“And the motorway’s stretching right out to us all…”

So you’re cruising through suburban Maryland on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Daylight is fading, just as a semester spent focused on fantasy and science fiction is drawing to a close, and you idly wonder what you can do to steer your blog back to its original focus on medieval literature and unexpected manifestations of medievalism in everyday life. You round a bend, intent on little more than reaching the Korean supermarket before it closes, and—

Behind those trees…can that really be a textbook example of Romanesque vaulting?

And can it really be standing on the corner of Medieval Avenue and Renaissance Lane?

Okay, that last detail is wishful thinking. But check out this intriguingly unnecessary structure at the entrance to an otherwise unremarkable townhouse development on Randolph Road.

What’s that, you say? A mere arch? Well, look closer.

Yep, two barrel vaults intersecting, like in the textbook drawing—and just like in many Roman buildings and countless medieval and Renaissance churches (thus achieving the effect which Vasari famously dubbed “criss-cross applesauce”). The major difference here is that the architectural features, including those blank capitals, have been recast in the idiom of a circa-1988 shopping mall.

But lift your eyes above the lintel…

…and you’ll see how the intersecting vaults divide the interior into four bays to create…

…a good, old-fashioned groined vault. (You in the back, stop giggling.)

I don’t know why an architect decided to evoke the history of his profession here, with this whimper of traditional whimsy, in front of a subdivision that bears no other mark of architectural distinction.

However, this Romanesque doodad does serve a practical purpose. When it’s raining, you can seek shelter…

…and wait in grand style for the bus.

UPDATE:

Dave at Studenda Mira points out that this bus stop also suggests a tetrapylon, a four-way triumphal arch placed at street junctions in the Roman Empire. Here’s a well-preserved example from Antioch, and here’s another in Jordan.

“There’s talk in the houses, and people dancing in rings…”

So I guess when a neighborhood’s most obvious medieval-ish draw is a gigantic new Gothic cathedral, it’s understandable that one might tromp up and down the street, possibly for years, and not notice, just two blocks away, the house with a gargoyle on the roof and a dragon in the front yard.

I don’t know who lives here, but they’re my new favorite neighbors. I hope they have trolls ’round the back.

“I never talk to my neighbours, I’d rather not get involved…”

“A gargoyle, Mother, is perched on the gable,
It searches and lurches, befickled by fable.
The gargoyle, Mother, has eaten the cat!”
“And what shall we do about that, my child,
What shall we do about that?”

“A gargoyle, Mother, is stalking our roof,
Its claw-pricks primeval, primordial proof.
The gargoyle, Mother, has eaten dear brother!”
“And why can’t we get us another, my child,
Why can’t we get us another?”

“A gargoyle, Mother, alights in the hall,
Its grindings and growlings begrizzled by gall.
The gargoyle, Mother, has eaten poor father!”
“And why must you be such a bother, my child,
Why must you be such a bother?”

“A gargoyle, Mother, is greedy for gore,
Befouled and bedeviled, beframed by the door.
The gargoyle, Mother, is coming for you!”
“And what do you dream I can do, my child,
What do you dream I can do?”

“A gargoyle, Mother, has eaten you whole,
Its hellmaw begobbling you, body and soul.
The gargoyle, Mother, is spitting you out!”
“And why did you have any doubt, my child,
Why did you have any doubt?”

“A gargoyle, Mother, bespews its hot breath,
Its burning and burbling betoken my death.
The gargoyle, Mother, has torn me in two!”
“And why must you mourn only you, my child,
Why must you mourn only you?”

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tag.)

“Before you were born, dude, when life was great…”

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring crawfish, bearded with moss…

“But Jeff,” I hear yon straw man cry, “it’s been ages since you reaffirmed your obsession with literary and quasi-medieval statuary!” Indeed, the greatest truths are often the most lamentable. So look who reared his head (and a fragment of torso) today along the bayou in St. Martinville, Louisiana: None other than “Hexameter Hank” Longfellow, author of Evangeline, the epic poem that made Cajun history hip.

In St. Martinville, Longfellow keeps watchs over the “Evangeline Oak,” which offers ample shade just down the road from the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site and a few paces from the lovely Acadian Memorial and Museum.

A block away, in the cemetery of the “mother church” of the Cajuns, is Evangeline herself, looking more sanguine than I’d be after decades of roaming North America in the name of deathless love. As bestsellers go, the poem that bears Evangeline’s name was the Twilight of yesteryear, but these days she gets fewer visitors.

St. Martinville boasts a population of 6,989, but half of those residents appear to be statues. In front of the church stands A.M. Jan, the 19th-century pastor, on a pedestal that tells his story in Latin.

Also honored in the town square is this dapper Attakapa Indian. He’s been here since 1961.

The interior of the church—”it is just the same as when it was built,” a plaque insists, “having been repaired but not changed”—is naturally full of old statues, too many to name.

But let’s not overlook two “Quid Plura?” favorites:

Noah’s wife…

…and our old pal from New Orleans, St. Roch.

