Images accompanying MDVL 301A – week 5

BEING A DUCK

Context…

British
Library Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1 f. 7v: early 11th-late 12th c. codex containing “an Anglo-Saxon miscellany” (and it is indeed very miscellaneous… and that miscellaneousness is a marvel and a thing of beauty in its own right; yet not without sense, coherence, its own “logic”; plus administrative documents written on reused 8th c. Gospel-book leaves. The whole manuscript description alone is a treat, before we even get into the text and the marvellous images.)

BEING CLOSE TO BEING A DUCK
(INCLUDING ATEMPORALITY AND MULTI-TEMPORALITY)

British Library medieval manuscripts blog: Bedford Hours calendar page, October (feat. sowing & Saturn)

Google image searches:
medieval calendar page ploughing
medieval calendar page october

Erik Kwakkel

Princeton Alumni Weekly

BEING IN MULTIPLE TIMES SIMULTANEOUSLY

(Not) Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus

STEREOTYPES OF BEING MEDIEVAL AND WHAT THEY (AND CRITICISM OF THEM & SATIRE) TELL US ABOUT PERCEPTIONS OF HISTORY (& OURSELVES)

BEING IN THE MIDDLE

British Library Royal ms 14 c vii: Matthew Paris maps, f. 1v-6r
Description, which may initially look to the 2016 eye rather like a history / historiography, but keep reading…

T-O maps

Early maps

12 maps that changed the world

Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae

…and the BL Harley MS 2660 thereof (observe what is described when it could be depicted, how few illustrations/images there are, and what they are of); plus a BL manuscript blog piece on Isidore & the Etymologies

HISTORIES AND POINTS OF VIEW

Are there common shared human universals?

The “universalism” of universal united knowledge/s, universities, and universal chronicles / histories / encyclopaedias

Ducks and the world’s funniest joke (in 2002): with thanks to Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins

Nostalgia, yearning for a Golden Age:
the place of myth in mythopoesis, poetry, poetic identity, and seeing the world poetically

The wish for peace & a/nother Golden Age:
mythic time before the “middle age,” futures, paradises, dreams, New Jerusalem, utopias

Byzantium, inc. more maps

People of Color in European Art History

Twitterography:

• Rabih Alameddine @rabihalameddine
• Miranda Bloem @Zweder_Masters (dragons)
• British Library Medieval Manuscripts @BLMedieval
  Inc. ducks going “queck” (BL medieval manuscripts blog, 2012)
• “cszabla” @cszabla
• Damian Fleming @FW_medieval (for #illuminatedages memes)
• History of Astronomy @HistAstro
• Jonathan Hsy @JonathanHsy
• Damien Kempf @DamienKempf (monsters)
• Erik Kwakkel @erik_kwakkel
• Sarah Laseke @aclerktherwas
• “Melibeus” @melibeus1
• Allie Newman @book_historia
• Karen Ng @litelbokewyrm
• Eleanor Parker @ClerkofOxford
• “Sissy-eater of grits” @divafancypants (for I think the earliest image on Twitter of a medieval rubber/plastic duck)
• Emily Steiner @PiersatPenn

Reminder & recap: The Fall of Icarus

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights as a fabulous futuristic online interactive project