Can You My Darling, Can You Picture This?

As a teaching aid, pictures are pretty much the best thing. If you happen to find yourself, brand new at university, faced with the prospect of reading the stanzaic Morte Darthur before you’ve even got to grips with the language it’s written in, and all that stands between you and failure is a feckless postgrad, a nice bit of Hans Memling mightn’t go amiss. Similarly, if you are the feckless postgrad who stands between a troupe of teenagers, having to read Middle English before they can read Middle English, and failure, Hans Memling could be all that stands between you and anarchy. Hans Memling’s cracking. Bravo Hans Memling.

But as a serious point, I’ve made the more or less unchallenged choice to bring pictures to the classes I teach, partly because they’re an excellent talking point, partly because it seems rather short-sighted to study medieval literature and extrapolate about the period’s culture from its literature, without considering that, in a society where the majority were illiterate, non-literary materials may be of value to us. It’s also quite clear that, while one can definitely learn about approaches to death by reading the Order of the Missa pro defunctis, this is not quite as memorable as a painting of a corpse with a toad in her whatsit.

Drawe me like vnto one of yowre Frenssh maides.

Anyway, this week I’ve been teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As any fule kno, the pictures in Cotton MS Nero A.x are ugly and crude and do nothing to illuminate the text. I described them as ‘being quite good, for a six-year-old’, which I think was really rather kind. A quick Google image search revealed that most results for ‘Gawain’ were pictures of the wonderful Joel Edgerton in the execrable King Arthur. If I wanted pictures of Gawain, the choice was either to bring images of Gawain from a significantly more attractive French MS, or to bring something by Burne-Jones – neither of which has any connection to this particular episode.

Well done, darling. Put it on the fridge.

So I had to work out (based on the essays I had been sent) what conversation points would be best served by images. And after not a particularly long think about it, I chose some Green Men. They helped with the rather flat point that a binary division between ‘paganism’ and Christianity wasn’t especially helpful, and they further helped assuage my guilt at having put cartoons on their reading list again.

It was easier to choose images that related to Pearl. Though, natch, its MS images are as ugly and crude and unilluminating as Gawain’s, there are some brilliant medieval depictions of the 144,000 brides of Christ, the New Jerusalem, vineyards, and various idealised gardens. Of which I chose a bit of the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry, and (lest we forget what books are) the Douce and Trinity Apocalypses. While these helped to illustrate a point about the proliferation of biblical imagery in medieval life, they were mostly popular for the fact that St John appears to be piggybacking on an angel.

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who found that funny.

Þinkestou þes ben a game?

People I’ve just met often ask me what my work is about and, like many graduate students, I am used to tailoring the answer to the person. When Professor Eccles-Cake (who has already forgotten my name) asks, I will mumble something about intellectual history and classical inheritance and [buzzword but not too buzzy; he probably remembers Walter Skeat]. When arty types or final-year undergraduates ask, I tell them [buzzword, buzzword, buzz-neologism; ‘Walter Skeat? Her last EP was sooo interesting’]. To my parents: ‘Oh, books.’

I’ve been lying to everyone. This is what my work is about, and I will be submitting these to my supervisor in lieu of work owed.

      

        

A Fine Line

With all that I am usually griping about some travesty towards the Middle Ages, I’m pretty keen on a good medieval cartoon. Be it the hand of God appearing from the sky, or gargoyles singing cabaret in the ogees of Notre Dame, there’s something about the Middle Ages that’s aptly captured in this medium. This feeling may derive from a delight in the whimsical nature of a lot of marginal illustrations, but cartoons actually sum up a lot of my own cultural encounter with the Middle Ages: the exquisite detail and the unreality, the fact that one very seldom knows anything about the person who animates that character or who illuminates that capital, the sense that, though the world it conveys is much bigger, one feels not disappointment at a tiny vignette, but enchantment and curiosity.

Essentially, the joy I get from studying the literary and cultural artefacts of the Middle Ages is the child’s delight at watching a particularly good cartoon. And then when I watch cartoons, I am like a child watching a particularly good magician. I am not a gifted singer, but I still sing ‘The Bells of Notre Dame’ in the shower. I am not a talented writer, but anyone can make puns about the Middle Ages. But I absolutely cannot draw, and so in my view anyone who can is automatically the Limbourg Brothers.

There is nothing unnatural about this image.

So obviously there’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which surely has everything one could ever want in a film: adventure, love, a truly terrifying villain, campanology and animal sidekicks. It presents a very Disney view of the Middle Ages: Paris is the same Paris as in The Aristocats and all the background extras from Beauty and the Beast appear. But the use of both plainchant and the Dies Irae in the iconic opening song promises much, even if six-year-old me didn’t realise quite what.

Disney Studios have a good record with medievalesque material. The 1963 adaptation of T.H. White’s glorious Sword in the Stone has the charming sketchiness of a lot of their output from that period, and despite its occasional crass (and unWhitelike) generalisations about the Middle Ages – flat earth theory chief amongst them – I enjoy watching it even now. Sleeping Beauty, while excellent, is only medieval in the loosest sense of the word, but Robin Hood both plays to its 70s audience by turning an outlawed troubadour into a Beat-generation drifter, and manages to capture the spirit of medieval drawings, simply by putting animals into human situations. Though separated by six centuries, Lady Kluck’s American football scene is only a step away from the rabbits in the margins of the Gorleston Psalter.

