I've never quite been sold on the identification, but the good people over at the Pierpont Morgan Library assure me that these little guys with big hats crawling around the margins of MS G24 are supposed to be Templars: If it's not clear, the one on the right is the "Templar". The guy on the left is...

So, this happens to us all the time.  We're away for a while, we fall a bit behind here and next thing you know, we're drowning in items to share.  Invariably, an all-too-familiar sloth sets in, and many of these nuggets fall to the wayside.  Not this time, however.  ...

For a long time I've been telling people "I dunno, maybe someday" when they ask if I'll ever start posting regularly here again. And there's all kinds of things I was telling myself I'd like to do to the site to make writing on it more appealing, like maybe erasing all the archives and just starting...

It actually disturbs me a little that I was able to correctly identify the manuscript in the tiny, low-resolution picture used to illustrate the recent BBC story about the cybernetic William the Conqueror clone from 2055 as the Macclesfield Psalter. Probably some of my readers thought I was just mak...

There’s an interesting little item in the news today: paleoanthropologists have found footprints 1.5 million years old that record the earliest known example of anatomically modern human feet — feet that are designed solely (so to speak) for walking, and not for grasping. It is hard to i...

Sometimes people* say to me, "Carl, why always the pictures of trumpets coming out of the asses? Why always the penises that land in the treetops and the vaginas that wear hats? Do you never have the pretty pictures for us? One thousand years of history and you have only the pooping and the sex pict...

This week's image comes from the lower margin of Das Gänsebuch, a liturgical choir book made in Nuremburg in the early sixteenth century.* Das Gänsebuch, or to translate it, "The Geese Book" (so named for reasons that should now be obvious), is one of those large format books that would have sat u...

This week's marginalia comes from a manuscript that has become a frequent visitor to our studios here at Got Medieval, Pierpont Morgan Library's MS G24: I'm beginning to feel bad for the poor souls who have to tag the scans of medieval manuscripts for online collections. How can you be sure you've a...

Pop quiz, hotshot.  You're the illuminator for Bodleian Library MS Douce 49, a late 13th-century Flemish Psalter.*  You notice there's a bit of spare room up above your historiated initial of the Passion of the Christ (pictured above).  Mel Gibson won't return your calls, and you've already burne...

* Rob Riemen, author of our recent favorite Nobility of Spirit (see Recommended sidebar), writes an open letter to the President-elect. * We failed to get our shit together in time to contribute to the always stimulating Books of the Year symposium at Ready Steady Book, but that shouldn't stop y...