The Wordspotter’s Guide is a compendium, a handbook, a journey, and occasionally a bit of a fever dream. It’s an introduction to wordspotting, a hobby I made up and may currently be the only practiser of. It has not only fun facts but also around a hundred diagrams, maps, and illustrations, all made by me! And it’s coming out this November!

As you can see on the various websites where it can be preordered, lots of people who have received early access to The Wordspotter’s Guide have already said many kind things about it.

Immensely readable, full of learning and very entertaining. Olivia Swarthout shows how words are a source of stories and of knowledge across time and across human society. With energy, humour and learning she demonstrates that words have inner lives, often surprising, wayward and ambiguous.

- Anthony Bale, author of A TRAVEL GUIDE TO THE MIDDLE AGES

I poured my heart and soul into this book and I feel slightly maternal toward it as a result, so it’s been delightful to see my baby taking its first steps out into the world and being met with such glowing endorsements. However, I wanted to give you my own, slightly more extended little introduction to this book and what it’s all about. Read on for some sneak peeks and additional information about what to expect when you become a wordspotter!

Words are everywhere you look. And each one has a story to tell. Just as ornithologists look at the birds in the sky and palaeontologists look at the fossils beneath our feet to piece together stories about the past, present, and future of our earth, those who care to stop and observe the words around us can learn a great deal, too. After all, language is a living beast.

The Wordspotter’s Guide is a handbook for those who want to learn the ways of the words.

Take a tree, for instance. A forester might be able to tell by examining it not just how long it’s been there but also a picture of the changing landscape in which it lived. Droughts, rains, fires, and frosts are all inscribed in its rings.

A wordspotter, on the other hand, might look at a tree and see the words inscribed in its knotted wood, all of which grew from an ancient root word that meant tree. Thus, we can catch a little glimpse of the people who passed this word down to us from thousands of years ago, allowing us to see what tree meant to them.

We learn that trees were powerful things to our forebears, venerated for their strength and longevity. This manifests in the many English words that come from one ancient root—not only tree but truth, trust, and truce. Some peoples, most notably the ancient Celts, even followed religious leaders called druids who derived their authority from the trees and claimed to know secrets only the forests could tell.

The Wordspotter’s Guide is a handbook for spotting relationships like these that lurk below the surface of our language. These hidden connections are everywhere, and thus the book is organised into six chapters, which together cover the entire world:

1. The Self

2. The Home

3. Other People

4. The Human World

5. The Wild

6. The Cosmos

Beginning in the reader’s own soul, The Wordspotter’s Guide embarks on a winding journey through places like your kitchen, your friendships, war, and the ocean, ending in the furthest reaches of the universe. At each place you visit, you’ll learn how to spot the words that live there and what they can tell you about the interwoven histories of humanity and language.

It’s not all as serious as druids and truces. In fact, a lot of The Wordspotter’s Guide is very, very goofy. We’ll look at the surnames of modern England to discover the medieval economies that powered the country long ago.

We’ll talk to the flowers and see the likenesses that earned many of them their names.

And, in what might be my favourite section, we’ll receive a crash course in international relations just by looking at all the creative ways countries use the names of other countries euphemistically.

There’s so much more I’m excited to share with you, but I can’t give too much away just yet! However, if you love words and language, history, my blog, my weird medieval guys work in general, pestering your friends/family/coworkers with fun facts, or owning books with beautiful covers—or you know someone else who loves any of those things—this is the book for you.

Preorder it now!

The Wordspotter’s Guide is out November 10th, 2026 in the USA via Penguin Random House. Options for USA preorders can be found on their website here!

• https://sites.prh.com/wordspotters-guide

The Wordspotter’s Guide is out November 5th, 2026 in the UK via Profile Books. Options for UK preorders can be found on their website here!

• https://profilebooks.com/work/the-wordspotters-guide/

If you do not live in the UK or USA, you can preorder with FREE WORLDWIDE SHIPPING from Blackwell’s here!

• https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781805226208

Or, as always, wherever you may live, ask your local independent bookshop or your public library to order a copy for you!

Preorders are hugely important for determining the success of a book, especially one written by a lesser-known author such as myself. Each one of you who puts your faith in this book before it has even been released is sending a message to my publishers and booksellers that I and my projects are worth supporting and promoting! In turn, that support and promotion can make or break my career. If you like the sneak peeks you’ve seen so far and think you’d enjoy ca. 300 pages of similar content, it would mean the world to me if you’d consider preordering.

Happy wordspotting!

Context matters

Illuminated manuscripts were essentially always written first and illustrated second in the late Middle Ages. The scribes would add their writing to unbound, empty pages, working carefully around blank fields where painted miniatures and initials would later be added by a separate artist or artists. We do not know exactly what sort of education these artists would have obtained. However, they almost certainly would have had a degree of literacy in their native tongue and a familiarity with the scriptures they were illustrating, even if this did not extend to a firm grasp of written Latin.

Understanding this is crucial for pushing back on the idea of medieval marginalia as ‘random’, since it opens up the possibility of considering marginal drawings in relation to the rest of the page and manuscript as a whole—crucial context that is often neglected when we encounter marginalia as isolated snippets online. Artists were not simply filling in blank voids but adding adornment to a canvas already rich with meaning imparted by the scribe. Thus, the first step to understanding a piece of marginalia should always be to trace it back to its source, if possible. Have a look through the entire work and see what themes and images recur.

Works like the 13th century English prayerbook known as the Rutland Psalter show extensive evidence of the marginal artists playing on specific words and lines from the scriptures featured on the same page. I highly recommend Betsy Chunko Dominguez’ fantastic paper “Playing on Timbrels: The Margins of the Rutland Psalter” for a more complete exposition, but I will go over a couple examples here.

In the lower margin of folio 11r of the Psalter, two men seem to be engaged in a fierce struggle, with one of them apparently trying to rip off the other’s ear. Moving their eyes back up to the start of the opposite page, a reader would have been greeted by the following line from Psalm 5:

Verba mea auribus percipe Domine intellege clamorem meum.

Give ear, O Lord, to my words, understand my cry.

Thus, our marginal brawl becomes a clever pun on the notion of ‘giving ear’—perhaps a way of making the text more engaging and memorable for its reader.

On folio 87v, the artist has extended the letter p from the word conspectu in Psalm 86 (85 in the Vulgate) into an arrow fired from the bow of one monster into the rear end of another.

Conspectu means ‘to behold’ or ‘to consider’, and the famous medieval scholar Michael Camille connected the arrow’s placement to the notion of gaze as a type of visual penetration. One might also consider the entire verse from the Psalm, which reads:

Deus, iniqui insurrexerunt super me, et synagoga potentium quaesierunt animam meam: et non proposuerunt te in conspectu suo.

Arrogant men are rising up against me, O God; a violent mob seeks my life; they do not keep you before their eyes.

In redirecting the word for ‘gaze’ into the supine creature’s rear end, the artist has perhaps emphasised the evils of turning one’s eyes away from God, connecting the two monsters with the violent mob evoked in the text above.

For those who lack an education in Latin, this type of wordplay can be tricky to identify. What may be easier to find are visual parallels between different drawings in a manuscript: the margins could function as a sort of antithesis to the ‘orthodox’ miniatures and initials in the centre of the page. In one 14th century French book of hours, the martyrdom of St Paul in an initial D is reenacted directly to the left by a soldier about to club a rabbit—a humorous elevation of lapine suffering that perhaps emphasises Paul’s innocence.

Other manuscripts show narratives playing out in the margins across multiple pages in a comic-book fashion. The 14th century Smithfield Decretals contains more than a dozen multi-page stories, including those of several saints, naughty priests, henpecked husbands, and a group of rabbits who capture, try, convict, and execute a hunter for his crimes against their kind.

Monsters have meaning

In line with the biblical notion that man had been created in God’s image, the human body occupied a distinct place in medieval humour. As much as we are inherently like God, our bodies give us all sorts of uncomfortable reminders of the gulf between divine and mortal—the flesh has urges and weaknesses, it is impermanent, it rots. And, while Nature creates us according to the pattern drawn by God, she is an imperfect craftswoman, always making at least a couple little errors in her work.

Any deviation from a perfect body was thus a deviation from God’s own image. The physical nature of such a change was inextricable from its moral implications. Half-human and not-quite-human beasts like the lusty centaur and the seductive siren, inherited from classical folklore, had by the Middle Ages long been understood as examples of humanity debased by animalistic impulses. These creatures were used in bestiaries as warnings against letting one’s baser urges take control.

The Christian moral perception of the human body that developed in the Middle Ages further entrenched the role of such monsters, allowing artists to develop them into a visual language of sin and perversion. Thus, we see the margins of manuscripts bursting with hybrid creatures seemingly cut and pasted together from various human, animal, and monstrous forms. A favourite was the gryllus, a creature comprised of little more than a human head atop two legs.

The gryllus is literally (to co-opt a British phrase) all talk and trousers: its head seemingly connects directly to its genitals, or perhaps replaces its genitals altogether. Like the centaur, which is governed by the beastly impulses embodied in its lower half, the gryllus’ mental faculties are located in the seat of its desire. Its role as a deviant is only reinforced by the context in which it tends to be found: in the margins, surrounded by other freaks, hybrids, and backwards beasts, encircling but rarely encroaching upon the word of God at the page’s centre.

A similar anatomical aberration is the image of the demon seen in medieval manuscripts, which often features (among other beastly attributes) a face in the place of its crotch.

Vision, speech, and breath were powerful phenomena in medieval theology, and rightly separated by elevation from the base, carnal activities of the human body’s lower half. The Latin word spiritus, literally the breath, also carried the closely associated meaning of soul, and indeed the mouth was the source of the Word, the satisfaction of spiritual desire. What bubbled and churned in the parts below was best ignored. Sinners were often described as inversions of this natural order, people with their eyes and minds fixated not on the heavens but the dirt. Some stories even depicted the wicked defecating through their mouths. While the Word of God was divinity incarnate, the placement of the demon’s and the gryllus’ faces made it clear that such creatures could only be incarnations of sin and subversion.

God indeed gave man an upright stance of body, it may be in order that this corporeal uprightness, exterior and of little account, might prompt the inward man, made to the image of God, to, cherish his spiritual uprightness; that the beauty of the body of clay might rebuke the deformity of the mind. What is more unbecoming than to bear a warped mind in an upright body? It is wrong and shameful that this body shaped from the dust of the earth should have its eyes raised on high, scanning the heavens at its pleasure and thrilled by the sight of the sun and moon and stars, while, on the contrary, the heavenly and spiritual creature lives with its eyes, its inward vision and affections centered on the earth beneath; the mind that should be feasting on dainties is wallowing in the mire, rolling in the dung like a pig.

—Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century

Michael Camille highlighted a fixation on anal and scatalogical themes that seems to recur throughout medieval marginalia, and which he connects to the notion of the ‘naughty’ rear end as a subversion of the ‘righteous’ mouth. The butt trumpets sometimes seen in medieval margins thus could be interpreted not just as comic scenes but also as a dig at those who spew the hot air of sinful speech—literally, talking out of their asses. (Perhaps a similar notion also fed into the gryllus’ often prominent buttocks—it, too, is a shit talker.)

It would be hard to argue that late medieval manuscript illuminators, who were generally not monks or nuns but independent, ‘secular’ artisans, were adhering to strict theological principles at all times when producing their work. But the religious culture in which these manuscripts were made helps us get a sense for why images of backwardness, upside-downness, beastliness, and general ‘wrongness’ proliferated in their art.

The world turned upside down

Medieval marginalia proliferated from the early 1300s onward, a time when notions of courtly conduct and chivalry were becoming encoded amongst high society. The joust began to eclipse the mass brawl of the melee as the sole focus at tournaments. The genre of the courtly romance flourished, filled with noble knights and blushing maidens. Hunting, too, became a carefully choreographed endeavour requiring knowledge of the proper rituals, roles, and vocabulary in order to take part.

Even as pageantry and hierarchy became increasingly important parts of life at court, there was (as there always is) the sense that people were living in the shadow of better times. Tournament contestants dressed as crusaders or members of King Arthur’s Round Table, recalling a time when knights had been braver, fought for something that really mattered. In the 14th century, the master huntsman Gaston Phoebus wrote lamentingly of the ever-worsening quality of men, boys, and dogs participating in the great chase. Everything good and pure and noble was slowly draining away, replaced by empty performance.

Since antiquity, writers had used the device of ‘the world turned upside down’ as a means of expressing the ever-degrading state of society. The scholar Ernst Robert Curtius was in 1948 perhaps the first to identify the trope, illustrating it with the example of the medieval poem collection known as the Carmina Burana:

The poem begins as a "complaint on the times": youth will no longer study! Learning is in decay! But—so the thought proceeds—the whole world is topsy-turvy! The blind lead the blind and hurl them into the abyss; birds fly before they are fledged; the ass plays the lute; oxen dance; plow-boys turn soldiers. ... What was once outlawed is now praised. Everything is out of joint.

—Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages

Thus, images like the huntsman and the knight became highly codified symbols in the medieval margins, sometimes played straight but other times turned upside-down. The rabbit becoming the hunter is a classic example: see how the artist of the second image plays on the established imagery exemplified in the first image below.

In fact, the huntsman is rivalled perhaps only by the knight in terms of popularity as a source of parody. The joust, a highly coordinated and performative act, was a favourite subject for marginal artists to skewer (forgive the pun), often by swapping out the rider and/or steed for animals or monsters. In the image below, a second layer of inversion is added by making the rabbit and the hound, traditional enemies, into allies.

However, the knight could also be brought down a peg by making him square up to a snail or some other non-threatening creature, with these confrontations usually ending in his defeat.

Note in this one the rabbit’s sling, drawing parallels with David and Goliath and thus foreshadowing the rabbit’s victory.

While these works might draw on more secular themes, there is a moralising quality to them, too, one that parallels the religious themes of the works they surround. Even as they invite the viewer to be entertained, their inversion of the world’s natural hierarchies is a reminder to the viewer of the ‘proper’ order of things. In the absurdity of the violent rabbit and the dangerous snail is a warning about the absurdity of transgressing those fixed boundaries that keep the universe in place. After all, these creatures are literally marginalised—by virtue of their placement at the edge of the page, away from the depictions of saints, Christ, and heaven, it is made cleari that they deserve to be.

The Book of Durrow

Trinity College Dublin, MS 57 (Ireland, ca. 700 AD)

This manuscript shows its age—in the best way possible, since it’s one of the oldest illuminated manuscripts around. Its pages are worn, water-stained in some places and repaired in others, but its hard to imagine that this has much detracted from the Book of Durrow’s charm.

View it here

The Book of Kells

Trinity College Dublin, MS 58 (Ireland, ca. 800 AD)

A singularly stunning Irish manuscript with some of the most ornate Celtic illustrations out there. Some would say it is the most beautiful Insular manuscript; others would say it is the most beautiful of all medieval manuscripts!

