This I learnt today, courtesy of the Cambridge Companion to Old French Literature:
During the Occupation of France (WWII), a French patriot whose name I have forgotten arranged for the editing, covert publication, and distribution of all known recensions of the Chanson de Roland.
*Grins* Who said medieval studies wasn’t good for anything?
If you haven’t seen Blogenspiel’s “You Might Be A Medievalist If…” post, you should. And even if you haven’t, you DEFINITELY should appreciate Owlfish’s celebration of medievalism in rhyming couplets. I reproduce it here in full for your entertainment:
You may very well a medievalist be
if you have a best-loved Lateran decree.
The same may be true if a one-car collision
could wipe out your whole academic division.
A giveaway token is if you add “yet”
to “I don’t know that language”; you will soon, I bet.
At conferences, all other folk in your session
have made holy orders their lifelong profession.
Your second’ry sources, for some other student,
are primary sources, selected, most prudent.
You must know the truth about Arthur and Cei?
You don’t? Well, why not? Please do tell me, I pray.
For you, the Americans fought revolution
for freedom, a recent and modern solution.
The Renaissance? That’s just a dirty, late lie;
it’s one that we all resolutely deny.
And when you’ve bad day, when hellbound all ways,
you can say in which infernal ring’s your malaise.
Copyright Owlfish/S. Worthen, 28.8.08
OK, I had been planning to keep my fannish activities and my medieval blogging as separate as is humanly possible, but here I am with a question that, really, the medievalist blogosphere stands a much better chance of answering than anyone in fandom.
As a present for a friend who is both a medievalist and a Narnia fan, I’m working on a short piece using Digory/The Professor. Because a) I like to show off my obscure knowledge and b) it’s actually a cool idea, I’m trying to write a scene in which Digory encounters the Old English Bede’s version of the story of Caedmon. The “Sing me Creation” line, and all the resonances between that and the creation of Narnia, is just too good to pass over.
The question is: would he have been learning OE at school or at university? Was Old English taught in (elite) British schools in the early 1900s?
Anyone out there know anything about the history of British education and/or the history of Old English in British schools?
*waves* Hi. In case you didn’t notice, I dropped off the planet- stopped blogging, stopped commenting, and disappeared. Sorry about that- I needed some non-medieval procrastination time. (This turned out to be a largely fruitless quest, resulting in my regaling Narnia fandom with rambles about the hagiographical significance of the names of the four Pevensie children. But I tried.)
Anyway, during my long absence, I accrued over a thousand new posts in my google reader and god knows how many in my wordpress dash. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I hereby admit defeat. If you said anything interesting in the last month (I’m sure most of you did), I’m sorry I missed it. The google reader has been wiped and we shall start afresh tomorrow.
So says Proffessor Albrecht Classen of the University of Arizona, author of “The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process”. The estimable Prof. Classen gave a paper for the Centre for Medieval Studies here, by the same title as his book. Many new and interesting things were learnt by all, I’m sure. For example, did you know:
* That before Classen, only five major studies of the medieval chastity belt had been written? The earliest was published in the 1880s, and the last in the 1990s. They all rely more-or-less on each other, are very difficult to get hold of due to the shady associations of the topic, and one of them was self-published and
only two copies survive. It is also Classen’s opinion that none of them did very thorough artefact research- as well as not considering the possibility that the items in castles and museums might not be as old as their owners claim, apparently none of these five authors felt obliged to give useful details like item numbers and locations to back up their studies.
* There are no manuscript or literary examples of chastity belts before 1405? The aforemen
tioned five books all cite various literary examples, which Classen carefully went through and demonstrated to be gross misinterpretations of a trope which associated belts with either a) prowess and heroics or b) love and romance, and sometimes both. See, for example, our dear friend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Apparently Gawain’s girdle is cited by all these five books as an example of a chastity belt! Excuse me while I die of hilarity now.)
