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.

Medieval Genomics: The Black Death

Apes play ring-around-the-rosy. Walters Art Museum.

This recent paper in Nature reveals that the pathogen that caused the Black Death pandemic of 1348-50, Yersinia pestis, is the ancestral pathogen to all contemporary Y. pestis epidemics. The Black Death walks among us yet! 

Even more interesting is the attendant conclusion: "Comparisons against modern genomes reveal no unique derived positions in the medieval organism, indicating that the perceived increased virulence of the disease during the Black Death may not have been due to bacterial phenotype. These findings support the notion that factors other than microbial genetics, such as environment, vector dynamics and host susceptibility, should be at the forefront of epidemiological discussions regarding emerging Y. pestis infections."

The conclusions in this study strongly point to social and environmental factors as vectors in transmitting the disease and its morbidity and mortality rates. This is a great example of how scientific methods in history can fuel, rather than stifle, more long-standing interpretive methods. Social historians, environmental historians, urban historians, and historians of public health will continue to inform our understanding of the Black Death, how and why it spread, and its effects at the micro and macro levels during subsequent outbreaks in later centuries. 

Michelle Ziegler, over at Contagions, has a series of pieces on this study and earlier ones, and the implications for identifying the cause of the Justinianic Plague (c. 571-c. 750)  as Y. pestis, as well as concerns about the plague and bioterrorism.