View it here

The Lorsch Gospels

Alba Iulia, Bibl. Batthyáneum, Ms R II 1 and Vatican, BAV, Pal. lat. 50 (Germany, ca. 810s AD)

A product of the Carolingian Renaissance, a cosmopolitan movement that revived interest in classical studies throughout Europe. Look at those naturalistic drawings and classical attire! A typical example of elegant Carolingian restraint. This one has been split into two parts.

View part I here

View part II here

The Beatus of Saint Sever

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 8878 (France, ca. 1028-1072 AD)

A good medieval illuminated Apocalypse should still be a bit disturbing to look through, even today. If you ask me, this Romanesque edition with its flat, expressive, colourful compositions fits the bill nicely.

View it here

The Stammheim Missal

Los Angeles, Getty Museum, Ms. 64 (Germany, ca. 1170s AD)

This Romanesque manuscript contains lots and lots of large, elaborate initials, each one a little self-contained scene in its own right! So many fun little details to explore.
View it here

The Aberdeen Bestiary

Aberdeen University Library, MS 24 (England, ca. 1200 AD)

A beautiful and copiously gilded manuscript considered to be one of the most lavish medieval bestiaries.

The Aberdeen Bestiary has its own website with more information and page-by-page English translations viewable here

The Bodley Bestiary

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 764 (England, ca. 1225-1240)

Another beautiful bestiary replete with images of weird medieval creatures both fictional and real.

View it here

The Crusader Bible

New York, Morgan Library, MS M.638 (France, ca. 1250 AD)

Though officially known as a Bible, this manuscript originally consisted entirely of illustrations. These depict various Old Testament scenes (especially battles and conquests) albeit with contemporary 12th century attire and weaponry. The detail on the soldiers’ suits of mail is mind-boggling! Over the centuries, the Bible’s various owners added explanatory notes to its drawings in Latin, Persian, Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Hebrew.

View it here

The Rothschild Canticles

Yale, Beinecke Library, MS 404 (Flanders or the Rhineland, ca. 1300 AD)

A prayer book with beautiful and utterly beguiling illuminations showing the influence of mystical devotional theology. Also, lots and lots of silly marginal guys. One of my all time favourite manuscripts for its mysterious and compelling artwork.

View it here

The Codex Manesse

Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cpg 848 (Zürich, ca. 1304 AD)

A 14th century compilation of works by around 135 courtly poets, each one represented by a full-page portrait of the writer engaging in courtly activities like hunting, riding, and romancing—although its most famous page inexplicably shows the poet Reimmar von Brennenberg getting stabbed in the head.

View it here

The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux

Met Museum, Cloisters Collection, 54.1.2 (Paris, ca. 1324-1328 AD)

An impossibly tiny 14th century prayer book. It pages are a mere 3.5 by 4.5 inches (9.2 by 6.2 cm) yet squeezed into them are some absolutely stunning and lifelike drawings showing the highest degree of artistic skill.

View it here

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264

(Bruges, 1338-1334 AD)

The first and largest part of this manuscript is an illustrated Alexander Romance. However, what makes this book really special is the marginal decoration, which contains hundreds of drawings of medieval men and women engaged in a huge variety of activities. There are jousts, puppet shows, bat-and-ball games, chess players, trebuchets, marketplaces, dances, courtship scenes, and much, much more. Practically every page feels like a treasure trove of detail about life 650 years ago.

View it here

Tacuinum Sanitatis

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Ser. n. 2644

Originally an 11th century Arabic health manual by Ibn Butlan, the Tacuinum Sanitatis soon found its way to Europe where Latin translations were widely circulated. This heavily illuminated edition depicts Ibn Butlan’s advice in vivid detail. From abundant fruits and vegetables to ample fresh air, you’ll feel restored just looking at all the healthful scenes.

View it here

The Sherborne Missal

British Library, Add MS 74236 (England, ca. 1399-1407 AD)

A luxurious late medieval English manuscript unique for its lifelike depictions of dozens of local native bird species. So arduous was it to write and illuminate this manuscript that the lead scribe and artist both signed their names in several places throughout to ensure their efforts wouldn’t be forgotten. This may not seem remarkable now, but very few medieval manuscripts were ever signed by their makers.

View it here

The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

Chantilly, Musée Condé, 0065 (1284) (France, ca. 1416)

Famous for its unmatched luxury, especially the calendar sequence in the beginning which includes detailed drawings of daily medieval life throughout the year.

View a version with digital annotations in English or French here

View a version with downloadable page images here

The Hours of Charlotte of Savoy

New York, Morgan Library, MS M.1004 (Paris, ca. 1420-1425 AD)

Perfect for the enjoyers of weird little guys, since there’s one lurking on almost every page of this prayer book, including the famous hedgehog with grapes!

View it here

The Black Hours

New York, Morgan Library, MS. 493 (Bruges, 1460-1475)

A brief fad during the mid-to-late 15th century saw several luxury illuminated manuscripts written on black-dyed parchment. This is one of the finest examples, with every colour and detail carefully chosen to offset the pitch-black background.

View it here

Livre de la Chasse

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Français 616 (France, 15th century)

Dogs! Dogs! Dogs! This is a treatise on hunting, and if you should know one thing about medieval hunting, it’s the importance of dogs. Consequently, a great deal of this manuscript’s text and illustrations are devoted to man’s best friends. The illuminator’s skill in depicting lush, verdant outdoor settings lends the pages of the book a pleasing harmony.

View it here

Chansonnier cordiforme de Montchenu

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. Rothschild 2973 (Savoy, ca. 1475 AD)

A liturgical songbook in the shape of a heart containing the scores for 43 songs and beautiful illuminated miniatures and borders.

View it here

Les Visions du chevalier Tondal

Los Angeles, Getty Museum, Ms. 30

This tale of a knight’s journey through heaven and hell has some brilliantly expressive illustrations of demonic torture.

View it here

Pierre Sala’s Petit Livre d'Amour

British Library, Stowe MS 955 (France, ca. 1500 AD)

Some time around 1500 AD, French nobleman Pierre Sala created this tiny book as a gift for his then lover and future wife Marguerite Bullioud. It contains prose and poetry written in her honour, accompanied by illustrations of medieval French proverbs and romantic themes. In the courtly tradition, the these portray love obliquely through a visual language of selflessness and hopeless devotion, such as in the above image of Pierre dropping his heart into an open daisy—marguerite is the French word for daisy.

View a list of the proverbs and the digitised manuscript here

Seligenstädter Lateinpädagogik

Uppsala University Library, MS C 678 (Seligenstadt, ca. 1487 AD)

A 15th century Latin textbook featuring slightly crude but very charming illustrations of many of its vocabulary words, which no doubt would have been a helpful memory aid to the young learner. The drawings speak to their creator’s sense of humour as well as his well-rounded education—an entry for vello, which means ‘to pull’, a skeleton bothers a happy young couple with a reference to Virgil: Mors aurem vellit Vivite, ait, Venio—‘Death plucked her ear. “Live!” he said, “For I am coming.”’

View it here

The Augsburg book of miracles

Private collection (Augsburg, 1551 AD)

Brilliant illustrations of biblical events, miracles, and strange atmospheric/astrological phenomena from 16th century Germany. Some of the events depicted really really did happen, some didn’t! I’ll leave you to decide which is which.

View most of the illustrations here

Guillaume Le Testu’s Cosmographie universelle

(France, 1555 AD)

A super fun collection of maps featuring all sorts of staples of the weird medieval creature genre (even if this manuscript is technically early modern). There are blemmyes with faces on their chests, monopods using their one big foot as an umbrella, and so much more!

View it here

These facts and myths were often presented alongside stunning and vivid illustrations of the bestiary’s fables, with all elements working together to tell powerful stories about the beasts that roam the earth. These helped the reader to decode the meanings encrypted by God into all of life on Earth. While the medieval depictions of animals and descriptions of their behaviour fall somewhat short of modern standards of accuracy, they remain compelling and charming even into the present day. Here are a few key lessons you might learn from a medieval bestiary!

The wolf

The wolf, of course, was characterised as a wicked beast, and the dangers of meeting one by chance were always made clear in the bestiary. The typical bestiary explained that if a wolf was encountered by a person in the wild, it was of utmost importance that the human should catch sight of the wolf before it notices them, because this will cause the wolf to lose its courage and flee in fear. On the other hand, should a wolf see a person before they see it, the person will be struck dumb and unable to call for help. Thankfully, the bestiary lets us know what to do in this situation: simply strip all of your clothes off and bang two rocks together

Read more

1. The Codex Gigas

The Codex Gigas (Latin for “Giant Book”) is an early 13th century manuscript created in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in what is now the Czech Republic. Its contents include a Latin Bible, two texts on the history of the Jews, a copy of Isidore’s Etymologies, various medical works, and a chronicle of Bohemia. The Codex Gigas is said to be the largest medieval manuscript in existence, measuring some 36 inches long, 20 inches wide, and almost 9 inches thick, and weighing in at a staggering 165 pounds. Also, it is said to have been written by Satan himself.

In addition to its massive size, the Codex has several remarkable features that have given rise to this legend. To begin with, a manuscript of this significance would have typically been the work of several scribes whose contributions would be distinguishable through differences in their handwriting. Not so for the Codex Gigas, whose 310 leaves (620 pages in the modern sense) show exactly one handwriting style. For a single person to complete a such a large book would have taken over 20 years of constant work, during which time the average person’s writing style would be expected to change or vary at least a little bit, but there is no sign of that here. From the first page to the last, the lettering is impressively consistent. Even more remarkably, the Codex contains no mistakes whatsoever, something almost unheard of for a book written entirely by human hands.

However, the Codex Gigas’ most famous feature is its large illustration of Satan.

This arresting full-body portrait occupies an entire page and is at the heart of the legend behind the book’s production, a legend that may be almost as old as the Codex itself. Per the National Library of Sweden’s website:

Already in the Middle Ages, a legend was told of a monk in Podlažice who was walled up while still alive for his sins. He tried to expiate his guilt by writing the world’s largest book in a single night. When he realised that the task was beyond his powers, he called on the Devil for help. The Evil One assisted him, had his portrait painted in the book, and demanded the monk’s soul in return. The day was saved for the monk, but he never had another moment’s peace. Eventually he turned to the Virgin Mary and prayed for salvation. The Virgin extended him a helping hand, but the penitent died the very moment he was supposed to have been freed from his contract with the Devil.

The theories

Most scholars have agreed that the best assumption is that the Codex Gigas really was written by one scribe working relentlessly for several decades. The myth of the book’s Satanic origins was perhaps inspired by an inscription in its calendar of deaths mentioning a man named Hermanus Inclusus, or “Herman the Recluse”. This could have referred to someone who lived as an anchorite, a special type of religious lifestyle that involved walling oneself permanently into a cell attached to a church or abbey as an act of devotion to God. The occasion of an anchorite’s walling-up was commonly celebrated with a funeral ritual symbolising their exit from the earthly realm and entry into a more spiritual mode of existence. The rest of the anchorite’s life would be spent in contemplation, prayer, and other forms of devotional activity. Writing out the largest book ever made would be a perfect activity for one who had made the decision to be walled away—and it was indeed the anchorite’s own decision to make, not a punishment for atrocious crimes.

This explanation plausibly accounts for the Codex, but the book’s singular nature still makes it one of the most intriguing objects from the Middle Ages. Although it is plausible for one person to have created the Codex Gigas, our so-called “Herman the Recluse” must have been a truly strange (and indeed reclusive) guy in order to devoted such painstaking attention to such a demanding task for 20 or more years. Who was he and why did he do such a thing? Was he a mystic? A madman? Repenting for something horrible? Or, as some have theorised, simply a historical example of someone on the autism spectrum? We’ll likely never know.

Read more about the Codex Gigas and browse a fully digitised version here.

2. The Pictish Beast

The Picts were a mysterious group of people who emerged in northern Scotland some time during the early Middle Ages and were probably completely assimilated into the Gaelic culture of the south of Scotland by the 10th century AD. While their own artwork seems to depict people with books, we have no surviving written records from the Picts whatsoever. Almost everything about their culture is up for debate: where they came from, what sort of language they spoke, whether they really covered their bodies in tattoos like the Romans said they did. Researchers have been able to glean a few shreds of information about Pictish culture from the scant comments written by their contemporaries and from place names that are thought to be Pictish in origin. However, our richest source about their lives comes in the form of the hundreds of monumental stone carvings they left behind.

These carvings are themselves a source of great debate on account of the cryptic symbols that they feature—arrays of geometric shapes that can look random at first glance but recur over and over on different stones. The most easily identifiable elements are depictions of the fauna of northern Scotland: wolves, boar, fish, stags, and other animals that roamed the British Isles a thousand years ago. However, some 40% of Pictish animal carvings are representations of a completely unidentifiable creature known today simply as the “Pictish Beast”.

Most animals carved by the Picts adhere to a relatively naturalistic style, making them easy to recognise as real Scottish wildlife. The Pictish Beast, by contrast, seems like something from another world. The ends of its limbs are scroll-like, its snout is long and pointed, and its head is adorned with a thin, trailing tendril. To make things even more confusing, it appears in a wide variety of contexts, alongside humans, animals, fantastical creatures, and abstract symbols. Sometimes the Pictish Beast appears tiny, but other times it seems to dwarf the other inhabitants of the scene.

The theories

Many people gravitate toward the idea that the Pictish Beast represents a real life sea creature such as a seal, whale, or dolphin. Its blunt limbs could be flippers, perhaps, and its head adornment a spout of water from a blowhole? Nevertheless, this still doesn’t explain why the Picts would choose to abandon their usual naturalistic style for this animal in particular, especially because their drawings of fish are easily identifiable as such.

I personally favour the explanation that the Pictish Beast is a mythical creature whose meaning was lost alongside many of the other distinctive symbols used by Picts. This is probably the least controversial theory, since it makes the fewest assumptions about the Beast’s significance, but it leaves so many questions unanswered! Was there a legend behind the Beast’s origin? Did it have a name? Why was it forgotten? The Beast wasn’t the only mythical creature used in Pictish art, but unlike the twining fish-horses and dragon-snakes that appear in other cultures and eras, it seems to have been completely unique to the Picts. Most likely, it evolved in Scotland and was forgotten in Scotland, just like Pictish culture itself. The Beast isn’t just a mystery in its own right, I think—it’s an emblem of how little we know about this long-dead society.

3. The Sator square

In 1936, archaeologists excavating the Roman city of Pompeii found something very strange buried under the ash. It was a graffito in the form of a 5 by 5 grid of letters scratched into a column some time before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 62 AD.

