic background without forcing it onto the page with the text, though—that’s a really interesting idea. And note that Miller suggests a digital version of “The Canterbury Tales” as another text ripe for exploring—now, that I can definitely get behind. My boyfriend does keep saying he and I should find a techy project to work on together—I may have to tell him I’ve found just the one…

 

March 25, 2011

…to Canterbury they wende!

Posted by meghanpurvis under Medieval
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No, my spellchecker is not broken. I’m just embracing the intense dorkiness that resulted out of a brief trip to Canterbury, and the endless Chaucer references that have ensued!

 

My sister has been at the University of Kent for a couple of weeks doing some research, and I took the opportunity of a free place to stay (mmm, the pull-out sofa bed in university accommodation—it had more in common with the medieval pilgrims’ penchant for sleeping on earthen floors than you might think!) and delightful company to visit and explore the city. I think I owe Dara several pints, because Canterbury is basically a perfect storm of things that made me nerd out, so she had to endure unending ramblings by me on pilgrims’ badges and the Hundred Years War. See, many many moons ago (MANY MOONS—I realised recently my first trip to London as a wee Oberlin sophomore doing a semester abroad was ten years ago, and I nearly dropped my false teeth into my stewed prunes), I took a class on the Canterbury Tales on a semi-whim; that class that first got me interested in all things medieval, and eventually expanded backwards to the Old English dissertation I know and hate-love today. Incidentally, one of the first assignments for that class was to memorise the first nineteen lines of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, and for whatever reason they seared themselves into my mind, because I still have them down cold. I also began graduate study as a Chaucerian—I was in the PhD programme at UC Davis for a year, and was planning on writing a dissertation on Chaucer, until I realized that while I loved being in grad school, the programme I was in wasn’t right for me, so I withdrew and applied to creative writing M.A.s and eventually ended up in Norwich. (And as yet another parenthetical, I really do mean the programme at Davis and I weren’t a good fit—I loved the people I was studying with, really enjoyed a bunch of my classes, and I think Davis is one of the loveliest towns in the world. I just shouldn’t have gone into a graduate programme that didn’t have a creative writing component, and realised so about halfway into the year.)

 

Anyway, so Canterbury is a resonant city for me, and the visit to the cathedral didn’t disappoint. The approach was particularly awesome, because Dara’s digs were up on a hill to the west of the city centre, so to get to the cathedral meant walking down the hill and through Westgate, which is a remnant of the city walls and the gate pilgrims from London would have used…I considered taking my shoes off and approaching barefoot all Henry II-style, but refrained and kept my moccasins on. Dara had already seen the cathedral, so she parked herself in a coffee shop while I went in and explored. It was…kind of beyond words. I’m not Christian (that’s rather an understatement), but I find cathedrals like Canterbury powerful because of the sense of how important they’ve been through time—the cathedral was the heart of Canterbury for centuries, and thousands of pilgrims would have visited, and there’s just a sense of history’s weight, if that makes any sense. I think a lot of my experience also came out of heading in knowing a lot about what I was going to see—actually seeing the door where Henry’s knights entered to kill Thomas Becket, for example, or seeing where the Black Prince is buried. Those are stories that I’ve known for years and years, and so to be standing in their physical realities was strangely moving.

 

Also, to be more superficial for a moment, I think I got insanely lucky with my timing. It would appear Canterbury is a popular day trip for French schoolkids, because they were EVERYWHERE in the city centre, looking at cheesy merchandise, smoking surreptitiously, and desperately trying to look like they weren’t kids on a field trip. (Note to mes amis: it didn’t work for me when I was a Model U.N. Student loitering around Berkeley, and it didn’t work for you.) I suspect if I had been in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral with a pack of them at my heels, it would have affected the experience somewhat, but I started my tour at what must have been a lull, because for long stretches of it I was the only person in each little area. For example, the Martyrdom (the side section of the cathedral where Becket was killed) was totally empty when I first walked into it, and I had a solid few minutes of being in there by myself before a few other tourists joined me. The atmosphere lent itself to a really reflective experience, and I’m really grateful the universe held off on releasing the hordes until I was through.

 

I left Canterbury feeling more connected to history than I had been—the next time I read the Canterbury Tales, I’ll have a clearer picture of where they were heading, and maybe a bit of a sense of why they wanted to go there. And yes, for the record, I totally bought myself a replica pilgrim’s badge from the gift shop. It is a fourteenth-century design of Thomas Becket, and he looks oddly mustachio-ed and vaguely Anglo-Saxon. It is perfect.

 

 

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