Mais où est le patron?

Aha! Here’s St. Martin of Tours, inventing the word “chapel” in front of the old presbytère.

Alas, my camera fizzled before I could get a picture of St. Martinville’s one truly unmissable statue, which depicts Charlemagne engaged in mortal combat with a giant crawfish. I’m sorry you won’t be able to see it, but trust me, dear reader: It was awesome.

“She rules her life like a fine skylark…”

The National Mall on the Fourth of July: America! Motherhood! Hot lunch for orphans! Red, white, and blue! Patriotic explosions!

…and a Welsh woman retelling stories from The Mabinogion?

Yep: Wales is one of the three cultures featured at this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival. If you’re local, it’s not too late to hie thyself down to the Mall and take in some music, storytelling, crafts, and food. Maybe you’ll even get to hear spirited retellings of the stories of Branwen and Rhiannon adorned with violence, humor, and quirky modern digressions. Medievalism, you see, never takes a holiday.

“…we all leave before the morning light.”

There are now so many good blogs devoted to covering aspects of medievalism, from the scholarly to the popular and everything in between, that it’s not always easy for a hapless insomniac to make his mark. That’s why I’m inordinately pleased to be the first to report a crucial piece of quasi-medieval news: General Hospital has just kicked off a storyline about courtly love.

No, really! Someone on YouTube has compiled the relevant clips from the June 30 episode, wherein garrulous geek Damian “The Jackal” Spinelli proposes new rules for his relationship with Maxie Jones. Spinelli has long adored the woman he calls “Maximista,” but only recently has she loved him back. Spinelli and Maxie have already had sex—twice, according to Wikipedia—but the dramatic and chivalrous Spinelli wants to woo his true love properly, even if Maxie ain’t exactly qualified to book passage with St. Ursula, if you know what I mean:

SPINELLI.
Maximista shall remain the queen of The Jackal’s heart, and to honor her luminous beauty and transcendent presence, I will demonstrate my pure and epic devotion through the time-honored tradition of courtly love.

MAXIE.
Spinelli, you’re so amazing. You’ve actually come up with something I’ve never done. So what is this “courtly love,” and who gets to go first?

Watch the five-minute video and you’ll see Spinelli explain (not always accurately) the up side of courtly love, after which Maxie’s step-cousin Robin explains the down side.

If the frustrated English majors who write the other soaps decide to follow suit, we may have a genuine trend on our hands. The troublemakers on One Life to Live might stop stealing each other’s babies and generate real drama by debating notions of inheritance and lordship in The Mabinogion, while Days of Our Lives supercop Bo Brady could very well shelve his investigations of mafia feuds to focus instead on a groundbreaking new theory about the date and composition of Beowulf. Should all this and more come to pass, “Quid Plura?” will be ready to keep you informed—if not with great sentence, then at least with some full measure of solaas.

“The general sat, and the lines on the map…”

Today, as the world little noted nor long remembered, was the 620th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. According to AFP, “no incidents were reported during the ceremony” held by Serbian pilgrims and officials near the battlefield that’s no longer Serbian territory, although Belgrade radio station B92 reports—how reliably I don’t know—that some Kosovars marked the day by bulldozing a 1999 monument to the medieval Serb heroes.

Pundits and politicians have forsaken the Balkans, but medievalists should keep Kosovo in mind—not because outsiders should rush to take sides, but because nowhere is a medieval conflict still burning quite so brightly. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on this date in 1914, the 525th anniversary of the battle, and Slobodan Milosevic chose the 600th anniversary to visit the battlefield and rally nationalistic Serbs. The Battle of Kosovo hasn’t really ended, and one epic poet predicted what diplomats never fully grasped: “Earthly kingdoms are such passing things—/ A heavenly kingdom, raging in the dark, endures eternally.”

From the “Quid Plura?” archives, here’s the medieval background to Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence, and here’s the capture of Radovan Karadžić and the ugly side of modern medievalism.

“Ran down, and the lady said it…”

When the U.S. Postal Service issues a stamp tomorrow to honor Anna Julia Cooper, she’ll be remembered, rightly, as a remarkable woman. Born into slavery around 1858 in North Carolina, Cooper earned a degree in mathematics but also taught Latin and Greek. As principal of the nation’s best public high school for black children, she fought for high educational standards and prepared her students for top universities. In essays and lectures, she addressed racism, the concerns of black women, and other issues of the day. When women’s rights groups turned out to be white women’s rights groups, she started her own.

But Anna Julia Cooper was also a Charlemagne buff—and an inspiration to exhausted grad students everywhere.

From 1911 to 1913, Cooper spent summers studying French literature and history in Paris. In 1914—at the tender age of 56—she enrolled in the Department of Romance Languages at Columbia University with plans to earn her doctorate. Scholars of medieval French literature were clamoring for an accessible version of the epic Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne to replace a hard-to-find German edition, and Cooper gave them one, but Columbia didn’t grant her a degree. As a widow raising her dead brother’s five children while holding down a full-time job as a teacher and principal in Washington, D.C., she couldn’t fulfill the one-year residency requirement.