This wasn’t the first time such a square had been seen. In fact, the so-called “Sator square” (it is often written with the words reversed so that the first line is SATOR) has been found in countless contexts throughout history, including:

• On Coptic papyrus scrolls

• Carved into walls, doorways, and floors of churches, houses, and public spaces from the early Middle Ages onwards

• In a Carolingian Bible

• Recommended in medieval medical books as a charm or healing spell. Sometimes, the patient is told to chant the words, but a variation involves etching the square into butter or cheese on a piece of bread to be eaten as a cure for all sorts of maladies

• Carved into or written on discs used to extinguish fires in early modern Germany

• I spent several hours trying to verify claims that the square was carved into skulls that defendants would swear oaths on in Germany’s secret Vehmic courts during the late medieval and early modern period. I was able to find evidence that such skulls had been auctioned off but would hesitate to fully trust their authenticity

However, no one knows what on earth the square means. It seems to be in Latin, but the second word, AREPO, is not known from any other context. It is a hapax legomenon. AREPO could be read as a proper name, in which case the square yields a rough translation as “The farmer Arepo works his wheels”, but this phrase doesn’t seem to hold any significance. Anways, early versions of the square usually have the words in reverse order, as do some later examples. Could this suggest that the square isn’t meant to be read as a meaningful sentence? Is it possible that the individual words are a pretext for a concealed message?

For years, the Sator square was assumed to have originated amongst early Christians as a secret symbol of their faith, since its letters can be rearranged into a cross comprised of the word “paternoster” intersecting itself. The leftover As and Os were taken as alphas and omegas, a pair of letters associated with Jesus and God the Father in the Book of Revelation. In this case, AREPO was merely a nonsense word that served no purpose beyond completing the square, and the other words in the grid were similarly arbitrary.

The 1936 discovery put this theory to rest. There were almost certainly no Christians living in Pompeii as early as 62 AD, and regardless all Christian writings were at that point in Greek. Since then, the Sator square’s origin has continued to be an open question. Particularly baffling is the fact that the square seems to have become associated with Christians from a very early date—if it was a pagan creation, how did this happen?

The theories

The ancient Romans loved puns and word games, and palindromes were a particular favourite. They combined this with their love of defacing public property, leaving many witty palindromic graffiti inscriptions on public walls and columns. That ROMA spelled backwards is AMOR (love) was ever entertaining to those patriots, who sometimes extended the palindrome to ROMA SUMMUS AMOR—Rome supreme love. There was even ROMA TIBI SUBITO MOTIBUS IBIT AMOR—Rome, to you love will come suddenly with passion.

Palindromic word squares like the Sator square are extremely hard to find—in fact, computer analysis by Charles Douglas Gunn in 1969 showed that no such square could be constructed with existing five-letter Latin words, but that the Sator/Rotas square was the one that most satisfactorily aligned with grammatically correct Roman text. He agreed that AREPO was probably just a way of completing the square. Perhaps the Sator square was simply one of many Roman word games and it had no real purpose beyond seeming clever. In this case, its use could have carried over into the Christian era simply because it was fun and iconic, like a millennia-old “cool S”. It doesn’t seem like such a logical leap to imagine that special words have special power, so the magical associations of the Sator square could simply be a product of its uniqueness.

A more recent theory that has found some support is that the square has Jewish origins, since it is known that large numbers of Latin-speaking Jews were living in Pompeii at the time of its destruction. This theory relies on some fairly esoteric and cryptic interpretation, so I recommend you check out Nicolas Vinel’s excellent paper on the subject.

Dozens of other explanations for the Sator square have been proposed, from ancient cult rituals to maps of the wind to Satanic numerology. Like most other historical mysteries, the chances are slim that we’ll ever find an answer so satisfying it puts the debate to rest. For the forseeable future, then, the Sator square will retain its air of mystique, even though it may have just been the result of some bored Romans having fun. However, I have yet to hear of anyone testing the square’s properties when scratched into the butter on their toast, which seems to me a gap in the literature. I think I know what I’ll have for breakfast tomorrow...

Smartphones have allowed us to offload a huge amount of life’s logistical burden onto our devices. Simply meeting a friend at a pub in the city where we live requires the internet to pick up a huge amount of slack for me. It tells me a place to meet, charts my route there, tells me when I’ll arrive down to the minute, and lets me text my friend from the train to say I’m running my inevitable 10-15 minutes late.

With this degree of digital input needed for everyday life, it seems impossible to imagine travelling abroad 500 or more years ago. And yet, people did. This article will focus mostly on the topic of language and communication, but in looking at examples how people overcame linguistic barriers, we will also learn a fair bit about how intercultural encounters were navigated in general. So, what’s a Flemish friar to do at the Mongol Khan’s court, and how does a Burgundian pilgrim become best friends with a bunch of Turks? Let’s find out!

Merchants, pilgrims, missionaries

Merchants were among the most well-travelled medieval Europeans, and by the high Middle Ages could expect to rely upon an established network of

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Today, sticklers will tell you that the proper term for these typefaces is blackletter, but the Gothic label remains prevalent. And, despite Hitler’s best efforts, they remain associated with right-wing and white nationalist movements. So, how did this historical tangle come to be?

This is the story of two fonts battling for dominance. One is the “Gothic” family, now largely fallen out of usage. The other is the “Roman” font, which provided the basis for most of the typefaces we use today.

Both styles of text share a common ancestor in the form of Carolingian minuscule, a style of handwriting that developed in the late 8th century under an illiterate emperor named Carl. Today, Carl is remembered as a shrewd military leader, uniter of Europe, and first of a thousand-year line of Holy Roman Emperors. His popular legacy as “Carl the Great”—more often Charlemagne in the Anglosphere—is rarely attributed to his involvement in handwriting standardisation, despite the fact that the very letters you’re reading now wouldn’t exist without him.

Charlemagne had inherited a fractured Europe. In the centuries since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, political and cultural divides had deepened. To bring these fragments of Europe together under the same legal rule was not enough. Charlemagne didn’t just see his role as a political one: his Emperor was a spiritual leader, too, one who would reign over a peaceful Europe unified by a shared church and shared Christian rites.

Though by most accounts Charlemagne could read only poorly and could hardly write, he understood that education would be crucial for making this dream a reality. Under his supervision, scholars were summoned from across Europe to create the foundation for centuries of Christian scholarship to come. In what is now known as the “Carolingian Renaissance”, classical learning was revived and Roman aesthetics flourished in art and architecture, lending a sense of historical precedent to the Christian future.

Carolingian minuscule was a product of this Renaissance, a synthesis of ancient Roman capitals and the lower-case (or “minuscule”, more properly) letters that had developed in various local handwriting styles in the interim. Created to be consistent, elegant, and easily legible to scholars around Europe, this wasn’t a script for everyday use by clerks and lawyers. It was meant to glorify and codify the word of God. Luxury Carolingian manuscripts such as the Ramsey Psalter below show how comfortably this writing style extended and fit alongside classical aesthetics.

Unfortunately, the artistic and political unity fostered by Charlemagne wasn’t meant to last. His empire fractured, many classical texts ceased to be studied, and the Romanesque styles of the Carolingian Renaissance gave way to the Gothic movement.

In northern Europe, away from Rome, the Gothic tradition was embraced in its most extreme forms. Cathedrals were bedecked with elaborate tracery and church spires extended higher and higher into the heavens. The spiky ornateness of Northern Gothic architecture was mirrored by the handwriting used in luxury manuscripts. Slowly, Carolingian minuscule became more and more detached from its Roman roots. Writing styles like textualis quadrata eschewed almost all curved strokes in favour of geometric forms. England and northern France were the heartlands of this style, which in reality had nothing to do with the historical Gothic peoples and was not even called “Gothic” until long after its heyday. In fact, Germany, the homeland of the Goths of yore, was rather slower to adopt these aesthetics, though they eventually did.

Further south, people weren’t quite so keen to leave Rome behind. Italian late medieval architecture incorporated many Gothic features, but these shared the stage with traditional, more restrained Romanesque elements. Once again, the same dynamics played out on the page. Italian and Spanish elites favoured a type of script called Rotunda, which blended sharp Gothic calligraphy with gentle curves.

Nevertheless, Italian scholars still began to tire of the influences that had made their way across the alps. Beginning in the late 13th century, Italy had become the heart of a movement to return to classical study. Previously forgotten works were rediscovered and fields like history and literature, long neglected, were brought back to the forefront of academia. The scholars leading the way couldn’t help but feel a tension between the principles of the ancients and those that recent history had propagated.

The philosophical backbone of the Renaissance was called humanism because it sought to re-centre human beings as an intellectual and artistic focus—their anatomy, stories, and minds. In this context, the Gothic movement seemed like an encapsulation of a philosophy rapidly becoming outdated. In its unrelenting march toward ever-greater opulence, humans had rather gone by the wayside. The frenetic, jagged cathedrals seemed designed to intimidate the mind and exhaust the eye, yet simultaneously lacked weight and presence. And the distinctive blackletter handwriting was hard to read and an absolute pain to write.

In the fourteenth century, the Italian scholar Petrarch wrote extensively about his issues with impractical handwriting. Petrarch praised older styles of writing (“littera antiqua”) for their legibility. He was referring especially to the pre-Gothic Carolingian scripts, which were used in the early medieval copies of classical works that had begun to be rediscovered. How neat and sophisticated those round little minuscules seemed! How orderly and refined those pages were with their airy spacing and restrained embellishment! This Antiqua writing was surely how classical authors were meant to be read. Copying Lucretius into blackletter was like serving up champagne in a pint glass. Just not right.

As more forgotten ancient texts resurfaced, the link between their handwriting and content became stronger. Thus, 14th and 15th century Italian scholars, especially in Florence, began to consciously incorporate Romanesque influences into their scripts with the hope of creating a medium appropriate for transmitting humanist thought. By the mid-15th century, works by the likes of Plautus, Cicero, and Caesar were circulating around Europe with a stylish new look inspired by the very old. Scholars referred to this handwriting style as “Antiqua” as if to suggest that they were merely picking up what Gothic writers had neglected. And indeed, 15th century Antiqua does very closely resemble its forbears. Compare the following sample from a lectionary, written in Trier around 1000 AD, with a paragraph of Plautus from around 1480 AD, written in Rome.

It was this revived taste for the classics that gave us the label of “Gothic” in the years following the Middle Ages, since this vulgar art had seemed to infiltrate from the other side of the Alps just as the historic Goths, a collection of Germanic tribes, had swept down to sack Rome. Though the Goths had later been subsumed by larger tribes in Iberia and Italy, the humanists still identified them with the German speakers of their day. The fall of Rome, bad education, ugly churches—it was all written off as Gothic nonsense.

North of the Alps, these humanist ideas had yet to fully take root. Ever the pragmatists, the Germans had been busy with a different innovation entirely: moveable type printing. Thus, when Gutenberg’s first Bibles rolled off the press in Mainz in the 1450s, the word of God was in a blocky typeface very similar to the textualis quadrata handwriting used by local scribes.

The Renaissance elites took some time to warm to printing, which put both the production of books in the hands of (largely German) craftsmen and merchants rather than Latin-speaking scribes. However, subsequent decades saw vast improvements to the printing process as well as the introduction of the first Antiqua typefaces, and it soon became clear that the scribe was fighting a losing battle against obsolescence.

By the early 16th century, Renaissance tastes had seen Antiqua displace blackletter across most of Europe for all types of printing. German-speaking areas remained the exception. Even as the Dutch and English left these old-school styles behind entirely, German typesetters tinkered with the dense quadrata forms to create newer, more elegant glyphs better suited to printing, such as the rounded Schwabacher which was soon usurped by the spiky Fraktur.

Soon, the notion of blackletter faces as being the domain of the Germans was deeply entrenched. This had evolved beyond a mere regional preference. Blackletter type, especially Fraktur, had come to be seen as the appropriate vessel for the German language and culture, just as Antiqua had arisen and spread as the proper vessel for Renaissance thought. Thus, German printers customarily carried at least two sets of characters—Fraktur for the bulk of their work, and Antiqua to be inserted in the case of any foreign words used. Never mind that Germans hadn’t had much to do with inventing these letters—they owned them now.

This entrenched the divide between Antiqua and Fraktur even further. The stark contrast between the two faces side-by-side on the page articulated a message about the uniqueness of the Germans and their tongue. It may seem strange that Germans should cling to something that the rest of the world had long written off as barbaric. However, barbarism was all the Germans had to call their own. The Renaissance had seen no resurfacing of ancient German writings. At the time of Caesar, there had been no German writings because no Germans could write. The same ancient sources whose rediscovery had fuelled the Renaissance and provided a rich substrate for Italian nationalism had provided only sparse information about the Germans, who were now beginning to ask themselves—What’s our story? What do we have to proud of?

The most detailed source on ancient Germans was a piece by Tacitus from the first century AD, devoted entirely to describing Germanic tribes. Tacitus had never ventured to the tribes’ lands himself. Why would he? Tacitus wrote in his Germania that the Germanic heartland was an impenetrable wilderness of swamps and dark forests which no outsiders ever bothered to visit. He described a collection of tribes thus almost entirely free from external influence or intermarriage, inhabited by a people tall, blue-eyed and light-haired, lacking any real laws, governed by consensus and merit. These Germans largely eschewed gold and silver, basing wealth more on quantities of livestock. Always ready to fight, they would sooner die than run from a battle or forgive a blood feud. Germanic women were no less fierce than men and would follow their husbands to the field of battle to egg them on, but at home they were caring mothers who birthed many children, and raised them to be tough like their fathers. Germans liked poetry and drinking. They lived in huts and holes. When people stepped out of line, they were beaten to death.

The picture Tacitus painted of Germanic life was vivid and compelling. It didn’t evoke much envy of their circumstances, but it did encourage a certain amount of respect for how they coped. It was mostly made up, of course, written to illustrate to the decadent Roman elite how they had left behind their own rustic, virtuous roots in pursuit of wealth and comfort. In short, Tacitus’ Germania was utter fantasy, perhaps the first known example of the “noble savage” stereotype deployed in writing. That actual Germans might read it 1400 years in the future and use it as the basis for an entire national movement probably never crossed his mind.

But the Germans did just that. This was the key to unlocking the origin story that German humanists had so desperately craved. The same traits that the Romans had called barbarous were reinterpreted as virtuous in service of German pride. If the Italians’ inheritance was the equestrian statue, the colosseum, and the imperial palace, the Germans’ was the sword and the song. If Italian ambition had built Europe’s greatest empire, it had also been the source of their decadence and collapse. The Romans had never managed to conquer the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine. But when the time had been right, those tribes had surged westward and southward into Rome and brought it down. The Germans hadn’t needed writing to make their mark on the world or to know who they were. German-ness was contained in the people, the land, the spirit, and the language—all of which were purer and nobler than any other.