* Belts, chaste or otherwise, didn’t come into fashion until around 1170? Before that, you had no idea where your top ended and your bottom began!
* The first known image of a chastity belt was drawn by a siege weapons designer? It appears, in 1405, in a manuscript called the Bellifortis, written by Kyeser von Eichstadt, accompanied by a rhyme about the dirty habits of Florentines, who supposedly invented the things. This is interesting, because everywhere else, although later, blames the Paduans. At any rate, this first example seems to have been a joke, a way of picking on the Florentines by mocking their sexual practices. As anyone who’s spent any time on a school bus knows, insults directed at by group A regarding the sexual practices of group B can be very inventive, often refer to anatomically impossible practices, and almost certainly do not give hard evidence of what group B get up to of a weekend.
The Bellifortis manuscript image
* Oh, and it would be actually impossible to survive more than a few days in one of these things? The hygeine issues alone would’ve been a disaster. This one below seems to provide more ample exit holes than some of the ones Classen showed us- making up for with spikiness for its lack of coverage. (Interestingly, only two of the examples Classen showed, this one and one from a German museum, thought to put spikes on the back door, so to speak. Regardless of spikes, they were all invariably far too small to use without serious waste disposal problems.)
Copyright- The Medieval Torture Museum, San Gimignano, Italy
* Chastity belts in art and literature really took off in the late 15th and 16th centuries? Everyone seemed to find them enormously fascinating, except for the English and the Spanish. There are, apparently, no references to chastity belts at all in England or Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries.
Classen then moved into talking about the 19th century, when fascination with chastity belts was quite the thing. He showed us a few pictures of belts actually used on young boys, and talked about the appeal in the 19th century of chastity belts as a popular and “approved” way to talk about sex and sexuality in an academic environment. If, as Classen seems to have found, chastity belts weren’t actually used in the middle ages, when what becomes very interesting is the way that the early modern and modern periods have constructed and reconstructed the past to create this image of the barbaric, torturous middle ages, this ultimate symbol of the violent medieval patriarchy, out of a few very late medieval references which are probably facetious.
Speaking of modern reconstructions of the past, this brings us to our final ‘did you know’ for the night:
Did you know that…
A room full of medievalists can sit there very solemnly nodding away and not sniggering even once, while being shown slides of images from online S&M catalogues? Because apparently we can. I’m not sure if that’s evidence of the superior maturity of SRS ACADEMICS, or just evidence that they’ve learnt not to snigger at people’s papers by now.
All in the name of investigating modern responses to and reconstructions of the past, of course…
~
Oh, and Prof. Classen told us a fabulous story about Dietrick von Something, an incompetent knight, and his cross-dressing wife. I’ve put in an inter-library loan for his book ‘Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany’, and when I get it, I promise a rousing retelling. It has love! Marriage! Adventures! Adultery! Seducation! Homoerotics! Cross-dressing! Magic Belts! Everything you want in a story, really.
I find this very very intimidating. In order to get to the Bocera’s office, I have to go through the middle of the English department- I skip the CMS corridor but have to go past Awesome’s office, the doors and outside walls of which are papered with CMS adverts. And the common spaces are papered with said adverts. They have my name on them.
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Sydney
Student Seminar Series
Amy Brown
Legislating for the Stranger :
Archbishop Wulfstan and King Cnut
Harry Peters
Testing the Boundaries of Romance and Marriage :
John Gower and ‘The Steward’s Tale’
5.00 for 5.30 p.m. start
Monday 8 September
Fourth Floor Common Room
John Woolley Building A20
Fortunately, I do think I know what I’m going to say in said paper. That’s a start. 
And I know what my thesis is about! WHEEE!
Hey again, Intarwubs! I’m back again, isn’t that surprising! No deep content this time, but I found a cool thing that I want to share with you. I am reading the Encomium Emmae Reginae right now, which is a hugely hilarious piece of propaganda. They should show this to high school kids, instead of WWI recruitment posters. So much more fun.