In response, Cooper sought out a university with no such requirement. The Sorbonne accepted her credits but her work on the Pèlerinage didn’t meet their dissertation requirements, so Cooper wrote a second dissertation. In 1925, she earned a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne and found a Parisian publisher for her edition and facing-page translation of Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne. She was 66 years old.

Cooper’s Pèlerinage was never published in America. When she offered the book and all its proceeds to her alma mater, Oberlin, the school hemmed and hawed—and then nervously declined. Even so, the book was the standard edition and translation for decades, American libraries and language departments sought it out, and several pages were included in an anthology of medieval French literature reprinted as recently as the 1960s.

Beyond its manageable size, it’s not clear what drew Cooper to the Charlemagne project she cheekily called her “homework,” but few American teachers have so aptly encouraged students, then or now, through indefatigable example. Cooper, who lived to be 105, understood the pedigree of that tradition:

Being always eager to carry out your wishes faithfully, I have sent back to you this dear pupil of mine as you asked. Please look after him well until, if God so wills, I come to you myself. Do not let him wander about unoccupied or take to drink. Give him pupils, and give strict instructions that he is to teach properly. I know he has learned well. I hope he will do well, for the success of my pupils is my reward with God.

Alcuin wrote that. It’s a Carolingian sentiment, but one that Cooper, a proper medievalist, could easily endorse.

“Walk without rhythm, it won’t attract the worm…”

When I was in Iceland in 1998, I stood where the locals chucked their pagan idols over the falls; I saw where Snorri Sturluson met his doom; and I got chased away from Hliðarendi by a dog. Five minutes later, Americans started visiting Iceland in droves; more recently, we all learned what happens when a nation that subsists on fishing and aluminum smelting decides to have a go at investment banking. I’m still abnormally fond of Iceland, but one of my sharpest classmates and traveling companions from ’98 has been busy indeed. He turned his passion into scholarship and became, to my delight, an expert on medieval Icelandic combat.

An award-winning acoustic engineer with a doctorate from MIT and nearly two dozen patents to his name, William R. Short made the sort of radical career change most people only dream of. Bill is now the Viking-in-residence at the Higgins Armory Museum and the author of Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques, a new book that reflects a decade spent researching, reconstructing, and demonstrating the fighting methods of saga heroes.

“Little in my academic training prepared me for life as a Viking in a museum,” Bill says on his Web site, but he’s being modest; his scientific background is exactly what makes Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques a valuable book. Rather than rush into the fray armed only with the romanticism that gives historical reenactors a bad name, Bill methodically defines his terms; he provides a taxonomy of Viking arms that extends even to such improvised weapons as rocks and household implements; and he surveys the written, visual, forensic, and archaeological sources, explaining their limitations and, most tantalizingly, pointing out where text and object disagree. Non-scholars and newcomers to the Viking arsenal will find this book quite readable, but medievalists in other fields will be intrigued by wonderfully trivial mysteries: For example, there’s no evidence for the chin-straps that surely held Viking helmets atop Viking heads, and nothing is known about several weapons named in the sagas but misleadingly translated into English as “hallberd.”

Already a useful reference work, Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques also documents efforts by Bill and his colleagues to rethink saga-era melee not as “two hairy men trading great blows with one another, almost as if they were trying to chop down trees” but as its own sort of martial art. Bill repeatedly stresses the conjecture and speculation that goes into reconstructing the combat techniques of medieval Icelanders, but the photographic sequences in this book convincingly show the versatility of a good, small shield, and also why a spear was no match for a sword.

I thought I had little interest in Viking combat, but the next time I pick up Njal’s Saga, I’ll be glad that Bill’s book has armed me with a whole new set of visuals. Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques is a concise but thorough handbook for scholars, saga readers, and even historical novelists; it’s the sort of work that puts a good face on independent scholarship and a worthy, bearded face on historical reenactment.

“Frame me, and hang me on the wall…”

Medievalists were some of the first folks in the humanities to embrace digital media, so it makes sense that medievalists are now the first to worry about the too-rapid demotion of the humble hard copy. As someone who’s searched in vain for quick and easy ways to transfer files from old Commodore-formatted floppies to a Mac running OS X, I loved Jonathan Jarrett’s nostalgic romp through old Internet protocols and was struck by the wisdom of his observation that digital media aren’t necessarily permanent media:

So keep offline copies and contribute to the Internet Archive, I guess, and remember that we work on sources that survived a thousand years or more because someone wrote them down in ink on skin and someone else, most likely, packed them between wooden boards and then generations of someones else kept them somewhere dry. Your CD-Rs will not last that long, or probably even as long as you do. Also, manuscripts (or books or print journals) don’t need mains power to be read. The low-tech will still be worth thinking about for a while.

That’s his conclusion; go see how he arrives at it. You don’t need to be a medievalist to care about the implications.