Thus, blackletter writing, precisely because of its barbarian connotations, became an indispensable part of German culture, as sober and dark as the people themselves, as dense and impenetrable as their ancient woodlands. In the 19th century, the Romantic movement saw myth, magic, and folklore form the basis for a new wave of arts and culture, and Germans were right at the heart of it. Their nationalism grew as works like the Grimms’ fairy tales dredged more German heritage up from the mires of history, while authors like Goethe and Heine kept Germans at the forefront of contemporary culture. Of course, all of their books were printed in distinctly German blackletter typefaces.

However, as Germany struggled toward its 1871 unification, blackletter Romanticism became a matter of public debate. Antiqua was ubiquitous in almost every other country in Europe and it was inevitable that some Germans would come to prefer it. Latin had ceased to be the international language of scholarship, but many Germans continued to use so-called “Latin letters” when printing scientific works. To them, a universally recognisable typeface signified participation in the global community. Over the 19th century, more and more printing began to use Antiqua. For German nationalists, however, it became a sticking point that their language should be written exclusively in “German letters”. The Antiqua style was seen as a vessel for foreign influences on German language and culture. This fragile, fledgeling nation had fought off Napoleon and a thousand other threats for the sake of unity and the right to self-determination. Now, German-ness was a finite asset that needed to be guarded. It had to remain pure.

After German unification, the debate only intensified between the liberalising, cosmopolitan pro-Antiqua camp and the romanticist, conservative Fraktur lovers. In 1910, German publisher Adolf Reinecke released a 280-page book on the need to stand by Fraktur. His arguments were deeply rooted in the nationalist mythos that Germans had assembled. He compared the straight, angular shapes of Fraktur to those of Germanic runes, claiming that both were a result of the indomitable Gothic warrior spirit manifesting on the page. His sentiments were widely echoed in German society. In practice, though, both styles continued to coexist, and the trend away from Fraktur might have continued unabated had it not been for the rise of the Third Reich.

The Nazis deployed every possible weapon in the German nationalist arsenal, from the newest “science” to the oldest myths. Heinrich Himmler read Tacitus’ Germania in 1924 and henceforth became obsessed with it, vowing to resurrect Germanic society in its image.

The Antiqua-Fraktur dispute slotted in nicely to the Nazis’ imagined dichotomy of noble German Aryanism versus perfidious Jewish globalism. It is not difficult to understand why the Nazis loved their “Gothic” fonts or why early Nazi posters and leaflets were often typeset in Fraktur styles. Printers were warned off using “Roman” letters, the prevalence of which in newspapers was taken as a sign of Jewish control over the media. To everyone in the Nazi party, it seemed self-evident that Gothic writing was best suited to their cause. Everyone, that is, except Hitler.

Hitler himself was all in on mythmaking, but Europe was modernising. Mythology wouldn’t conquer Europe. Germans needed to look to the future; they needed to let go of their primitivism. In a 1934 speech to the Reichstag, Hitler denounced blackletter script:

Your alleged Gothic internalization does not fit well in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and intention defiant [...] In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far [...]

Perhaps in part because of his dislike, a selection of new, minimalist Fraktur typefaces were developed in the following years. These were enthusiatically received by the Germans, particularly the slick, futuristic Tannenberg. While the Nazi Party never adopted an official font, Tannenberg in effect served this purpose. It was used for postage stamps, road signs, and government publications internal and external. For a while, Tannenberg probably seemed like a happy medium that balanced the Nazis’ futurism with German heritage.

However, it wasn’t to last. On 3 January 1941, an internal memo circulated throughout the party: Hitler had officially banned Gothic fonts. The memo explained that the Führer had come to the understanding that so-called “Gothic letters” had, in fact, been letters of Jewish origin this whole time. Antiqua was to be designated “normal letters” and would from then on be the only acceptable typeface for party use.

What was framed as a purely ideological move was just as much a practical decision. Germany had already occupied Poland, France, and the Netherlands. If all went according to plan, these countries and more would soon be speaking German. And yet, in their printing houses, there was nary a Gothic letter to be found. Meanwhile, every German printer carried Antiqua letters. It was clear that so long as Fraktur and Antiqua coexisted, there would be tension between them. One of them had to go. And so, for largely practical reasons, it was Fraktur that got the axe.

Even with the end of the Third Reich, Germans never brought their beloved Fraktur back into books and newspapers. After 500 years of laundering barbarians’ reputations, blackletter type was finally consigned to the annals of history. These days, it is used decoratively to evoke its various historical connotations of things that are medieval, far-right, primal, traditional, or subversive. However, the few remaining remnants of the Nazi love of blackletter go largely unnoticed. In my ten years of living in Berlin, I never thought twice about that distinctive Tannenberg font, which adorns the WWII-era subway stations that carried me to school every day.

Let’s dive in!

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This clandestine treatment would have made sense had the erdstall been built as escape routes in case of invaders, but this can’t have been their purpose. They only ever have one entrance, usually located beneath the floor of a church or farmhouse, or simply under the flagstones of a town square. After an initial drop, the tunnels run for a few dozen metres, sometimes branching or dropping down to lower levels via narrow shafts. Often, the tight tunnels widen in the middle or toward the end into small chambers with rudimentary benches or shelves carved into the earth.

No theory has yet been able to account for:

• The number and distribution of the erdstall

• The similarities between the many erdstall

• The inconvenience of accessing the erdstall

• The secrecy with which these tunnels were built and guarded

• The complete lack of artefacts found within

The erdstall surely could not have been built with storage in mind, since their length and narrowness offer no advantages over a conventional and convenient cellar. And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones. Though they could have provided refuge for a small family, why would they be accessed from such public spaces? Or be too small for a large man or pregnant woman to fit through? The lack of exits is a further strike against this theory—if enemies became aware of such a tunnel being used as shelter, it would quickly become a death trap for its inhabitants. Besides, in either of these cases, one would expect at least some goods to have been left behind—remnants of food or clothing, cached or dropped valuables. Instead, there is nothing.

Natually, many have turned to ritual explanations to try to solve the mystery of the erdstall. Of course, there are the pagan theories, suggesting that these tunnels hosted clandestine rituals by those who had covertly resisted Christianisation for centuries. It is true that any heathen worship would have had to take place in complete secrecy, so severe were the Church’s punishments for non-believers. In this case, the idea that over 2,000 pagan labyrinths were painstakingly excavated and used regularly without a single documented instance of anyone being caught seems far-fetched, especially considering the erdstall’s usual location in or near Christian places of worship. To pull off such a widespread, coordinated feat would imply a conspiracy on a scale that would require a complete dismantling of our understanding of medieval history. To some, this probably makes the pagan theory all the more compelling, but most researchers don’t tend to agree. More likely than the erdstall being used to subvert the Church, they think, is the possibility that they were used by the Church.

Could the erdstall have been places left deliberately empty as some sort of folk Christian ritual? A resting place for spirits either friendly or malevolent? A feature common to apparently all erdstall is the presence of one or several “slips”—extremely narrow, often vertical sections which can only be squeezed through by most adults with some effort. The experience of this arduous passage has provoked comparisons with that of a birth canal. A German farmer and erdstall enthusiast once took a group of female folk healers on a tour through his erdstall, during which the women slid through the tight gap headfirst like an infant entering the world. Might there be an experience of rebirth built into these tunnels’ winding passages? Perhaps those who suffered from ailments either physical or spiritual were sent down into the depths to undergo a sort of renewal, intended to bring them back up into the light as if born again. Reemergence would parallel that of Christ rising again after three days dead in a cave.

This theory is tempting because it turns the narrowness, darkness, and emptiness of the erdstall into a feature of the experience, contributing to the feeling that one was being laboriously brought forth into the world. While the small niches carved into the tunnels’ walls could have held the lamps of builders during excavation, a penitent might have gone down with nothing but their hands to find their way. Christians have long used things like rosaries and labyrinths as physical guides for contemplative prayer, so maybe the erdstall’s branches and chambers could have functioned similarly, offering designated places for specific prayers or invocations. And the imagery of the birth canal has parallels in other Christian traditions depicting Christ’s enthronement and side wound.

Of course, this doesn’t explain why there are no contemporary writings attesting to the erdstall’s existence, but many religious objects and images from the Middle Ages went undocumented. We still don’t know why so many manuscripts contain images of knights fighting snails, nor why churches sometimes have carvings of female figures pulling open their genitalia to the world. It is all too easy for these things to be considered unremarkable until they become a mystery. And, without much rigorous study investigating the erdstall, it is likely that a satisfying answer may be a while off, if one can even be found.

Perhaps I favour the rebirth explanation because, during the four years of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow, I walked past a distinctive sculpture outside the geology building almost every day. The Glasgow Geological Society notes that it was carved from an old railway culvert and deftly glosses over any reference to its shape by referring to it simply as a “strange monument”. However, to all on campus, it was quite plainly the Stone Vagina. Normally, the Stone Vagina would be spared little more than a glance or remark by those passing. However, on nights of revelry, when spirits were high and drinks had been drunk, it was not uncommon to give in to the urge that the stone so invariably provoked and stop to squeeze oneself through.

And debated it was. Most theories attributed OK to a reinterpretation of a foreign word—perhaps from Choctaw or a west African language brought over by slaves. A corruption of the Scottish och aye was even proposed. As it turns out, though, OK is a home-grown word. To see where it came from, let’s go back to the summer of 1838. Let’s go to Boston, baby!

The 1830s marked the start of the golden age of newspapers and Boston was right at the heart of things. In 1830, Bostonians became the first to benefit from the penny press model, a new style of publishing enabled by dirt-cheap printing technology. Previously, newspapers had mostly been sold on a subscription basis. Now, the cost of making extra copies was so low that publishers could print a surplus to hawk on the streets and in shops. With any passer-by a potential customer, broadsheets began to to cast as broad a net as possible. Political and financial news remained the backbone of their publications, but they began to pad the gaps between with gossip, humorous tidbits, and other pieces of “filler” content, often no more than a few lines long.

This was perhaps the genesis of text-based humour as we know it. Never before had printed jokes been in such high demand nor circulation. If a joke proved popular with readers, it might be circulated around to other penny papers in the country to be reprinted for their own audiences. Thus, columns filled up with throwaway gags and one-liners meant to earn a quick laugh and be forgotten by the time tomorrow’s issue had rolled off the press.

Editors quickly zeroed in on the burgeoning American urban middle class as a source of material. A classic comedic staple of the 1830s and 40s was to replace common words or phrases with exaggeratedly pompous ones, often as an imagined affect of polite society.

A variation on the gag was to use acronyms instead. Again, the main target was the language of the educated city-dwellers. O.F.M., short for “our first men”—a popular phrase referring to the well-to-do gents about town—was one of the earliest such acronyms to become popular. Names of trendy drinks were commonly abbreviated, like G.C. for gin cocktail, as were many generic short phrases. N.G. for “no go” became popular, as did A.R. for “all right”.

In the summer of 1838, acronym jokes exploded into a craze among American newspapers, first in Boston then nationwide. Mr Charles Gordon Greene, founder and editor of The Boston Post, established himself early on as one of the most prolific and innovative abbreviators. Greene was already notorious around the country for his dry sense of humour. Each edition of The Post was filled with jabs at the people of Boston, local public figures, the Whig party, the temperance movement, the other newspapers of Boston, and anyone else who fell afoul of Greene. No one was too big to intimidate him nor too insignificant to escape his notice. Like many of its competitors, The Post thrived on banal gossip and hearsay, but Greene’s clever insight elevated penny journalism to an art form. The story of a woman being brought to court over the theft of 40 cents’ worth of salmon (approximately $15 in today’s currency) could have made for tedious reading, but in his capable hands it became glib social commentary.

“A warrant was then issued against Ellen, and very properly; for eating salmon is the peculiar and exclusive prerogative of the gender masculine, and class O. F. M. It is quite bad enough for females to be abolitionists, Malthusian philosophers, professors of political economy, she-presidents and she-secretaries, and other semi masculine monstrosities: but when they aspire to equal rights of gormandizing on Salmon, with Our First Men, it is tune to pause, as political editors say, by way of climax sublime. Salmon, indeed! and forty cents’ worth, too, for a woman; and she a poor woman—it is not to be endured.”

—The Boston Morning Post, July 17, 1838

With no fewer than 40 newspapers circulating in Boston during the 1830s, each one had to offer something special in order to stand out. The Post’s U.S.P. was Greene’s wit. He had a knack for drawing out the comedic thread from absolutely anything, or in some cases, absolutely nothing. If the news was slow one day, that was no problem at all for The Post—Greene would simply make something up.

Melancholy.—We understand that J. Eliot Brown, Esq., Secretary of the Boston Young Men’s Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Indians, F. A. H. (fell at Hoboken, N. Y.) on Saturday last at 4 o’clock, P. M. in a duel W. O. O. O. F. C. (with one of our first citizens.) What measures will be taken by the Society in consequence of this heart rending event, R. T. B. S. (remains to be seen.)

—The Boston Morning Post, June 12, 1838

The above item from Tuesday, June 12 1838’s Morning Post seems bizarre at first—what kind of paper would exploit a man’s violent death for laughs? Of course, there was no duel in Hoboken on June 9, because J. Eliot Brown, Esq. did not exist and the Boston Young Men’s Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Indians was but one of the many running gags that Greene had serialised in The Post. The news items above and below the death notice were perfectly real, but the death notice itself was not.

While it might seem deceitful to insert fraudulent articles into a source of otherwise-legitimate news, The Post’s readers were probably already in on the joke. For several years, the tumultuous history of the Boston Young Men’s Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Indians (more commonly referred to as the B.Y.M.S.M.C.I.) had been unfolding on the pages of Greene’s paper. In 1836, the Society suffered allegations of corruption and embezzlement amongst its board, though scandal was avoided when it came to light that the mysteriously vanishing funds were being siphoned to abolitionists in New Orleans. Unfortunately, the incident angered the famous local actor Mr Finn and jeopardised the Society’s working relationship with him, though he came around in time to deliver a lecture on their behalf the next year on the topic of “fish of Newport, with a digression on the piscatory propensities of the Sandwich tribes”. This was to be part of one of several fanciful lecture series hosted by the Society.

Despite their purported mission, the Society’s reported encounters with Indians were fairly infrequent and the amount of meliorating that they accomplished was minimal—so preoccupied were they by their packed roster of dinners, parades, lectures, assemblies, and so on. In fact, they were part of a large social community of other societies and public figures, all invented by Greene. He maintained and developed the Society’s world with impressive continuity over the years, often laying the foundations for new jokes months in advance. After printing a report in 1837 of a “monster cod” so big it took six gentlement to reel in (the dispatch was attributed to one Mr J. Hake), the Monster Cod Association became a recurring gag in The Post, popping up for years afterwards. The M.C.A. had no stated purpose but was furnished with a silver cod-shaped medal awarded each year on the anniversary of the big catch, a place in the B.Y.M.S.M.C.I.’s annual parade, and a motto: “Round and round the cauldron go, let it simmer, nice and slow!”

