Colin Dickey introduces the current Lapham’s Quarterly collection of rude and complaining messages left by monks in the margins of medieval manuscripts, a subject covered in detail in Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, Michael Camille's 2004 book.
Depictions of sexual consort are frequent, among men and women, among various species of animals, and enough other combinations to make even contemporary readers blush. Camille cautions against reading such images as violations of the sacred text; because the medieval world was so rigidly hierarchized and structured, “resisting, ridiculing, overturning and inventing was not only possible, it was limitless.” That these psalters and books of hours often contained sacrilegious sentiments right alongside their holy piety, it seems, was perhaps the point: “We should not see medieval culture exclusively in terms of binary oppositions—sacred/profane, for example, or spiritual/worldly,” Camille explains. “Travesty, profanation, and sacrilege are essential to the continuity of the sacred in society.”
Living in the Margins
Sculptor Jud Turner (previously) sends us two new pieces: Deindustry ("a meditation on the industrial divinity of late-stage capitalism, and combines my fear of heights with my fear of over-industrialization") and Scale of Themis ("an imagined tool for the Greek goddess Themis to weigh possible civilizations against each other. The tiny differences in these two […]
Grether Labs's Science Fiction Plot Generator can sure pick 'em: "You are friends with a talking fireplace, and you are working to solve this ancient puzzle before the creatures consume you"; "You are a cyan-eyed cartographer who is finding the awful truth beneath this false utopia, and who is struggling with the terribly thick underbrush […]
Every month, Tor Books' free Ebook Club gives away a different novel to people who have signed up; this month, the selection is my most recent novel, Walkaway! Sign up between now and the 20th to get your free copy (this only works in Canada and the US; different publishers have the rights in other […]
When businesses need big cloud projects done right, they need experts in DevOps. For the uninitiated, that’s shorthand for the framework that allows development and operations teams to work together toward the same goal – not as independent departments with their own agendas. There’s an arsenal of software that has cropped up to help in […]
Are you super organized? You’re going to love the Genius Pack G4 and its seemingly limitless, well-placed compartments. Not that organized? You’re still going to love this piece of luggage because it’s so well thought out that it practically does the packing for you. We’ve all tried to stuff a piece of carry-on so full […]
If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re not just hungry for success. You’re hungry for knowledge, the insights that can lead to bigger and better ideas and ways to implement them. That knowledge is out there in the bestselling biz books that have changed the game over the years. There’s just one problem: In a fast-paced lifestyle, […]
