Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times

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Swarthout launched a podcast series expanding on her social media presence last summer, with ever-prescient topics including a deep dive into three prominent “wife guys” of the era and whether or not a single Dorito would kill a medieval peasant. By day, Olivia Swarthout is a data scientist in London with an interest in environmental topics. But in her free time, she’s the queen of Middle Ages memes, and she spends a few hours a week perusing digital archives to find them. She likes the British Library’s collections because you can search by keyword, but she also uses resources from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Morgan Library in New York, the National Library of France, and a slew of others. “I’ll look through whole manuscripts online and get totally lost in them. There are all these really cool bits of art,” she told me over the phone.

A lot of people see the drawings, which look maybe anatomically inaccurate or don’t look like something that they expect to see in a historical art piece, and they assume that Medieval artists were naive or untalented, but I felt like there was sort of a deeper story to tell,” she explained. i’m looking for a specific piece of medieval art i saw once/the source of an image i found. can you help? In fact, there’s a lot in Medieval documents that departs from contemporary values—the antisemitic stereotypes, for one, or the contempt toward religions that aren’t Christianity. For Swarthout, who is Jewish, running her X account and writing her book meant learning how these attitudes infused the art of their day, but also understanding that they are of their day . Swarthout herself is drawn to the surfeit of animal depictions in Medieval art, particularly the many examples of hedgehogs carrying fruit on their spines. “Stuff like that,” she said, “a lot of it is really familiar material or a familiar subject, but it’s portrayed in a way that’s totally different to how someone might portray it today.” Explore what your medieval life would have been through a choose-your-own-adventure full of quizzes, how-to guides, diagrams and flow charts that takes you from your birth to your gruesome end, revealing your patron saint, the fate of your love life and the trials and tribulations you faced along the way.

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Since then, she has been collecting the weirdest medieval images she can find, such as a woman throwing up a small demon, an eagle with human faces covering its body and a man with an indifferent expression being brutally stabbed in the head. She posts such images alongside understated captions like “ turtle having fun, Germany, 15th century” or “ a 14th-century door in Exeter cathedral that has a hole in it for cats to come and go.” Today, the account has over 600,000 followers. Even without sweeping empires, the Middle Ages had impressive art and culture and literacy. And now, a generation centuries younger can appreciate it in a whole new way.

I was looking for an escape from the technical and mathematical work that was piled on me, so I decided to take a break, and I flip through some medieval manuscripts as a mental cleanse. I didn’t have the intention of doing anything with them, but I got lost in the art. I was like, ‘Oh, these people were really funny.’” Like they always say, nothing takes your mind off work like a thousand-year-old painting of a bird with two dozen eyes. It’s trying to explore the way that religion and Christianity impacted this art, while creating a clear separation between my beliefs and those ideas. It’s also trying to highlight the ways that society has changed and improved, while still making it feel natural,” she said. there is a myth in europe that hedgehogs use their spines to carry fruit home. while this isn’t true, people have believed it for millenia–in part because it’s such a cute idea!! Swarthout (who recently asked followers for a fancam of 12th-century polymath Hildegard von Bingen, “for a friend”) is framing medieval art through a meme-y lens, making the Classics palatable and funny: medieval guys — they’re just like us! They examine things. They hug their friends. They hold eggs. They gamble in sunglasses. They eat poultry with pals. They even had ‘this isn’t what it looks like!’ moments, like one post showing a king peeking into a room to see the queen (crown still on) in bed with a dragon, which Swarthout captioned, "really? with the dragon?" Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times is out now on Square Peg by Penguin.

The Life of Medieval Students as Illustrated by their Lettershttps://www.jstor.org/stable/1832500Student power in medieval universitieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/89561/j.2164-4918.1968.tb03142.x.pdf?sequence=1Sporting and Recreational Activities of Students in the Medieval Universitieshttps://www.medievalists.net/2010/07/sporting-and-recreational-activities-of-students-in-the-medieval-universities/Medieval murder mapshttps://medievalmurdermap.co.uk/ The witch isn’t dead: New book explores witchcraft’s rebellious history – and modern transformation So you want to live like you’re from the Middle Ages? Well, maybe that’s not a common aspiration, but nevertheless, it’s a subject that’s become Olivia M. Swarthout’s expertise. For one, she pointed out the preconception that Medieval manuscripts were created by monks or disciples when most were made by people at their day job. They were regular folk working on commissions from clients looking to have their own prayer books, which served a status symbols. These artists, said Swarthout, “were aware of the subject matter, [but] were riffing on that, combining it with things from folklore and daily life, and things from their own minds and creativity.”

If the often strange and absurd depictions of animals during this era are your thing, this 587-image compendium of the Medieval animal kingdom (both real and fabled) is a must. The beastiary includes entries on 100 different creatures and includes plenty of lore in the form of essays. yes! please feel free to dm them to me on any social media platform. if you have a source you can send along that’s even better, but it’s cool if you don’t The classic satire of Arthurian legend mined the Middle Ages for comedic gold decades before Medieval memes were a thing. Follow the Monty Python troupe on an epic, farcical journey from Camelot (‘Tis a silly place) in search of the Holy Grail.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.