In his imaginary Boston, Greene found an outlet for his frustrations with the real one. As the proprietor of a popular newspaper, Greene was very much embedded in the world he was satirising. The endless procession of functionaries, the frantic and fruitless organising of thousands of civic societies, the awards and titles and honours that seemed to outnumber deserving recipients—it all would have been an inescapable part of life for the 1830s society man. Greene had begun life as working-class boy from New Hampshire, orphaned at the tender age of 8, and one can easily imagine how he found the world of native privilege quite grating.

The acronym was just one weapon in Greene’s satirical arsenal, but it proved to be perhaps the most effective one. Over the summer of 1838, his acronyms caught on like wildfire, finding their way to the furthest corners of the United States. Some of the snappier ones even made the transition from print to speech. These developments can be seen in writers’ gradual dropping of explanatory brackets from phrases like O.F.M. and N.G. It also became common to treat O.F.M. as a singular noun, resulting in phrases like “our O.F.M.’s” and “an O.F.M.” which become nonsensical if the acronym is read out in full.

By mid-June of 1838, the abbreviation fad was widespread enough in Boston that it warranted a jocular letter of complaint to The Post, which Greene dutifully reprinted (though he declined to respond).

(N.B.—The four acronyms at the end are all alcoholic beverages—wine bitters, gin cocktails, brandy cobblers, and port wine sangarees, the last one an early version of sangria.)

Whether this is a genuine letter or another one of Greene’s concoctions, it does quite insightfully hit on the spirit of the trend. Abbreviations had taken on a life of their own. While they had ostensibly begun as a way of satirising the self-absorbed language and ways of the urbanites, they had quickly become an in-group signifier for the very same people. Simply put, the nonsensical nature of the acronyms had become the reason for using them. The less obvious an acronym’s meaning was, the more one had to be tuned into the cultural trends in order to use it correctly. Even as Greene was poking fun at the culture of the Boston elites, he was contributing to it as well. He continued to play with the format, adding further layers of obfuscation to his gags. “All right” could be represented by A.R., but an alternative, O.W., short for “oll wright”, added a deliberate misspelling into the equation.

They are making a great many paragraphs about the murder of a turtle at Parker & Whitney’s. Why don’t they try a bowl and certify that it is o. w.—all right.

—The Boston Morning Post, July 30, 1838

His invented world grew in complexity, too. In the autumn of 1838, a new group was added to Greene’s canon—the Anti-Bell Ringing Society, which paradoxically was formed to protest new Boston laws banning the ringing of dinner bells. Clearly this was Greene’s latest pet peeve dredged up from the mire of civic bureaucracy.

The A.B.R.S. met in January of 1839 to ratify their new constitution and celebrate over a hearty meal. At least, that’s what The Boston Post related. The group received a nice little write-up outlining its many committee roles, including “Lord High Chancellor, and Keeper of the Society’s Conscience”, “Chief Butler and Imperturbable Deliberator”, “Confabulator, to do all the Society’s Unnecessary Talking”, “Professor of Bell-ocution”, “Benign Reliever of the Bell-y-ache”, and “Pacificator of Canadian Re-bells”. There was even an anti-bell ringing song to be sung on special occasions. So rich with detail were The Post’s accounts of the A.B.R.S. that one would be tempted to think the group really was convening regularly—were it not for the fact that the public meetings were advertised to take place in the Exchange Coffee House, a grand and imposing structure which had burned down some twenty years prior.

In youth it jingles us on to school,

And it jingles us home to dinner;

It jingles the wise man, it jingles the fool,

It jingles the saint, it jingles the sinner;

It jingles the doctor, it jingles the preacher,

It jingles the lawyer, it jingles the teacher;

It jingles us all, whate’er we’er about,

It jingles us in life and will jingle us out.

—The Anti-Bell Ringing Song, as related in The Boston Post on January 19, 1839

While the A.B.R.S. probably never existed as described, it was still in some ways a group effort. Greene’s slang innovations caught on because he was a well-known and highly-regarded humourist with publishing connections in every major city. His peers in Boston and further afield were eager to be in on his little conceits—perhaps because this lessened their chances of becoming the target. In March of 1839, in response to an announcement in The Boston Post about an A.B.R.S. field trip to New York, the editor of the Providence Journal sent Greene a wry letter admonishing the Bell-Ringers for failing to stop by Rhode Island on the way. Greene printed the letter in The Post with the following response beneath it:

There we have it, then! The first usage of OK in print, as far as anyone has been able to tell today. It’s an unlikely word, the product of layers and layers of in-jokes and abstractions that essentially boil down to a familiar concept—misspelling and overexplaining things is funny.

In much the same way as its predecessor acronyms, OK quickly took off. By the autumn of 1839, we hear that it is standard parlance among New York financiers, alongside other abbreviated misspellings like N.S.M.J.—’nuff said ‘mong ‘gentlemen.

Thus, with its origins established, only one question remains: nobody uses O.F.M. or N.G. or F.A.H. (Fell At Hoboken, NY) any more. So what kept OK from going the way of its kin?

You’ll be happy to hear that there’s an equally interesting story there. But it’s a story for next time! See you soon in Washington DC…

F.Y.I.—the newspaper clippings used in this article, unless otherwise credited, were taken from newspaperarchive.com, which operates on a paid subscription basis but can be accessed with a seven-day free trial. Where newspaperarchive.com’s scans were too blurry to share, I took quotes from Allen Walker Read’s exhaustive study of the etymology of OK.

A few coats of arms which you should be aware of include:

That of the Italian Colleoni family, first granted to Bartolomeo Colleoni in the 15th century. Although “Colleoni” probably didn’t mean this originally, the name is pronounced the same as coglioni, the Italian word for “testicles,” and was even spelled as “Coglioni” in some contemporary records. Thus, the coat of arms features three pairs of testicles. It has also been reported that Bartolomeo’s battle cry was coglia, coglia, coglia, which means “balls, balls, balls!”

Read more

Bear in mind this is supposed to be a starting point for getting inspiration rather than a one-stop-shop of links! A gift should be personal, so have fun digging around and finding the perfect thing.

Medieval sweaters (second hand, prices vary)

The UK company Past Times which made historically inspired clothing is now defunct, but their beautiful pure wool sweaters can be found on eBay, Vinted, and Poshmark in the UK and USA in good condition. Just look at them!!!

I have bought three and am obsessed with all of them. One was stolen from me on a boat, which goes to show you how great it was. With a bit of digging on eBay/Vinted/whatever your local used clothing site is, you can find historically inspired sweaters from other brands, too. Also, pattern regardless, a nice pure wool sweater is in my opinion just a perfect gift and many can be found secondhand for quite cheap.

Vintage Folio Society editions (second hand, prices vary)

The Folio Society has been cranking out beautifully handcrafted editions of classic books since 1947, which means that there are enough secondhand copies floating around that you don’t have to splash out £100+ on a new one. Their books are wonderfully luxurious with high-quality paper, embossed fabric and leather covers, custom endpapers, and often exclusive illustrations. Medieval enthusiasts are spoiled by their back catalogue, and eBay and other used book sites are packed with copies for less than £10. Make sure they still have the original slipcase to keep them safe!

Hand embroidered medieval ornaments (£12+ / $18+)

UK-based company St. Nicolas creates the most amazing hand-embroidered ornaments using metallic thread, beads, and other gorgeous embellishments. Their range includes famous medieval figures and symbols, and I’m particularly fond of their ornaments featuring designs directly from the Bayeux Tapestry! Who could resist sparkly little William the Conqueror or Harold Godwinson with an arrow in his eye?

According to their website, they are a registered fair trade company who works with ethical traders in India to make their items using a technique call zardozi that dates back to at least the 14th century! Sadly, you need a trade account to order from them directly, but there are websites in the UK and USA that stock their ornaments! Their full selection is huge and each website has slightly different stock, so have a look around.

UK sources:

The Christmas Company (also ships internationally at a flat rate of £5.95!)

Reading Museum

Royal Armouries (NOTE: RA also stocks decorations of Henry VIII and his six wives! If you buy all six of his wives, you can get Henry for free with the checkout code FREEHENRYVIII)

USA sources:

A Bit of Britain

Shepherd’s Knot

British Isles Online

Medieval washi tape ($9+/roll)

Boschi washi!! I have had the privilege to use this beautiful tape from the Washi Station with its luscious gold foil and characters from Hieronymus Bosch’s Gsrden of Earthly Delights before and can vouch for it wholeheartedly. Sadly, these are not available in the UK and EU.

But why stop there? The Washi Station has like 700 different rolls of tape available, so go to town!

Pilgrim badges

Did you know that covering your hat/bag/jacket in silly little pins dates back to the Middle Ages? Cheap badges made of cast lead were extremely common souvenirs for medieval people on pilgrimages. Some featured religious imagery, but others were extremely silly images of animals, monsters, and occasionally genitalia. American gifters should browse the incredible Billy and Charlie shop, which is run by Marianne Hansen (Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Bryn Mawr College) and the armorer Robert MacPherson and sells a huge number of pewter replicas of real badges that were worn in medieval Europe. They make everything in the USA using period-authentic stone moulds! I particularly love their sets of two or three pins which feature both conventional badges and naughty parodies of the same imagery: for instance, one cat with a mouse and a Latin banner that reads “look at my mouse” and one cat with a phallus in its mouth:

They also have loads of reproductions of other trinkets, knick-knacks, and baubles. Individual badges start at $5 and there are discounts on sets, so you could easily curate a little collection for a friend at quite a reasonable price. Their selection is HUGE so do some digging.

In the UK, check out Lionheart Replicas and Pilgrim Gifts for similar badges made in Britain and starting at £6.

Paperblanks medieval notebooks

Everyone knows there are approximately 1,000,000 beautiful notebooks available from Paperblanks, but did you know that a few of these replicate designs directly from medieval manuscripts? Paperblanks is a Canadian company but their notebooks are available worldwide, so have a look online and you’ll be able to find these.

Bayeux Tapestry tote bag (£29.89) and La Dame a la Licorne tapestry tote bag (£22.89)

I’m a HUGE sucker for this type of fabric, which features a design woven in using coloured threads rather than printed on the surface. The red straps on the Bayeux bag are also so classy!

Fauve Fine Arts stock crossbody bags, wall hangings, pillowcases, and more made from the same fabrics. But let’s be real, everyone loves a tote bag.

For a bit more of a splurge, check out these gorgeous handmade medieval pouches at £47 apiece and worth every penny! The construction with drawstrings and tassels very closely resembles surviving medieval purses and those depicted in manuscript art.

Iron gall ink (various prices or make it yourself)

From the 5th to the 19th centuries, iron gall ink was ubiquitously used in Europe for handwriting—essentially every medieval manuscript was written with it! It’s lightfast, waterproof, and extremely easy and cheap to make with common ingredients and a bit of patience. There are traditional calligraphy shops which sell gall ink made to a medieval recipe, but it would be an extra special gift to make it yourself.

All you need is rusty nails, water, and a source of tannins. Oak galls were traditionally used and are easy to forage if you live near oak trees, but there are plenty of other natural sources including acorns and pomegranate rind—have a look at what’s growing near you! Most recipes suggest adding a binder, particularly gum arabic, which you would need to buy online, but this tutorial says you can forage gum from cherry, damson, and plum trees too! I think this would be a particularly sweet gift if you were to find an antique inkwell to put it in. A ceramic one will help your ink keep its colour but a glass one is fine too as long as the ink is stored in a dark place. Buy or have a go at making a quill pen and some rag paper to gift a whole medieval writing set (I won’t get into how to make these, you can find lots of instructions online!)

Instructions for inks from oak galls, lichen, and acorns.

Instructions for ink from pomegranate rinds.

In the UK, you can buy foraged small-batch inks by Will Valentine in a variety of natural pigments! These are so gorgeous and the bottles even tell you when and where the ingredients were foraged.

Nalbinded socks (Etsy, various prices or make it yourself)

Nalbinding (or naalbinding, or nålebinding) is an ancient fibrecraft that predates knitting and crochet and uses a single large, blunt needle. It was favoured by the vikings to make woollen garments, including the famous “Coppergate sock” found in York. There are many handcrafters who make beautiful reproductions of historical nalbinded items. There are many known stitches used in nalbinding and the simplest can be learned quite quickly, so why not have a go at making something yourself? Use a thick, rustic, tweedy wool and you can whip up a hat or pouch quite quickly. There are free tutorials online aplenty: here is a youtube channel with instructions from basic stitches all the way to making a full sock.

Nidavellnir on Etsy makes beautiful 100% wool nalbinded socks, mittens, and hats to measure right in York, home of the original Coppergate sock! They also have a selection of premade items and a section with downloadable tutorials and kits for those who would like to learn.

Sons of Vikings in the USA also sell quite affordable nalbinded hats, socks, and mittens.

Book of Kells socks (£9/pair)

Trinity College Dublin has lots of Celtic socks available in their shop, but these ones featuring letters from the Book of Kells are the best! And they come in two stylish colours!

The same type of thing happened to the daw, who was eventually christened with the proper name of Jack Daw. Mr Robin Redbreast doesn’t even get the courtesy of a full name these days, and as far as I can tell the various Martins (house Martin, sand Martin, and so on) have always just been “Martin”.

So, why give birds human names in the first place? One thing to bear in mind is that historically, lots of animals have had generic names—think of Fido and Rex for dogs, for instance. Historically, such names were quite common, though many have gone by the wayside now. I have already written about the famous legendary horse Fauvel, whose name was a standard one given to dun-coloured horses in the Middle Ages. In a nice little article about medieval pet names, Medievalists.net cite Kathleen Walker-Meikle’s great work on pets of yore, pointing out that in England, Gyb, short for Gilbert was a generic name for a tomcat, while in France monkeys tended to be called Robert and parrots Pierrot.

While most of these names were applied to house pets, there is plenty of evidence showing how generic names were applied to wild birds such as the pie and the daw. In 1679, as part of an elaborate ploy to fabricate a Papist plot to kill the king, English Baptist priest Titus Oates published a lengthy scree against Catholics, including a fervent attack on their doctrine surrounding the properties of the Eucharist. The story of Oates’ life of fraud, villainy, and alleged sodomy is actually quite entertaining and I highly recommend looking through this extremely damning biography by one of his contemporaries, but for now let’s focus on the birds.

Oates’ first gripe with how Catholics view the Eucharist is that if the communion bread is all that holy, then the wafers perchance being eaten by a bird or worm would be an extreme theological crisis that would shake the very foundations of the Church’s doctrine. I’m not a theologist or a Christian, so I don’t know if Oates’ argument holds much water (I suspect not), but I am attaching an exerpt from it nonetheless because he does refer to each animal by a generic human name: the pie is Mag Pie, the daw is Jack Daw, the sparrow is Philip Sparrow, and the worm, charmingly, is William Worm.