Observe:
“After the death of his father, Knutr attempted to retain the sceptre of the kingdom, but he was quite unequal to so doing, for the number of his followers was insufficient… the king [...] ordered a fleet to be got ready for him, not because he was fleeing afraid of the harsh outcome of war, but in order to consult his brother Haraldr, the king of the Danes, about so weighty a matter.” (E.E.R, book II item I)
but, immediately following this explanation of why Knut is wise and not cowardly for leaving England, we then get an explanation of why Thorkell the Tall was brave and heroic for chosing the opposite course:
“… Thorkell, whom we have already mentioned as a military commander, observed that the land was most excellent and chose to take up his residence in so fertile a country, and make peace with the natives, rather than to return home like one who had, in the end, been expelled.” (E.E.R, book II item I)
There are, of course, good reasons for this, and for the fact that the encomiast does his very best to gloss over Thorkell’s alliance with AEthelred at this stage, and so on. He’s engaged in the praise of Emma, Cnut, and everyone who ended up on their side in the end. Some of these people were on the other side at various points in time, but they’re still all superlatively excellent. This results in some humourous contradictions, like the one just above.
Along with all the amusements, I just found this description of Cnut:
“He became a friend and intimate of churchmen, to such a degree that he seemed to bishops to be a brother bishop for his maintenance of perfect religion, to monks also not a secular but a monk for the temperance of his life of most humble devotion. He diligently defended wards and widows, he supported orphans and strangers, he suppressed unjust laws and those who applied them, he exalted and cherished justice and equity, he built and dignified churches, he loaded priests and the clergy with dignities, he enjoined peace and unanimity upon his people…” (E.E.R book II item 19)
O blogosphere, you have no idea how happy this makes me. Just look at the Wulfstanian tenor of that passage!
Oh, I don’t believe it for a moment. Cnut was a rampaging egomaniac, and I certainly don’t buy all this humble devotion business. HOWEVER, what this does show is that Wulfstan’s description of the ideal king had sunk in, well enough that Cnuts wife would want Cnut painted as a king in that mould.
The first sentence I’m not so sure about- king as brother bishop and fellow monk. I know I’ve read something like it somewhere, but it might have been AElfric rather than Wulfstan. The defence of ‘wards and widows’ is a priority which crops up all over Wulfstan’s work, though- laws, Institutes, homilies, you name it. The emphasis on promoting justice and stamping out injustice is all over Wulfstan’s work- often expressed in repetitive and parallel structures like this. And peace and unanimity reminds me awfully of Wulfstan’s injunctions to the synod regarding their common dealings.
The short form of this is, O Internet:
Rejoice! For I may have something to say in the third chapter of my thesis, after all!
HELLO, INTERNETS!
Sorry for my long absence- personal stuff has kind of interfered with my levels of functionality lately. But I’m here again, at least for the next half an hour. And the reason why I’m here is that I had a massive geek-out tonight and blathered for half an hour at my long-suffering friend K about Widsith and the character of Ealhhild. Having inflicted my nerdery upon her, I thought I would inflict it upon you in turn.
SOOO. Widsith is a poet’s boast, all about how the Poet has been with every awesome man in history and every group of people on the face of the earth. Clearly not this poet, but The Poet as a typical figure. It’s a piece of self-advertising, if you like: oy! All the great people of the past had poets! So you should pay me to write praise poetry for you too! Also, poets are really great because we preserve memories and history! Did 
I mention that a lot of people gave me very expensive jewellery in return for my poetry? (This reminds me in a way of the theory Bo advanced that the later, ‘mystical’ Taliesin poems are self-advertisment on the part of eleventh century poets. Anyway.)
Widsith goes on at great length about all the awesome people he ‘was with’ and all the cool peoples he met- some of them are just in the form of lists, and some he elaborates on a tiny bit. He makes mention, for example, of the feud between Hrothgar and Ingeld that the Beowulf poet notes in a few places.
