i’m looking for a specific piece of medieval art i saw once/the source of an image i found. can you help? i’m sorry, but i get quite a few messages every day and while i do look at all of them, i do not have the brain power to reply to each one. i also can’t post every single submission i get. a lot of them are lovely but if the image quality isn’t great or they’re not actually medieval, i probably won’t share them. don’t hesitate to bump your message once but please don’t dm me incessantly! You might well have seen Swarthout’s handiwork in your feeds even if you don’t follow the account: Paired with her zeitgeisty captioning, many of the strange, cute and often absurd illustrations from 6th- to 15th-century manuscripts — showing jovial skeletons and wan angels, strangely drawn animals and the daily affairs of commonfolk — have become popular memes. There’s weird floating babies, a knight stabbing himself with the caption “I’m out,” a sneaky cat with a severed penis in its mouth, and a pair of men demonstrating not-so-vaguely sexual sword-fighting tactics. 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. Buy

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

Select a format:

A Secret Room in a 16th-Century Italian Chapel, Where Michelangelo Hid—and Drew—for Months, Opens to the Public 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. Yes, the bulk of Swarthout’s work is humorous and tongue-in-cheek, but it comes from a place of admiration and appreciation for “the depth and breadth of the subject matter, skills, and styles in Medieval art,” she said.

Florence and its residents appear in late medieval popular culture across Europe, particularly in jokes at their expense. So why was everyone so obsessed with Florence? In this episode, Olivia and Aran take a look at how this Tuscan city grew to become a thriving centre of arts, banking, and trade by the 15th century, its resulting notoriety, and the conflicts that ensued between its different factions. Also discussed are Olivia's Italian heritage, why Master Splinter is a communist, and the Underwear Revolution. A lot of the art being made (in the Medieval era) was people drawing on things from their life and experiences… that were part of popular culture,” Swarthout said in a phone call with CNN. “Focusing the book on life in general and the entire medieval world… felt like a really good way to synthesize all of those different sorts of topics together.” The Middle Ages gave us one of the longest-lasting institutions of education: the university. And where there are universities, there are sure to be students sowing chaos and destruction. Olivia and Aran are joined by a special guest, Joe Mason, as they explore the medieval origins of universities and take a look at the lives and activities of those who studied at them. Also discussed are the dangers of tennis, the risks of kidnapping a bishop, and wrong way to behave in a tavern. 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. 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.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.” At the same time, Swarthout tries to avoid focusing too much on contemporary narratives or judgments about the images. Instead, she aims to provide new insights into everyday life during this period of history—which requires looking beyond criticisms of the art’s quality.

Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times is out now on Square Peg by Penguin.

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.”

An interesting thing for me to explore was the idea of telling a story through medieval images and medieval information without inserting myself as the author, and just trying to tell it from the perspective of a real weird Medieval guy.” In her new illustrated book, Swarthout guides readers through life in the Middle Ages with the same timely wit, making sense of broader Medieval culture through a contemporary lens. What would your name be? Ratbald? Wulfwynn? How about just Guy? 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. I didn’t know very much about the Middle Ages before, but collecting pictures of the weird guys as if they’re Pokémon has led me to all the history that’s behind them,” said Anna, a high schooler from California who follows @WeirdMedieval.

Retailers:

A self-described “proprietress of weird medieval guys,” she shares little 15th-century snail cats, gun-carrying demons, and other oddly charming scenes from centuries-old art along with her not-so-serious modern-day commentary. 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.