And methinks that the Prayer of the Popish Priest is very large, in that he desireth of God, that as many as taste of that conjured Bread may receive health both of Body and Soul. What if Mag Pie,or Jack Daw,or Philip Sparrow, should chance to eat of it, as it may happen (hath it not been known that the little god of the Altar hath been eaten and devoured of Mother Mouse and Will. Worm) should they also, through the tasting and eating thereof, receive health and salvation both of body and soul? A foul and a great oversight.

While the magpie and jackdaw have kept their human nicknames into the present day, Philip Sparrow hasn’t been so lucky. In fact, almost every bird used to have a nickname of this sort that has long since fallen out of common use. In the UK, you might still hear the names “Jenny Wren”, “Tom Tit”, and “Jack Snipe”, but these are just a drop in the bucket of what used to be. This 1886 compendium of British and Irish bird folk names and folk lore attests to that. Have a look through, and you’ll see that most birds have a number of regional names, with some species racking up dozens.

A non-comprehensive list of what some birds were known as in various regions:

• The whitethroat was Charlie Muftie, Peggy Cut-throat, Blethering Tam, and Great Peggy

• The arctic skua was Dirty Allen

• The storm petrel was Martin Oil

• The hooded crow was Harry Dutchman and Royston Dick

• The great titmouse was Black-headed Bob and Joe Ben

• The pied wagtail was Wilie Wagtail, Peggy Dishwasher, and Molly Washdish (the latter two from the way its characteristic tail-wagging stirs up the water as it hunts for aquatic insects)

• The missel thrush was Norman Thrush and Big Mavis

• The heron was Jenny Longlegs, Craigie Heron, Jack Hern, and apparently also simply “Ralph”

• The ringed plover was Dull Willy and Dot Plover

• Jenny Wren was among the birds with the most aliases: her epithets included Pudding Poke, Titmeg, Tiddleope, Juggy Wren, Titty Todger, and Stumpy Dick.

Some of these epithets drew on stereotypes about certain human names. Today, Karen has become synonymous with a certain type of nagging woman and, here in the UK, Barry calls to mind the image of a man who’s a sort of red-faced, spherical booze-swiller. 500 years ago, Mag was a common generic name for a chattering, gossipy woman, Robin was a charming nickname for little boys, and Jack was associated with mischievous men (I would argue it still is today! Think of how many dashing rogues of literature and cinema are named Jack).

Other folk names didn’t include human names and instead were purely descriptive, based either on the bird’s behaviour or on folk beliefs about it. There are so many funny ones that I would feel quite bad not sharing a few:

• The long-tailed titmouse was the bum towel, nimble tailor, and ragamuffin

• The chaffinch was the charbob, wet bird, scobby, and pinkety

• The yellowhammer was the cheeser, or in parts of Scotland, where it was apparently not held in high regard, the skite (=shite)

• The bittern was the butter bump, bitter bum, bog bumper, bottle bump, and bumble

Perhaps the most baffling, though, was the common Kestrel. He was known simply as the Windfucker.1

Though not all of these names are flattering to the birds, I find all of them quite endearing. Either way, it makes me happy to read about these names, especially living in a time when few people take the time to notice birds, let alone name them. It speaks to a sense of closeness that our ancestors felt to our little feathered neighbours that they greeted the birds like old friends :)

The use of the word clue in the sense of “a hint or helpful piece of guiding information” is a more recent one. Previously, clue, often spelt clew, meant a ball or other round mass of material, in particular a ball of thread.

Though somewhat archaic now, clew was used in its original sense well into the modern English period, including by Shakespeare. In All’s Well That Ends Well, our heroine Helen is spurned by her two-timing rapscallion love interest Bertram who abandons her right after their wedding. When Bertram’s mother, the Countess of Roussillon, hears the story from Helen, she is aghast. Though Helen is ashamed to confess Bertram’s behaviour, the Countess implores her to speak the truth:

You love my son. Invention is ashamed
Against the proclamation of thy passion
To say thou dost not. Therefore tell me true,
But tell me then ’tis so, for, look, thy cheeks
Confess it th’ one to th’ other, and thine eyes
See it so grossly shown in thy behaviors
That in their kind they speak it. Only sin
And hellish obstinacy tie thy tongue
That truth should be suspected. Speak. Is ’t so?
If it be so, you have wound a goodly clew;
If it be not, forswear ’t; howe’er, I charge thee,
As heaven shall work in me for thine avail,
To tell me truly.

—As You Like It, Act 1, Scene iii

Or, in simpler terms: if you’re telling me what I think you’re telling me, and I think you are, then dear lord, what a tangle you’ve found yourself in!

Clew carried an implication of things congealed or knotted together. A ball of thread was perhaps the most common usage, but a knot of people—or in Helen’s case, problems—could be a clew as well. One of the few ways in which the term’s original meaning has survived into the modern day is apparently as the proper way to refer to a ball of worms. I don’t spend enough time amidst large quantities of worms to have first hand experience, but I am told that their clumping together into a slimy mass is a phenomenon common enough to necessitate its own name.

This sense of “something which has been balled or congealed together” preserves the original root of the word, which had very much the same meaning. It’s a connotation that is shared by many other words with the same root, including cluster, congeal, and, charmingly, jelly, gelatin, and gelato, which evolved via the Latin term for freezing or frost. Ice, jelly, a ball of thread—these things are all the product of some creative act or force. It has even been suggested that the word child descends from the same Proto-Indo-European root, the implication being that a child is something balled up or amassed in the womb in the ultimate act of creation.

The creation of thread and fabric is a common motif in folklore around the world, especially as a representation of the giving of life. Because both childbearing and the making of cloth were historically associated with women, it is no surprise that most of our mythical spinners and weavers are female, nor that their craft often signifies extraordinary power. If women can work the magic of creating new human life, might their other acts of creation be miraculous, too?

There are many cultures in which a fertility goddess is also closely associated with spinning and weaving, such as the Norse Frigg and the Maya Chac Chel. Of course, a classic example of this phenomenon is the Ancient Greek Fates or Morai, three women who quite literally spin, measure out, and cut the threads of human life.

Similar themes appear in the myth of Theseus, the legendary Greek hero who ventured to Crete in the hopes of slaying the monstrous man-bull known as the Minotaur. Countless Greeks had already perished in the labyrinth where the Minotaur dwelled and the same fate may well have befallen Theseus had he not caught the eye of a Cretan princess named Ariadne. Smitten with the young hero, she gave him a clew of thread: a literal lifeline which he fastened at the entrance of the maze so he could retrace his steps back to safety once he had slain the beast.

Theseus’ trip back to Greece wasn’t quite as glorious as his exploits in Crete. According to most versions of the myth, he sailed off with Ariadne in tow only to abandon her before reaching home, sneaking off when she fell asleep on the beaches of Naxos1. Worse still, Theseus had promised his father King Aegeus that if he was successful in his mission, his ship would return to Athens with white sails instead of the black ones with which they had departed. If Aegeus saw a black-sailed ship approach the Athenian harbour, it would mean that his son had died. However, Theseus forgot to make the swap. When Aegeus spotted black sails on the horizon, he was so stricken with grief that he threw himself off the Athenian cliffs and into the sea, just a few minutes before his son arrived home safe and well.

Luckily for Theseus, it is not these little lapses in judgement for which he is best remembered. No, our picture of him is that of the intrepid young hero walking into the abyss with nothing but his sword and a ball of thread—his clew. So great is the power of that image that the word clew took on an additional meaning in English: not a tangle or snarl but the thing that leads us out from the tangle. The spelling was sometimes still clew rather than clue before the latter became standard, but the word was the same in either case.

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

—Walt Whitman, "When I Read the Book"

Our story begins in 14th century France with a poem. About a horse. This poem, the ultimate origin of currying favour, is called Le Roman de Fauvel, or “the Romance of Fauvel.” Romance being the original sense of the word—not a love story necessarily but a grand and fantastical tale—and Fauvel being the name of its main character, who is a horse. Fauvel isn’t just any old horse, though. He’s a naughty horse. Maybe the naughtiest horse there ever was1.

The 3,820 rhyming couplets that make up the poem are dedicated to informing the reader in great detail of Fauvel’s misdeeds and character deficiencies, which are many. For starters, his coat is fallow, the colour of mud, barren fields, and vanity. Our next clue to Fauvel’s unsavoury nature is his name. Spoken aloud, it sounds like faux veil, or “veil of falsehood.” It’s also an acronym, wherein each letter stands for one of the vices that Fauvel embodies.

F: Flattery

A: Avarice

V: Villainy2

V: Variability

E: Envy

L: Laxity

That’s pretty damning stuff, especially for a horse. What could Fauvel have possibly done to make himself the object of such ire, you ask?

Once an unremarkable horse, Fauvel was raised from the ranks by Lady Fortune herself in a sneaky coup against Lady Reason. Fortune swaps out Fauvel’s stable for the royal palace and bestows immense power and privilege upon the wretched steed so that he may reign over the world of men. Fauvel deposes the old nobility and installs his own court populated by anthropomorphised vices such as Gluttony, Lechery, and Drunkenness3. Not only is Fauvel blessed with immense material wealth but also with the adoration of his greedy, self-serving human subjects who have embraced his sinful ways.

The natural order of all things is reversed. As the fallow beast beast becomes ever more human in his manners and lifestyle, we are told that men of the world have become more and more like ignoble beasts who fix their gazes not on the heavens but on the dirt beneath their feet. Humans of all walks of life, from humble peasants to the King himself, travel from across the land to prostrate themselves before Fauvel and groom his tawny coat in the hopes of gaining his favour. Even the Church has given in to Fauvel: the Pope has lost all power and the clergy answer to their new equine leader.

This invective against Fauvel continues for some time (1,300 verses, more or less), but the upshot throughout is essentially the same: Fauvel is corrupt, godless, sexually immoral, and evil, and has induced these qualities in all of society. The author laments that his land has fallen into the throes of horse-induced degeneracy and begs the reader to keep an eye out for Fauvel so they don’t fall victim to his tricks.

After this, though, the narrative really starts to kick off. The rest of the story concerns itself with Fauvel’s efforts to secure a wife. His first prospect is Lady Fortune herself. Though Fortune has been kind to Fauvel, he fears that the notoriously fickle dame could just as quickly turn against him. Matrimony, he hopes, might keep her on his side. Alas, Fortune sneers at the prospect, rebuffing his persistent advances with critiques of his foolish and greedy ways as well as discourses on the nature of fate, God, and humanity until the sorry horse is left heartbroken and declares himself ready to die. Taking pity, Fortune offers Fauvel one of her handmaidens, Lady Vainglory, as an ersatz bride.

Fauvel, all too happy to accept, trots off home with his betrothed to prepare for a wedding celebration befitting a horse of his status. Lured by the prospect of food, drink, and debauchery, vices flock to Fauvel’s palace en mass and the party commences. A great tournament is planned as the wedding’s centrepiece, but as contestants prepare, the second group gatecrashes the feast: the kingdom’s long-lost virtues, come to take up their lances and meet the vices on the jousting field. One by one, the vices are unhorsed by their betters. Carnality falls to Virginity, Pride to Patience, Fornication to Chastity, and so on, until all of the vices have been defeated.

However, we learn that Fauvel’s reign is far from over as Lady Fortune appears on the scene to deliver a final message. She tells Fauvel that though he will one day fall, he will cause much more damage to the world before that time comes. At this, she departs and so does Fauvel, who returns home with Lady Vainglory and sires many unholy offspring, all of whom inherit their father’s corrupt nature. The virtues are forced to retreat once more into the homes of the faithful few who have continued to harbour them in secrecy until all that is good can safely reemerge from the shadows.

The Roman de Fauvel seems to have enjoyed a warm reception in its day. More than a dozen surviving manuscripts show that the text was popular well into the fifteenth century. One version, which interpolates 169 pieces of choral music of various genres into the story, has led to speculation that Fauvel may have been staged as a play or sort of proto-musical, though it’s hard to imagine audiences sitting through what would have been hours of dithering love songs delivered by a sinful horse.

Fauvel pops his horsey head up in a few other works of the following decades. One, the Roman de Fauvain, features a purported relative of Fauvel and his equally devious deeds. Fauvain’s story, however, reaches a perhaps more satisfying conclusion when he dies and goes to hell. A manuscript illumination depicting Fauvain’s end shows his little equine soul departing his body to be received into the open arms of a demon.

However, the Roman de Fauvel and its antihero seem eventually to have faded from European cultural memory—perhaps unsurprisingly so. Though the Roman de Fauvel bears similarities to more enduring romances of the day such as the Roman de la Rose, its constant moralising and lack of any positive figures or themes make it feel rather dour in comparison. Perhaps a better comparison to Fauvel would be the fables of Reynard the Fox, another devious animal of medieval folklore. But Reynard is a more archetypal trickster, like Tom Sawyer or Bart Simpson—an endearing social outcast who’s always one step ahead of his rivals. Naughty but clever, he uses wit to exploit the witless and corrupt. You can’t help but root for the trickster even when you know they’re morally wrong because the trickster is relatable or even aspirational; someone crafty enough to cut corners and live by their own rules.

Crucially, the trickster uses their wit to expose shortcomings in society. Fauvel, conversely, embodies and even induces these same shortcomings. Superficially, he is a horse, but he is a horse composed of pure evil; he is set up by his author not so much as an example of vice but as an essential form of it, unabashed wickedness wearing the skin of a barnyard creature, a being whose depravity is so virulent it has infected the entire world.

Of course, there is an allegorical layer to the text. This article has gone on long enough, so I won’t get fully into the background behind who wrote the Roman de Fauvel and why, but it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to hear that Fauvel is a stand-in for the king of France who reigned during the author’s life and that the author wasn’t too happy with the nobility or the church at the time, either. In that context, Fauvel-as-allegory holds a bit of water, but only a bit. If you’re going to write a story whose message effectively amounts to “everything was fine until this evil horse showed up and made everything bad,” that’s a message that really only works in the context of the horse being a metaphor for one specific guy that you really hate.

Most fables about animals seem to use them as a way of simplifying moral messages—be like the persistent tortoise, not the arrogant hare! Even people who are quintessentially ugly like frogs can still be nice! The animal embodies one aspect of human behaviour, either good or bad, and experiences the consequences thereof. The message is that you should learn from it, because while the animal cannot control its own behaviour, you can. Fauvel, on the other hand, tells us that true evil walks among us in the form of a wicked beast, and if we do not remain on constant guard, we too will become corrupt and satanic and beastlike. In this regard, his closest literary parallel is more likely to be the Beast of the Apocalypse, or perhaps the pale horse ridden by Death, which was after all sometimes depicted in medieval manuscripts with a tawny or mud-brown coat.