At the very beginning of the poem, the character of Widsith is introduced: his family were of thte Myrgingas, and he was sent with ‘the beloved peace-weaver’ Ealhhild (ie, a diplomatic bride), when she went to marry Eormanric of the Goths, who was apparently not a nice man and prone to breaking his troth. From there, Widsith goes on to tell us all about his adventures, and around line 88 he returns to telling us about Eormanric, who may have been a nasty bloke but he did certainly know how to treat a poet, giving Widsith a big shiny ‘beag’ (ring, collar, bracelet- something round and expensive).1 Widsith, being a good retainer, took the shiny back home to his lord Eadgils because Eadgils has been a generous lord to him and his family.
Next, Widsith goes on to tell us about Ealhhild:
Ond me þa Ealhhild oþerne forgeaf,
dryhtcwen duguþe, dohtor Eadwines.
Hyre lof lengde geond londa fela,
þonne ic be songe secgan sceolde
hwær ic under swegle selast wisse
goldhrodene cwen giefe bryttian.
And I quote the 
translation from Bradley’s Anglo-Saxon Poetry, because I’m too lazy to do my own:
And then Ealhhild, Eadwine’s daughter, the queen of the people, gave me another. Her praise extended through many lands, whenever I was to say in song where below the sky I best know a queen ornate with gold, bestowing gifts.
Now, a queen all decked out in gold is a good queen- the Beowulf-poet makes the same emphasis when he introduces Wealtheow. Ornately dressed queen= a wealthy and powerful people. However, unlike Wealtheow, who passes the cup and then retires, Ealhhild is also praised for distributing wealth, praise otherwise reserved by both poets for generous kings.
Gift-giving is the means by which a lord maintains the loyalty of his retainers: so here, we have Ealhhild rewarding her own retainers, or perhaps rewarding her husband’s retainers and claiming their loyalty in her own right.
Furthermore, the poet calls Ealhhild the dryhtcwen duguþe. Bradley’s translation here (the people’s queen) is pretty uninspiring, so let us take a moment to consider the implications of dryhtcwen first. Drihten is the AS term for lord, often used for God in the sense of capital-L Lord; the word dryht is defined by Bosworth and Toller as ‘a people, multitude, army’, but the impression I had from studying Genisis B and the Gospel of Nichodemus was that dryht carries an extra sense of ’social order’ or perhaps ‘the body politic’. I’m not sure how I’d translate dryhtcwen- it could be something like ‘Lord-Queen’, or ‘the Queen of nation’, but at any rate the term carries a lot more authority than regular old cwen.
Secondly, she’s not just dryhtcwen but dryhtcwen duguþe: Dryhtcwen (to the) host. Duguþe doesn’t m
ean ‘people’, as Bradley’s translation has it. It means either ‘manhood/ all those who have reached manhood’ or ‘multitude, troops, army, people, men, attendants’. It has an overtly masculine and militaristic association- I’ve found it used in two contexts, firstly to identify a troop of warriors, and secondly to identify a group of grown men and seasoned warriors (ie, those who have reached manhood), as opposed to the young men in a king’s service.
So here we have a powerful queen distributing gifts to military retainers. Pretty awesome, no?
What else is Queen Ealhhild doing? Why, she’s commissioning praise-poetry in her own honour, just like the enormous list of male rulers Widsith gives. As Widsith explains at the end of the poem, one who wants to exalt his reputation and sustain his heroic honour will be generous to poets. It can be assumed, then, that not only did Ealhhild want to exalt her reputation, but that she already had a reputation and heroic honour to sustain.
