Rant: digging up Richard III

It's not my rant but Howard Williams' of the University of Chester, referred to me by Guy Halsall.  Here is part of it:

Worshipping Dead RoyalsThe third objectionable aspect of the excavation of Richard III is the royal cult of personality that surrounded the excavation and the respect shown to his remains. I personally don’t have time for those that fawn over present-day living royals and their sprogs, but it seems somehow cut-rate and sordid to be fawning over long-dead royals in the hope of ‘rewriting the history books’ or getting to know their true person through their bodies. I can imagine the same sensitive facial reconstructions done for the butchers of the 20th century and imagine cult followers shedding tears over their sensitive small moustaches and their kind eyes.

Now I am sure Will, Kate and little baby George are all lovely. Even the Duke of Edinburgh makes me laugh. However, this royal necrophilia gets right up my archaeonose. Rather than the scientific study of human remains to understand life and death, this becomes a faux-forensic investigation into the individual’s life and death. Whether hero or villain, it is ironic that our obsession with the remains of the individual cadaver of Richard III flies in the face of the aspirations we have as a discipline for writing about the past in a social and humanising way.  Implicated in this view is that only rich and powerful people in the past matter today. In other words; the bones of toffs are venerated today as sacred, the bones of plebs are trowel fodder.

There is a strong case for Leicester cathedral to create a medieval equivalent to Westminster Abbey’s ‘tomb of the unknown soldier’. If you want to spend a million, select one of the many thousands of medieval graves we archaeologists have dug up – an old woman who died of leprosy, an infant who died in childbirth – and create a monument for them that makes us reflect on present-day poverty in the rest of the world and how many millions live in poverty today and die in agony from curable diseases. Don’t honour a warmongering royal, honour humanity.

Well Met: a book on Renaissance Faires

I have yet to read this book, but Jeff Sypeck's post on Quid Plura is intriguing:

What hath the Renaissance faire to do with psychedelic rock? The vogue for “world music”? The frilly shirts of Jimi Hendrix? The rise of craft breweries? The House Un-American Activities Committee? Before reading Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture, I hadn’t thought to ask—but Rachel Lee Rubin’s book is a useful reminder that pseudo-medieval pursuits are sometimes more about the present than they are about the past.

Rubin starts with the basics: how the first faire grew out of a children’s commedia dell’arte troupe organized at a California youth center by teacher Phyllis Patterson. In May 1963, Patterson and others organized the first “Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market” as a fundraiser for left-wing Pacifica Radio, drawing more than 3,000 revelers to a North Hollywood ranch. Associated with hippies and drugs by local detractors, the event quickly outgrew Pacifica. It spawned its first imitators in Minnesota and Texas in the early 1970s; more than 200 Ren fests of varying sizes now thrive across the United States.

So how did a countercultural crafts-and-music romp evolve into a nationwide subculture overseen, in some cases, by a large entertainment corporation? Well Met doesn’t chart the growth and commercialization of the Ren faire. Instead, Rubin has two goals: to explain “the ways in which various forms of cultural expression ‘tried out’ first at the faire became recognizable staples of American social and cultural life,” and to restore the Renaissance faire to a central place in the history of the counterculture. Once I got past my initial disappointment that the book wasn’t a history, I was won over by Rubin’s argument for the importance of the Renaissance faire to the culture of the 1960s and 1970s—and its long-overlooked ubiquity.

Her evidence is legion: how the Los Angeles Free Press began as the Ren faire newspaper; how Americans, who now consume beer from nearly 2,500 craft breweries, first sampled ale at the faire; how fashion choices and even the typefaces on psychedelic album art recall early faire fliers; how the faire anticipated renewed markets for handmade crafts and set precedents for large outdoor rock concerts; how occasional faire-goer Michael Jackson mimicked the moves and style of faire mime Robert Shields; how the Flying Karamazov Brothers, the Firesign Theater, and Penn and Teller all got their start at Ren faires; and how the faire coincided with a Middle Eastern cabaret boom in California that helped build an audience for international music. Rubin even suggests that the Ren faire helped revive interest in the klezmer. Who knew?

There's more...

In Georgia in the Caucasus, a modern stylite monk revives living on a stone pillar

Here's the story (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty):