That’s not to be too down on Fauvel. After all, he was very popular in his day. I’m sure the gravity of his Roman’s themes juxtaposed with its satirical style—which parodied conventional love stories of the day—made for some very entertaining reading amongst the late medieval francophone literati. And horses possess a certain innately puckish quality that is captured beautifully in illuminated editions of the Roman de Fauvel. But although Fauvel clearly spoke to some sort of fourteenth-to-fifteenth century zeitgeist, he seems to have been largely irrelevant by the sixteenth century. Europe’s first printing presses churned out copies of Robin Hood, The Canterbury Tales, Le Mort D’Arthur, The Divine Comedy, The Romance of the Rose, The Travels of Marco Polo, and other familiar medieval tales, but nobody printed Fauvel. The modern world didn’t want him. I suppose that, like a silent film starlet whose career was ended by the talkies, he just didn’t have the range.

Perhaps the most enduring impact that Fauvel had on popular culture was in the form of his name, which he lent to a common turn of phrase: to curry4 Fauvel, meaning to flatter or praise with the intention of gaining favour. Currying here means a type of grooming with a brush made to clean and smooth a horse’s coat, just as Fauvel’s sycophants would groom his coat in the hopes of winning his approval. The phrase seems to have remained well-known in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries even as Fauvel and his tale did not5. As is often the case in early modern English, spellings vary wildly: by 1475, versions such as correy famelle, conraye fawenelle, and cory favyl appear.

By the mid-sixteenth century, some writers seem to have a poor grasp on the term’s original sense. English printer John Awdeley published a short pamphlet in the early 1560s titled The Fraternitye of Vacabondes in which he catalogues the different types of beggars, street swindlers, and ne’er-do-wells of his day and their tricks. Awdeley warns against such characters as the Ruffeler, Whipjack, Irish toil, Choplogyke, Simon-soon-a-gone, Palliard, Munch-present, and of course the notorious “Cory fauell [sic].” Awdeley describes the Cory fauell thus:

Cory fauell is he, that wyl lye in his bed, and cory the bed bordes in which hee lyeth in steede of his horse. This slouthfull knaue wyll buskill and scratch when he is called in the morning, for any hast.

So, to Awdeley, a curry-favour was some sort of layabout who spent all morning fiddling with his bedsheets (or something along those lines) rather than keeping his horse in good nick. How foolish.

And then, in 1580, we finally see it, in the first edition of John Lyly’s Euphues and his England. The phrase “to curry favour6.” Well, technically “to currey fauour.” But the change has been made! Good-bye, Fauvel! Clearly, his name has become so obscure to the average English speaker as to be nonsensical. The human brain, doing what it does best, has filled in the gaps with something more recognisable. Favour. Thenceforth, to curry favour seems to have gradually become the dominant form, as it remains today.

N.B. Unless otherwise mentioned, all images of Fauvel are from Bnf, Français 146

EDITED 08/03/2025: Thank you to for alerting me to the fact that there is indeed an English translation of the first book of the Roman de Fauvel and it is available for free online download! Sadly, there is as far as I can tell still no English translation of book II, which contains Fauvel’s courtship of Lady Fortune and marriage to Lady Vainglory.

Hi. It’s me

Hello dear readers! It’s been barely more than a year since I started Weird Medieval Guys. Fifteen months, to be exact, which is absolutely bonkers. If WMG was a child, it wouldn’t even be old enough to walk and talk properly. And yet, Weird Medieval Guys has accomplished far more than any toddler could ever hope to. It’s amassed over 700,000 followers around the world, including among others a host of knowledgeable and accomplished medievalists, the lead singer of my favourite band, and, curiously, the president of Chile. I’ve seen my posts shared far and wide, reaching people who I never even imagined would see them. It’s been absolutely spectacular and I’m so lucky to have every single one of you following along and providing your wisdom, wit, and appreciation at every turn.

Though I never thought my silly little project would turn into such a big silly project, I’m writing this post to share some even more mind-boggling news with you all: there’s a Weird Medieval Guys book on the way! And it’s being published by Square Peg, an imprint of Penguin Vintage!! And it’s coming out on November 2nd, in two months!!!!

Weird Medieval Guys: How to live, laugh, love (and die) in dark times is a guide to medieval living. It’s been conceived and carefully crafted over the past year by myself, my singularly powerful agent Tom, the brilliant team at Square Peg, and many others who have lent their creativity to the cause. In proper WMG fashion, it is goofy. Irreverent, even. There are personality quizzes. And flowcharts. And lots of questionable advice about dating. And, of course, literally hundreds of weird medieval guys reproduced in full colour for you to behold. 

It’s her!!!!!

One of the first copies found its way to me last week and I was absolutely speechless at how beautiful it turned out!! The images, the gorgeous cover and interior layout by our amazing designers, and the details like lovely gold foil on the cover make this little book feel like such a beautiful item to have and hold in my hands! I’m so in love with this book and I hope you guys love it too! While the publication date is a couple months off, UK and EU preorders are open now on whichever Amazon site serves your country! Visit https://linktr.ee/vintage_books for a few options! And if you’re US-based, fear not! You can order off of one of the UK suppliers or wait for us to share the US link soon :)

Thank you so much to everyone for supporting this silly little blog and I’m so excited for this huge next step!!!!

-Olivia aka weird medieval guys

You’ve found him: the Pillar Saint.

Stylite, Constantinople, 11th century

To our modern eyes, this is a profoundly weird image – but it would have been a recognisable, even iconic, one if we were living in the early medieval Middle East. To explain how we got here – and how that guy got on that pillar - we need to step back and tell the origin story of one of the most recognisable characters in medieval life: the monk.

First, let’s wind the clock back all the way to the mid-third century. Rome is still the bustling, million-strong metropole of a continent-spanning empire. Legionaries are off fighting battles against the Goths along the Danube. Christianity is a curious minority sect clinging to life despite often-ferocious persecution from the emperor’s officials. And in the wealthy province of Egypt, a young man, barely 18, who we will come to know as Anthony makes an unusual decision. Mourning the recent death of his parents, he finds inspiration in Christ’s teaching that the perfect man will give everything he has to the poor. Once he’s set aside a little of his money to provide for his younger sister’s welfare and chucked her in a convent, he departs for the endless desolation of Egypt’s desert interior (We have no idea, by the way, what the sister made of all this business. I suspect she was less than impressed).

Eventually, Anthony pitches up in an old, abandoned tomb in the desert, to live a life of isolation and mortification (a religious concept, meaning to deny the desires of the flesh), eating and drinking only just enough to keep his body at bare minimum functionality. Did this make him a devoted servant of Christ who accessed a level of connection with his god unprecedented for a mortal man, or a total bore? Your mileage may vary.

Unfortunately for Anthony, his dream of a life of solitary contemplation didn’t work out as planned. He quickly became a local celebrity, with countless Egyptian Christians making proto-pilgrimages to visit the home of a man they came to believe had a unique connection to the Almighty. This only got worse when Emperor Constantine legalised Christianity in 313, and Anthony moved further into the desert to avoid his admirers. 

Saint Anthony dispensing wisdom (no doubt reluctantly), Crimea, 1430

After (allegedly) almost a hundred years living the life of an ascetic, Anthony passed away sometime in the 350s. He left behind the following complete list of possessions:

• Two tunics

• One cloak

• One shirt

And thus, the tradition of monasticism was born!*

*Well, maybe. So the Early Christian sources say, in any case. It’s important to remember that the narrative I’ve just described comes from the Life of Saint Anthony, a literal hagiography composed after his death by churchmen. There are definitely things in the account that make its reliability dubious – like the suggestion that a centenarian who’s basically been subsisting on sand for eighty years would be hale and hearty until the day before he died. And then there’s the near-certainty that Anthony wasn’t the only or first person in this period who made the decision to exile themselves from society and deny themselves the sins of the flesh. But even if Anthony isn’t THE granddaddy of all monks, he’s at least an example of an early evolution of monastic life, and he’s as good an example of them as we have. So we’re stuck with him; hang critiquing the sources.

At this point, I imagine readers (and my benevolent editor) are vibrating with the questions “What does this have to do with pillars” and “isn’t this meant to be Weird MEDIEVAL Guys? Please stop talking about Romans.” Hang with me, alright? We’re getting there.

So while Anthony is out scratching an existence in the Egyptian desert, these ideas of isolation and mortification are spreading across the Roman world. The popularisation of the lifestyle lead other famous hermits, like Pachomius, to gather up their disciples into their own communities. These exceptional characters have come to be known as the Desert Fathers.

A quirky bunch, those desert fathers

Or, in a few cases, the Desert Mothers. Women set up their own similar communities, or in a few cases, snuck in to join the men. Like a fourth-century woman named Marina, who cut her hair, put on a man’s tunic, and joined one of these communities until she was  kicked out for being the (supposed) father of a local girl's bastard child. Instead of coming clean and explaining why that was anatomically impractical, Marina left voluntarily and happily raised the child. In fact, nobody figured out her secret until after she had died.

Brother Marinos is discovered in death to be a woman, Bruges, 15th century

So: asceticism, isolation and gender segregation. Sounds a lot like monasteries, right? Well, we’re not quite there yet.  There were important differences between these early communities and the monastic lifestyle that will come to be so iconic of the medieval period. The most relevant for our purposes is that these were not understood to be permanent communities. Disciples lived alone in their own huts, only meeting for prayers, and the ultimate remained – in theory – to leave the community to take a life of isolation like Anthony’s. You can think of it as a sort of base camp for people before they scale the spiritual Everest of living alone in a hut for the rest of their lives – whether or not most of them ever intended to do so (they didn’t, by most accounts).

Outside of these communities, meanwhile, time was marching onwards. As the fourth century rolled into the fifth, the Roman empire’s possessions in Western Europe and North Africa began to crumble. The empire’s eastern half weathered the storm from its new capital of Constantinople – beginning the process of east-west division that would eventually lead to historians renaming it the Byzantine Empire. Newly-legalised Christianity spread further and deeper among Roman subjects. And with it, the monastic lifestyle spread to new territories, like Palestine and Syria.  

Excavations of monastic sites in these regions suggest that with this spread, the role of monasteries changed to become increasingly recognisable as monasteries: they were more permanent, communal, and embedded in surrounding rural communities. But not every holy man gave up on the idea of withdrawal and mortification, and the transfer to new contexts and landscapes came with a new challenge for wannabe monks. When Antony and his Egyptian contemporaries became hermits, they were separating themselves from society spiritually, but also geographically. This is easy enough in the Egyptian landscape. The fertile Nile Valley surrounded by hundreds of miles of borderline-uninhabitable desert means that, as today, the population density of Egypt went from “lots” to “absolutely nobody” over a very short distance. Not so the rolling hills of Syria. The holy men of the Levant would have to innovate.

In the mid fifth century, a Syrian Christian man named Simeon had a brainwave: maybe the only way out was up. He’d been living in a hut for over a year, but he was constantly being bothered by pilgrims looking for advice/healing/assorted miracles. So he found an old pillar outside of town, built a platform on it, and lived there for thirty-seven years (with the exception of one occasion, where he moved to another, much taller, pillar). So, he came to be known as Simeon Stylites (Simon Pillars, as he’d be known today).

As you can imagine, the novelty of a guy living on top of a fifty-foot pillar 24/7 attracted a lot of attention; he was thronged with even more visitors than he had had before, including the Patriarch of Constantinople, the most senior Christian figure in the entire eastern Roman Empire. Emperor Theodosius II was reportedly also much impressed. With notoriety came imitators, and “stylites” became a common feature outside of many Middle Eastern cities. It was not unheard of, while you were entering a great Christian city, to pass by two cranky old men, each standing on their own giant stone pillar, bickering about theology.

Simeon Stylites and his visitors, France, 13th century

To state perhaps the obvious, this was not a lifestyle for the faint of heart. Most Stylites lived without roofs (there was no factor 50 in fifth-century Syria). All your food has to be delivered by locals or visiting admirers, either via ladder, or jerry-rigged rope and pulley systems, if you had a particularly luxurious pillar setup. There are even stories of stylites’ entire legs atrophying from lack of use.

Two Syrian icons depicting Simeon Stylites (left) (right)

But all the same, the stylite craze spread further afield, to Russia, and to the Caucasus Kingdom of Georgia. And so did their artefacts: the images of these saints were also revered. When they weren’t engaged in one of their occasional fits of iconoclasm, Eastern Romans (or, as scholars generally start calling them at this point, the Byzantines) were absolutely obsessed with icons: visual depictions of saints that were supposed to possess holy powers. They also occasionally were built to ooze holy oil, which, well, each to their own I suppose. Icons could supposedly heal you, bring you good luck, or even generate protective magical forcefields around cities if you carried them around enough. Simeon and other sainted stylites were among the most popular icons around, with personal icons bearing their signature pillars showing up across the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Eventually, however, the world moved on again. Stylitism appears to have declined precipitously among the Byzantines from around the 11^th century, although the practice clung on in the Russian Empire until 1461. As far as we know, there is only one left: a Georgian named Maxime Qavtaradze, who revived the practice in the 1990s. He’s yet to start another trend, but watch this space.

It also never really caught on in Western Europe. Indeed, Westerners seem to have been mostly baffled and unimpressed with the whole thing. They were quite happy, though, to adopt the Desert Fathers’ ideas about living in monasteries and nunneries, and developed their own traditions of aseticism and hermitage (although that’s a story for another day). So while monasticism made the jump and spread across Europe from the fourth century onwards, forever colouring our image of medieval life, the stylites never did.

More, to be quite honest, is the pity.

Editor’s note: Hi everyone! Hope you enjoyed today’s article, which is also the first ever WMG Substack post to feature a guest author. Aran Prince-Tappé is a history graduate, Ottoman/Byzantine enthusiast, and my co-host on the Weird Medieval Guys podcast. A huge thanks to him for writing this great piece and I hope to see more from him soon!

-Olivia aka weird medieval guys

Further Reading: 

Athanasius, The Life of St Anthony. Available at: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm  

Jakob Ashkenazi, “Holy Man versus Monk—Village and Monastery in the Late Antique Levant: Between Hagiography and Archaeology.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 57, No. 5 (2014), pp.745-765.

Rodger Collins, Early Medieval Europe, 300-1000 (St Martin’s Press, 1999).

William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: a Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (HarperCollins, 2007).

Judith Herrin, Byzantium: the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Emma Loosey Lemming, Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity (Koninklijke Brill, 2018)

Yet, the question of why medieval art is so strange continues to intrigue us, though it may not be the right question to ask. After all, when we talk about “medieval art”, we are really referring to a millennium of ever-changing and highly contextual trends across a rapidly developing continent. Though the prospect of a single simple answer that does not require us to understand all of that context is appealing, it is also unlikely. Perhaps a more realistic approach, then, is to narrow our focus and look at individual cultures, manuscripts, and even images.

