“One step ahead of the shoe shine, two steps away from the county line…”

Every December, I think, ‘Well, I didn’t write much on the blog this year.” Then I look back and find myself amazed by all the neat stuff that begged to be written about—and by how many of you apparently enjoy this singular blend of books, poetry, gargoyles, and medievalism.

Thanks for reading “Quid Plura?” in 2012! Here are highlights from the year that was—which I hope you’ll take as an invitation to check back often in 2013.

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Washington isn’t known as a city with a deep sense of the past, but this blog continued to find medievalism rampant amidst the ephemera.

Our Joan of Arc got a body scrub and a new sword.

Winter beasties peered from the College of Preachers, and churches were festooned with “faux-tesques.”

In southeast D.C., we learned that Frederick Douglass was (sort of) a medievalist.

I cursed in my garden a medieval weed.

Taste the past: the National Cathedral medlar tree.

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In Georgia, finding medievalism was weirdly easy, first at America’s only all-out Gothic Revival synagogue, and then on a highway beside B-17 bombers.

Enjoy a summer postcard from the medieval Midwest: Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri.

Take a jaunt to Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson clashed with Saxon warriors.

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Avid readers develop obsessions, hence this triad of posts about Washington Irving:

• how Irving looked for Charlemagne and came home disappointed
• medievalism at Irving’s home on the Hudson
• how Irving and his friend John Pendelton Kennedy saw medievalism on Maryland’s Patapsco River

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The Velveeta people weren’t “thinking medieval” when they demanded you “eat liquid gold.”

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Meet the art historians who spent the end of World War II chasing down medieval relics.

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Let’s give Mary Jo Bang’s quirky Dante translation a chance.

In my neighborhood, you might fall into a Philip K. Dick novel.

A used book offered up the ghosts of a Bulgarian poet and a Librarian of Congress.

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Thirty books in four years! In 2012, I finished reading all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain works.

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I also wrapped up a series of 53 poems and herded them into a book: Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles.

At Christmastime, I put my translation, The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier, into wider circulation.

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In 2012, “Quid Plura?” celebrated an anniversary. Here’s the best from those first five years.