In an isolated part of the Caucasus, a monk is spending his days in prayer and silence atop a 40-meter pillar of limestone in western Georgia (near the town of Chiatura). The Katskhi Pillar was used by stylites -- Christian ascetics who lived atop pillars and eschewed worldly temptations -- until the 15th century when the practice was stopped following the Ottoman Empire's invasion of Georgia. For centuries the pillar was abandoned and locals could only look up at the mysterious ruins on its summit. Finally, in 1944, a mountain climber ascended the pillar, discovering the skeleton of a stylite and the remains of a chapel. Shortly after the collapse of communism and the resurgence of religion in Georgia, former "bad boy" Maxime Qavtaradze (now 59) decided to live atop the pillar in the way of the old stylites. “When I was young I drank, sold drugs, everything. When I ended up in prison.... It was time for a change. I used to drink with friends in the hills around here and look up at this place, where land met sky. We knew the monks had lived up there before and I felt great respect for them." In 1993 Maxime took monastic vows and climbed the pillar to begin his new life. "For the first two years there was nothing up here so I slept in an old refrigerator to protect me from the weather." Since then Maxime and the nearby Christian community have constructed a ladder to the top, rebuilt the chapel, and built a cottage where Maxime spends his days praying, reading, and "preparing to meet God." As a result of the interest in the site there is now a religious community at the base of the pillar. Men with troubled lives come to stay and ask for guidance from Maxime and the young priests who live at the site. The men are fed and housed on the condition they join the priests in praying for around seven hours per day (including from 2 a.m. until sunrise) and help with chores. (19 PHOTOS) Photos by Amos Chapple.

The Maidenform Middle Ages

 The blog Quid plura? focuses on American medievalism and it is always good. The most recent entry, however, is really outstanding. An excerpt:

Maidenform’s “I Dreamed…” campaign, which began in 1949 and ran for 20 years, was apparently so successful that it’s still studied in business schools. The other ads weren’t medievally themed, but they all showed a shirtless woman in some professional or historical setting. The “medieval maiden” ad stands out, though, for its fidelity to its source.
Place the ad and the tapestry side by side and you can see how little got removed (other than the maiden’s blouse).The heraldic symbols on the banner (and on the unicorn’s little Thundershirt-shield) are intact, even though they’re meaningless now. The grimacing lion is gone; modern people might have have been distracted by him or found him comical. The woman no longer holds the unicorn’s horn but caresses it near its mouth. She’s also been decked out in a hat on loan, I would guess, from the neighborhood gnome.

Maidenform was determined to portray not just some fantasy scene, but a real and very specific medieval work. Why?

This is brilliant

Anyone who thinks seriously about cultural history will probably love this.

Thanks to xkcd!

Twelve of England

The Deeds of Arms series, which I edit for Freelance Academy Press, has just issued its third volume, the Twelve of England. This is perhaps the most famous chivalric story in the Portuguese tradition, and the volume was prepared by the leading scholar of Iberian chivalry, Noel Fallows. I am very happy that I had the chance to work with him. Those who want to know more can look here:

http://www.freelanceacademypress.com/twelveofengland.aspx

Off to school in Manila

From the Big Picture.

Le Tournoi de Chauvency

Back around the end of the 13th century, the poet named Jacques Bretel wrote a semi-satirical account of a tournament, Le Tournoi de Chauvency. It was a real event and the poem features real people. Alas for me, the focus was not on the fighting, but on the audience and attendees, and how they contributed to what was a big, expensive and lighthearted celebration. For instance, the poem is hardly started when it begins making fun of people's accents, showing named figures protesting that their French is as good as anybody's. In another section, prominent ladies are shown singing songs appropriate to the occasion. I've always wanted to read the poem, but the language is old enough that I have put off tackling it.

But if you want to read about the poem, there is now this detailed treatment, just recently reviewed in The Medieval Review (but not yet on their website):

Chazan, Mireille, and Nancy Freeman Regalado, eds. Lettres, musique et société en Lorraine médiévale: Autour du Tournoi de Chauvency (Ms. Oxford Bodleian Douce 308). Series: Publications romanes et françaises. Geneva: Droz, 2012.  Pp. 583. Euros 78.00 or $96.00. ISBN-13: 9782600014656.

And if you want to hear a musical composition based on the poem there is this on YouTube.

Armies of Heaven, by Jay Rubenstein

This book presents itself as an argument that the first crusade was both inspired by apocalyptic thinking – the conviction that humans have entered a part of history where their actions take on cosmic significance – and also promoted that kind of thinking.

Jay Rubenstein's book does that, but the reader who expects an unwavering focus on apocalypticism may be disappointed. A great deal of Armies of Heaven is devoted to a rather detailed narrative history of the crusade. On the other hand, for a lot of readers this may be a virtue. Rubenstein does a good job of telling the basic story.

Recent scholarship has tended to focus on religious motivations for going on crusade, dismissing the idea that people went to Jerusalem for profit and self-advancement. Reading Rubenstein's book, devoted to the emergence of apocalypticism, has the perhaps paradoxical effect of showing that there was a real struggle between ordinary, greedy, ambitious warlordism and the more abstract motives of those most devoted to bringing on the final days. There are plenty of non-apocalyptic motives out there.

In an earlier blog post, I drew attention to the fact that Pope Innocent III in the early 13th century used the idea of crusading to attack any disobedient or unorthodox target, in Europe or in the Middle East. Somewhere in this book Rubenstein quotes people considerably earlier than Innocent saying much the same thing. "We have beaten the infidels in the Middle East, but have not yet been able to do something about the heretics and schismatics out this way."

You can hear Rubenstein being interviewed at New Books in History.