Dr Betsy Chunko-Dominguez, an art historian who specialises in medieval marginalia, has given us an opportunity to do just that. Her paper “Playing on Timbrels” focuses on the Rutland Psalter, a 13^th century English prayer book held in the British Library—and one of the most densely adorned manuscripts of its time. You may not have heard of this book by name, but its images have been circulated far and wide on the internet as it’s a classic example of that characteristic medieval oddness that many of us find so captivating. Though the Rutland Psalter contains many illustrations of a purely religious nature—mostly full page works and decorated initials—its hundred or so marginal drawings are the real attention-grabbers. Seemingly absent of scriptural themes, they depict a panoply of humans, beasts, hybrids, and monsters that fight, play, and dance across the pages, even interacting with the written text and floral borders.

Many of the figures are fully or partially nude and engage in crass gestures and poses. To a modern viewer, these silly scenes may seem wholly unrelated to the prayers that share their pages (not to mention vulgar and unfitting for a religious book). However, drawing on the earlier work of medievalist Michael Camille, Chunko-Dominguez shows that many of these drawings are very direct puns on the prayers of the psalter.

The Rutland Psalter, fol. 67r

In his seminal work Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, Camille pushes back on the notion that the marginal art of the Rutland Psalter is, as many scholars have assumed, “pure fantasy”— that is, with no defined intentions or meaning. Crucially, he highlights the fact that almost all manuscripts of this type would have been illustrated by a separate artist (or several) after the scribes had finished their work on the text. Therefore, Camille posits, it’s hardly unexpected that some of the artist’s work should be influenced by the writing. He cites as an example the illustration on fol. 14r, in which a decidedly pained-looking man clutches onto the page border while a serpent bites his foot.

At first glance, it’s easy to write this off as random and meaningless. But Camille points out the text directly above this interaction, from Psalm 9:

Exultabo in salutari tuo infixae sunt gentes in interitu quem fecerunt in laqueo isto quem absconderunt conprehensus est pes eorum.

I will rejoice in thy salvation: the Gentiles have stuck fast in the destruction which they have prepared. Their foot hath been taken in the very snare which they hid.

Unlikely to have drawn such a scene by coincidence, the artist has created a sly parody of the adjacent text and its reference to snared feet! Chunko-Dominguez provides many more examples. At the bottom of fol. 11r, we see two men locked in a wrestling match. One appears to have grabbed the other by the ear, and his opponent desperately tries to break his grip.

The same page contains part of Psalm 5, which begins on the opposite page with the words:

Verba mea auribus percipe Domine intellege clamorem meum.

Give ear, O Lord, to my words, understand my cry.

A clever inversion of the phrase “give ear”, now the ear is being taken by force: Hey, you! Give me that ear! On fol. 65r, we see a figure performing a handstand.

Inposuisti homines super capita.

Thou hast set men over our heads.

Which more or less speaks for itself. A particularly humorous example, fol. 87v contains the following vulgar scene, in which a monstrous sort of archer fires an arrow directly into the rear end of another humanoid creature:

The arrow has been attached by the artist directly to the word “conspectu”, meaning to see or penetrate visually: now the word is penetrating physically as well, an unwilling participant

Of course, there is still some ambiguity as to the purpose these puns served in relation to the text. Michael Camille seemed to favour a rather antagonistic interpretation, suggesting that the crudeness and irreverence of these illustrations were the artist’s way of hitting back at the scribe and even at the scripture itself and undermining the written word. Chunko-Dominguez theorises a more harmonious relationship, noting how the rich and dynamic imagery could have highlighted key textual themes in a manner that was engaging and memorable to the reader, forming a sort of dialogue between word and margin—not an argument.

Why are manuscript margins illustrated, anyways?

So entertaining are medieval margins to the layperson that it becomes easy to forget their raison d'être—the text itself. Of course, without a medievalist’s understanding of Latin scripture, remembering won’t do much good. In a sense, this is by design. Latin was not spoken among the uneducated in the Middle Ages, despite the fact that it was the language of all religious texts and services. This was hardly seen as problematic because average people were not meant to understand or engage directly with scripture, but rather rely on educated members of the Church to interpret it for them.

In large part, this stems from early Christian theologians such as Saint Augustine. In order to reconcile seemingly immoral aspects of the Old Testament (such as polygamy) with the New Testament and Christian teaching, Augustine established an interpretive framework that treated scripture as highly symbolic. Rather than believe that early biblical figures literally had six wives, as was written in the text, such a passage was meant to convey a much more cryptic and obscure meaning that was compatible with the supposed holiness of its subject.

Those things […] which appear to the inexperienced to be sinful, and which are ascribed to God, or to men whose holiness is put before us as an example, are wholly figurative, and the hidden kernel of meaning they contain is to be picked out.

-Saint Augustine, De doctrina Christiana

The underlying message is that those who read the Bible without proper understanding of how to identify and interpret its symbols risked drawing incorrect and harmful conclusions. Augustine tied this into a broader notion that scripture was necessarily symbolic in order to be impenetrable to the non-devoted reader, ie the “commoner”. Only the pious, erudite, and spiritually worthy could “pick out” the true intentions of the text, which they were obligated to do, in order to tell it to the little people and make them into better Christians. This idea was an influential one, and subsequent theologians throughout the Middle Ages deepened and broadened biblical analysis into a highly active and international field of study.

Augustine explains to the masses why it’s okay that he has six wives

In the centuries before the creation of the Rutland Psalter, most manuscripts were made by and for religious scholars like these and had wide margins: not for decoration but to provide space for the owner to add commentary, notes, disagreements, and other expansions upon the original text. Far from devaluing a book as they might today, these additions were often highly useful to subsequent owners of a manuscript, who would extend the discussion by refuting or building upon them with their own notes.

This definitely improves the overall reading experience.

Drawings, too, became part of this culture of commentary, where they could be added to the margins to bring attention or give weight to an annotation. One 12^th century scribe at Canterbury Cathedral, disgruntled at having to copy a text in which Augustine was quoted incorrectly, drew a depiction of the saint pointing a spear at the offending passage while holding a scroll that reads “non ego” (literally “not me”, i.e. “I didn’t say that”).

Augustine recants his previous statement about wives and commits himself to a life of celebacy.

By the time the Rutland Psalter was created, around a century later, this culture of spontaneous margin illustration had grown in popularity and taken on a life of its own. The margin increasingly became a space for planned decoration, too, as artists experimented with illuminated initials. Large and complex letters inhabited by plants, beasts, and people had always been present in medieval manuscripts as a form of embellishment and a means of delimiting sections. As their contents often related to the adjacent text, initials were also a means of emphasising or commenting on its themes. But over the 13th and 14th centuries, these letters and their inhabitants began to spill into the margins and across the pages of books into self-contained scenes and borders independent of the letterform.

At the same time, demand for books, particularly illustrated books, grew among the upper class who prized them as a symbol of wealth. To cope with this new market, manuscript production gradually became the domain of secular scribes and artists who worked in teams to produce highly decorated prayer books for wealthy patrons. As the industry became separate from the church, motifs from folklore, popular culture, and everyday life joined the inhabitants of margins.

By the 15^th century the opulence would peak, with full-colour lifelike illustrations filling every inch of available space in the most expensive books. The decorated initial was not altogether abandoned, but became less important as artists gradually assumed the freedom to illustrate beyond its confines.

Pages from the Prayer Book of Charles the Bold, Flanders, ca. 1470-80

While the pages above represent a culmination of manuscript grandeur, the Rutland Psalter, 200 years its senior, could be considered a first foray into this new generation of manuscript art. Created at a turning point from sacred to secular, functional to decorative, the Rutland Psalter displays qualities of both its forebears and descendants, the product of an artistic tradition still finding its feet.

In fact, it is the first known example of an English manuscript to display those highly decorated margins that would become so ubiquitous. Though it was likely not made by or for members of the Church, its artists were no doubt heavily influenced by the tendency among medieval religious scribes to use art as commentary. At the same time, they seem to have enjoyed the freedom to explore new styles and subjects in their work.

I can’t recommend enough that you look through the Rutland Psalter yourself: there’s brilliant artwork on practically every page. And luckily for you, the whole thing is digitised here!

A quick note from me!

Hi, it’s Olivia, aka weird medieval guys :) If you’ve made this this far, thank you! I appreciate every single person who clicks on my page. I love writing these articles and want them to be interesting and high-quality: often I spend a full day or more writing each one!

I apologise for not being more active in the past month on here. I’ve been working like heck since last autumn trying to balance a full time job, WMG, and some other very exciting things which will be announced later this summer. It’s honestly been a blast and I don’t regret any of it!

However, the degree of plate-juggling has gradually become difficult for my brain and body to maintain :( Thus, I’ve decided to leave my job so I can focus on my personal health and medieval guys for a few months. One of my main goals is to be more active on Substack during that time and put out more articles for you guys, especially my recently-neglected paying subscribers! To that end, I just wanted to remind you guys that you can become a paid subscriber to this newsletter for $10 a month (or less if you pay annually!) and that now more than ever I am so so so grateful for every one of you who has chosen to do so!

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For more information about some of what we cover:

• Listen to Ira Glass and Michael Camille at Medieval Times

• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

• Read more about visual puns in the 13th century Rutland Psalter

• Read "The Wonders of the East" online to learn about giant ants, pepper-loving snakes, and more

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Weird Medieval Guys @WeirdMedieval

Olivia @olivia__ms

Aran @aranptappers

Normal map, France, 16th century

For most of their existence, original sources and records from the Middle Ages sat in libraries and private collections, largely unavailable to the public. But today, thanks to modern technology, they’re easier to access than ever: the information, manuscripts, and resources that have been transcribed, translated, digitised, and put online are far more than you could ever hope to use in your life! It’s exciting, but also a little bit intimidating, and definitely hard to know where to start. In order to help you make the most of your historically-unprecedented privilege, I’ve put together a list of five interactive maps that are easy to use and packed with interesting, enlightening, and occasionally very funny information about the medieval world.

Enjoy!

NB: England is slightly overrepresented here because it is a list of English-language resources, but if you’ve got any other great maps or websites that weren’t mentioned in this list, please do leave a comment so everyone can enjoy those, too!

1. London Medieval Murder Map

By the Violence Research Centre at University of Cambridge.

The punny headlines are a modern addition but a very welcome one.

Thanks to the late medieval London coroner's rolls, we have access to records of hundreds of centuries-old homicides in vivid (often painfully vivid) detail. This map shows the historic streets of 15th-century London overlaid with the locations and details of murders that took place there. Its makers note that it's not a comprehensive view of medieval crime and caution against using it to draw conclusions about the nature of life in the Middle Ages, but it's still a fascinating resource. Have a look through and you'll find out about the dangers of things that may seem harmless or even commonplace today, such as leaving your baby unattended when pigs are nearby or dropping your leftover eel skins on the ground in front of someone else's shop.

View it here.

If you like funny historical deaths, see also: London’s weekly death statistics during the Great Plague of 1665.

2. The Hereford Mappa Mundi

By Virtual Mappa

Before the magnetic compass was adopted as a tool of navigation, maps were rarely used as way-finding tools on long voyages. Many medieval maps, particularly early ones, were therefore less concerned with topographical details than with cultural and religious knowledege. Such maps present the known continents as sectors of a circle, with biblical scenes and mythological beings inhabiting them alongside real-world features and settlements. One such creation, the Hereford Mappa Mundi from ca. 1300 AD, is the largest extant Medieval map (the Ebstorf Mappa Mundi, which was almost triple the size, was destroyed by the Second World War). It is available to view online in gorgeous high resolution via the Virtual Mappa Project, whose website provides over 1,000 translations and annotations of the original Latin names and labels.

The Hereford Mappa Mundi may appear bafflingly naïve to those unfamiliar with medieval cartographic tradition: a unicorn prances on the banks of the Nile, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis of Homeric legend guard the waters between Sicily and Italy, and a large Christ in Majesty reigns over the whole thing. But it's a map of not only the physical but the mental and spiritual world, and a unique chance to assume the perspective of someone in England 700 years ago.

View it here.

If you like medieval cartography, see also: Hereford Cathedral’s 3D scans and history of the map.

3. Medieval Google Maps (Viabundus)

Collaborative project hosted by the University of Göttingen

Presumably, annoying foreign tourists in Amsterdam were less of an issue back then.

Before Ryanair flights to Ibiza were £20, European travellers had to plan their routes a little more carefully. Even neighbouring cities could take a full day or more to reach on foot or horseback, and the spaces between were often empty and inhospitable. Though today we take our privilege of safe and speedy travel for granted, the project Viabundus helps restore a sense of the medieval world's scale with its interactive route finder and journey time estimator. Choose from any of close to 1,000 settlements in Northern and Central Europe to view a timeline of its history, population, and notable features, or open up the route planner to find out how long it would take you to get there from another location. In addition to the duration of your journey, Viabundus will tell you about the places you'll pass through in transit, the amenities available along the way, and all sorts of other fun details.

View it here.

If you like medieval travelling and exploration, see also: this interactive map of John Mandeville’s 14th century travel writing.

4. The Domesday Book

By Anna Powell-Smith

Imagine you pay rent to someone named “Hugh the Ass”…

William the Conqueror is best remembered for his, well, conquests — in particular, that of England in the 11th century, which permanently altered the course of the country's history and culture. Perhaps less glamorous but equally important were his contributions to record-keeping in the form of the Domesday Book, the first ever national census of England and its landholdings. Open Domesday maps the Book's findings, including its residents and their property before and after the Conquest, making this historically significant work more accessible than ever. Clicking through provides great insight into how the distribution of wealth changed during the Conquest as the Anglo-Saxon elites were deposed and replaced with Norman aristocrats, and it's also an amazing resource if you want some goofy and/or unique historical names: the people surveyed include Ælfric the Pig, Humphrey Goldenbollocks, Bordin of Thorpland, Gundwin the granary-keeper, and many more.

View it here.

If you like silly names from the Middle Ages, see also: this paper that contains a list of over 1,000 dog names from the 15th century.

5. The Medieval Eel Economy

By Dr John Wyatt Greenlee, PhD

The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) has largely fallen out of favour in its home continent as a culinary fish, a trend that began even before its numbers shrank to historic lows in the past half-century. Today, many Europeans have probably never tasted eel in their lives. Until recently, though, the story was a bit different. Prized for their flavour (they are seriously delicious) and exploited for their abundance, eels were a staple food and a cornerstone of the European economy. A testament to their social and economic sway is the use of eels as a de facto currency in medieval England, where they were used in the hundreds of thousands to pay for rent, taxes, and other transactions. Greenlee's eel rent map collates records from 7 centuries of eel rent history, allowing users to explore the value of different landholdings expressed in numbers of these slippery, slimy fish.

View it here.

If you like all things eel related, see also: Dr John Wyatt Greenlee’s Twitter for loads more medieval eel history and fun!