Now, some thoughts about why Queen Ealhhild might be commissioning praise poetry and distributing gifts, as well as being recognised as Queen of the Host. First up, she’s a diplomatic bride, a ‘peace-weaver’ between her father’s people and Eormanric of the Goths. Although the marriage contract is made between her father and husband, diplomatic brides seem (perhaps only under certain circumstances- but it’s those circumstances we hear about) to have had an active role as, well, diplomats. Their job is to ‘weave’ peace between their husband’s court and their fathers’. Exactly what this usually entailed, I can’t say.
However, in this case, I would suggest that by commissioning praise poetry, Ealhhild is busy spreading her own fame, with two intents: one, to cement her own position in her husband’s court by establishing herself as a famous and honourable queen; and two, to increase the honour of her father and his court in the eyes of her husband’s people by association.
By distributing gifts, Ealhhild would be rewarding and shoring up the loyalty of the host which she has apparently already drawn around herself. It might not be a personal host, it might be her husband’s host who are accepting her leadership as his wife and queen. Eormanric is probably still their ultimate leader, but nevertheless, by creating for herself a loyal following in her husband’s court (could she be distributing treasure brought from her father’s court?) Ealhhild is creating (weaving) a network of loyalties and honour gifts which bind her husband’s people to her father’s.
There must have been many diplomatic brides who did all this and were never remembered. There must have been many who never commanded any personal loyalty or power. But the names that come down to us, even small mentions like these lines in Widsith, are evidence that the position of diplomatic bride could be used by a powerful woman, and that she would apparently be respected by her contemporaries for this. One reasonably well-documented example is that of AEthelfleda, Lady of the Mercians, who was a generally awesome sort of person and a formidable military commander into the bargain.
Here Endeth the Geekout For Today.
~
1. You know the word ‘beag’ in Anglo-Saxon comes from the same Germanic root as the word ‘bagel’? Bagel comes into Modern English via Yiddish, but its origin was apparently Old High German. The Bocera told us this in Beowulf class the other day and now we have a fabulous mental image of Hrothgar distributing bagels in the hall. Much easier to break up than gold circlets, don’t you think?
Still in procrastination-hiding. However, I come bearing two interesting tidbits for the popular medievalist:
Firstly, there’s a remarkably accurate description of the development of the English language, including the difference between Old English and Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, over at T.V. Tropes, which used to be a wiki catalogue of, well, T.V. Tropes, but is now a catalogue of all things fandom-oriented.
Regarding the habit of adding ‘eth’ to things, throwing around the word ‘thee’ and messing with word order in order to sound archaic:
This writing, e’en when well penned it doth be, oft is named by the unwashed masses “Old English”. In this a grave error lieth; actual Old English dost be a language that to an ear modern is completely incomprehensible, and real Middle English, while somewhat more understandable, still a dictionary at hand requireth (as anyone knowth who has lookethed at Chaucer in the original language). What writers are attemptingeth is somethinge Shakespearean, which in truth early Modern English be, and then even that is bastardizedeth with grammare and vocabularie moderne. (Though that may beeth because Shakespeare ignoredeth spellinge and word definitiones in exchange for poetics and punnes. Heaps upon heaps of punnes.)
Ten points to the relevant Troper, I say.
Secondly, my dear friend the Heretical Purple Blur and I went on a giant bookshop spree today, in quest of textbooks. She found one, I found none. However, in Galaxy, Sydney’s big sci-fi bookstore, I found and squeed over and subsequently bought “The Time Travelling Cat and the Viking Terror”.
The Time Travelling Cat appears to be a series for 8-12 year olds about some kids who, by aid of their magical time travelling cat, get to go back in time and mess around with history. In this particular case, I discovered by flipping to the end of the book, they save King Edmund from Ivarr the Boneless (who stalked on the land like a wolf, if you recall), and visit the tomb of St Ethelreda (I didn’t figure out WHY they were visiting her, but they were). And we thought there wasn’t anything in Anglo-Saxon England to interest the kiddies…
I may or may not have bounced around the bookstore aisles squeeing ‘THEY SAVED KING EDMUND’.
