A Number 1 Year

Dear Reader, 

One year ago, I launched this blog. My idea was to publish short pieces on my research and various aspects of medievalism in popular culture, and my goal was to write something once a week. I've ventured farther afield than I thought I would, into robotics and AI, and I didn't manage to publish once a week (although I averaged one post per week). 

I've been delighted with how well-received my blog has been, and I never imagined that I'd get over 10,000 page views. My hope for 2012 is to develop a more vocal community of commenters (and for that, I need your help). My goal is to continue to blog regularly, and to finish my book on medieval robots. 

And now, for the sake of the archive, here's a look back at the year here. Westeros and Winterfell garnered less interest than a sixteenth-century Spanish automaton, and the Banana, Jr. showed up fairly frequently in Google searches. 

Thanks for reading!

Away in A Manger

Happy Christmas to all! 

The ox and ass peer at the newborn Jesus. New York, Morgan Library, M751, C13 France.

The ox and ass look rather mischevious, while Mary looks skeptical about the entire endeavor.

Extra! Extra! Hildegard of Bingen to Become A Doctor of The Church!

Hildegard receiving her divine visions. From an early C13 manuscript of the Liber divinorum operum

Great news! The Vatican Insider reports that Pope Ben16 plans to canonize Hildegard of Bingen next October and declare her a Doctor of the Church. There are 33 Doctors of the Church (an honor granted to important theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas) and only 3 of them are women. So this is kind of progressive! Even though Hildegard lived and died over 800 years ago. And the Pope claimed that Hildegard is an example to women theologians, who can testify to divine mysteries thanks to their feminine intelligence and sensitivity.

Hildegard was a nun and abbess, a confidante of popes and correspondent of theologians (like St. Bernard of Clairvaux), a visionary composer, philosopher, and theologian. Her musical compositions are still performed throughout the world. Her reports of her ecstatic visions gave her the nickname "The Sybil of the Rhine," and, like a medieval Nostradamus, her prophecies continue to be queried and interpreted.


 

Holiday Gift Guide: For the Watch Enthusiast

H/t to JB, Medieval Robots' London correspondent, for passing this along. The geniuses at Hublot, the Swiss horological firm, have built a replica of the Antikythera Mechanism as a wristwatch.

The story of the Antikythera Mechanism involves a shipwreck, lost treasure, Archimedes, an emperor's ransom, and cosmological know-how. The device itself, recovered by chance on a sponge-diving trip near Crete, is over two thousand years old and is the oldest analogue computer. You could program in a date and it would predict (accurately) the position of the sun, moon, and five known planets. Read more about it here.

It's "American Chopper" Meets "A Knight's Tale"!

H/t to MB, my informant on all aspects of modern-day medieval warfare, for the heads-up about the Knights of Mayhem. Sadly, NatGeo is not part of my basic cable package, and I refuse to give KableTown any more of my hard-earned ducats, so I have missed the recent series premiere, and have had to piece things together by relying on the internet.


Holy crap, Lancelot, full-contact jousting is back! Don your greaves and helmet, saddle up your destrier, and aim your lance at your opponent's torso! But as Sir Hugh of the Vale might tell you, it's all fun and games until someone ends up with a lance splinter in his neck.
 

What's in Your Wallet?

The most recent issue of National Geographic has an article on the Staffordshire treasure, a massive Anglo-Saxon treasure-hoard, which was discovered by an amateur treasure hunter in 2009.  Check it out! 

The treasure was found near Lichfield, in what was once Mercia, one of the most important kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. It comprises hundreds of gold and silver artifacts, from roughly 600-800 (although the hoard could have been deposited later), most of which are martial (sword pommels, knife hilts, etc.), and all of which are 100% gorgeous. 

 "Scyld's strong son was the glory of Denmark;

his father's warriors were wound round his heart

with golden rings, bound to their prince 

by his father's treasure. So young men 

build the future, wisely open-handed in peace,

protected in war; so warriors earn

their fame, and wealth is shaped with a sword." 

(Beowulf, ll. 19-25)

Where the gold came from is something of a mystery--it might have been recycled from Roman solidii. Likewise, the garnets in the pieces probably came from central or southern Europe, but it's not clear how they ended up as part of an Anglo-Saxon hoard. 

Oh, and the guy who discovered the hoard? He was living on government assistance. Not anymore. Time to buy a metal detector.

Forging and Forgery

I gave a talk earlier this week on twelfth century neoplatonism and literary depictions of medieval automata and their creators in twelfth and thirteenth-century French literary texts. Building on the works of Macrobius and Chalcidius, later medieval philosophers like Bernard Silvestris and Alain de Lille used the metaphor of "natura artifex"--Nature as artisan--to describe the work of human generation in artisanal terms. Natura hammers out new people using her hammer and anvil, creating them from parts. Yet this metaphor is an attempt on the part of philosophers to describe the mysterious work of Natura--translating divine forms into materiality.

Le Roman de la Rose, France, 15th cent., Yale University, MS 418.

Writers of literary texts, though, described automata and their makers not in artisanal terms, but instead in elevated terms--as philosophers, sorcerers, and wise men, educated in the deepest secrets and mysteries of nature. However, as these men tried to copy Natura's work, making artificial people and animals, their work was considered debased, as it involved aping divine prerogative and copying natural forms. Natura forges people; people make forgeries.