Elsewhere the Middle Ages are well-represented in cartoon. The Shakespeare Animated Tales version of Macbeth is stark and terrifying, the chainmail and background barrel vaults setting the scene. The same studio, Christmas Films, also cleverly adapted The Canterbury Tales so that the pilgrims’ parts were shown in Claymation and the Tales in different styles of cartoon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been animated several times, most memorably in 2002, inspired in line and colour by stained glass windows and introduced by the cracking carol Caput apri defero. And the medieval period is a popular setting for shorts, from The Animation Workshop’s chucklesome Saga of Biorn to the teasers for Heavenly Sword, animated by CHASE.

The very good results of a very bad trip.

But to me, the pink, pearl and perfection of medieval-inspired animation is The Secret of Kells. The story concerns a young oblate called Brendan, who is charged with preparing, and then protecting, what will become the Book of Kells, during an attack by some mean-ass Vikings. The story, as many adult viewers reported, is pretty unimportant when compared to the fact that the animation is heavily inspired by the eponymous Book. Obviously its source material is peerless, but when one sees bees flying in floriated lines, intricate symmetrical arches in two-second backgrounds, sea monsters tying themselves into Celtic knots, and minute triskeles in every scene, one begins to think of The Cartoon Saloon’s animators as the heirs to the manuscript’s exquisitely talented illuminators. The first time I watched it, I felt breathless for a good hour afterwards. I can’t really be objective about it. Everyone should see it, at least twice.

Hey Nonny Nonny

In the days before Medieval II: Total War, the go-to popular culture checkpoints for the Middle Ages were probably Disney, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and The Wicker Man. Now The Wicker Man is set on an Hebridean island in the 1970s, and looks at Celtic paganism – but anyone who has seen it will be scarred by the final scene, in which the most famous of all medieval English songs is sung while other things happen. I mean, of course, ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’.

This song is dated to between 1240 and 1300 and, as its manuscript instructs, should be sung as a four-part round (Hanc rotam cantare possunt quatuor socij…). It’s all about the coming of summer, with growing crops and skipping lambs and farting bulls and so on, and a mimetic chorus of cuckoos’ song. There is also a Latin contrafactum about the Baby Jesus. It’s all completely charming and utterly twee.

That is the average impression of medieval music: happy farmers, wet minstrels and even wetter angels. It seems to me not unlike writing off Shakespeare as nothing more than drag acts and dreadful puns. Because the lyrics of medieval songs, Latin or vernacular, sacred or amorous, are still rightly held as works of passion and skill, not only amongst professional medievalists.

In the mid-1990s there were two notable attempts to ‘update’ medieval music. The first was the opening number of the Mel Brooks spoof Robin Hood: Men In Tights, where a group of African-American men rap about Prince John before launching into a madrigal-inspired chorus of Hey Nonny Nonnies. The second was Jeff Buckley’s version of the late-medieval Corpus Christi Carol.

Lully lulley, lully lulley

The faucon hath born my mak away.

The exact meaning of this song is under debate, though its religious tone is unavoidable. These two examples couldn’t be further apart: one parodying, the other refashioning. And while the Brooks song suggests that the medieval-ness of medieval music is inherently funny because deeply unsexy, Buckley’s speaks of a profound, shared sensitivity to the lyrics, even over five centuries and even if we can’t agree on what is so attractive about them.

It’s all too good to be troubadour.

Unsurprisingly, the use of essentially folk lyrics has become the preserve of folk musicians like Bellowhead and Joan Baez, and where you are most likely to encounter medieval music is in a church, probably at Christmas. This is not, apparently, mainstream listening. But while it may seem inappropriate to describe Herrad von Landsberg as lascivious or Perotin as panty-dropping, the grandeur, delicacy and, indeed, sometimes the sexiness of western medieval music is apparent to pretty much anyone who listens. The problem is that very few people do listen.

I was recently bemused to find that the YouTube viewing figures for various recordings of Tallis’s Spem in alium had shot up – far quicker than your average 16^th-century English polyphony would have one expect. Apparently, the reason for this was that it had been mentioned in Fifty Shades of Grey, as background music in one of the multiple spank-a-thons. This is, to be clear, the Spem in alium whose first line translates as ‘I have never put my hope in any but thee, O God of Israel’. I was initially rather upset, but have come to think of it in two different ways.

Firstly, this suggests that, in the author’s mind at least, literally anything can be background sex music. Rihanna, Vaughan Williams, Stockhausen, the Dam Busters March – anything. If we believe the advertising slogan that ‘Sex Sells’, this infers that anything sells, up to and including Byzantine Old Roman chant. This can only be a good thing for the revival of the Early Music scene, and for the social lives of all those Early Music contratenors who were duped by dreams of riches and groupies.

Secondly, I see it as a gateway. Much as people who hated Harry Potter rationalised it by saying ‘Well, at least it’ll encourage children to read…’, I (who do not hate Tallis) see this faintly ridiculous consumption of his music as potentially leading towards a deeper exploration of Tudor polyphony, which in turn may cause people to discover Machaut and Dunstable, turning eventually to Leonin, and then the music of the Carolingian renaissance, Mozarabic chant, fragments from papyrus scrolls, and backwards, until we’re sitting in a cave, drumming our fingers to mimic the rain. And what a brilliant prospect that is.