Paul McCartney vs. Brian Wilson: A Rivalry That Inspired Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, and Other Classic Albums

in History, Music | September 10th, 2021

One could argue that the album as we know it didn’t exist before the mid-1960s. As a medium of recorded music, the “long-playing” 33 1⁄3 rpm record was introduced in 1948, and the market proved quick to take it up. A great many musicians recorded LPs over the following decade and a half, but these were produced and consumed primarily as bundles of individual songs. The heyday of radio, which lasted into the 1950s, imbued the single — especially the hit single — with enormous cultural power. Through that zeitgeist rose the Liverpudlian quartet known as the Beatles, the very band who would go promptly on to transcend it.

In this version of music history, the first true album was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. When it came out in 1965, it introduced to a vast listening public the possibilities of the LP as a coherent art form in itself. At that point the Beatles had already been making hit records for a few years, as, on the other side of the pond, had a southern Californian singing group called the Beach Boys.

Given each act’s ever-growing prominence and the unprecedented internationalization of pop culture then underway, it was only a matter of time before their musical worlds would collide. Decades later, Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson would remember his first listen to Rubber Soul as follows: “It just totally took my mind away” — a sensation back then sought along many avenues, chemical as well as cultural.

Though Paul McCartney has credited the effervescence of the 1960s to “drugs, basically,” the music he and fellow Beatles made was also enhanced by friendly competition with the Beach Boys, as detailed in the Jeffrey Stillwell video essay above. To Rubber Soul the Beach Boys responded with Pet Sounds. “Oh dear me, this is the album of all time,” McCartney later recalled thinking upon hearing it. “What the hell are we going to do?” Their return volley took the form of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, which in turn sent Wilson into an Icarus-like flight toward the ill-fated Smile project. More than half a century later, some say we live in a post-album era. Even if so, the heights of ambition to which the Beatles and the Beach Boys put each other inspire artists still today — and their fruits will be listened to as long as recorded music exists in any form at all.

How the Beach Boys Created Their Pop Masterpieces: “Good Vibrations,” Pet Sounds, and More

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson & Beatles Producer George Martin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Greatest Song Ever Written”

How The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cover Design Forever

The Making (and Remaking) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Greatest Rock Album of All Time

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Is the Famous Photo of Lee Harvey Oswald Posing with the Gun Used to Kill JFK a Fake?: 3D Forensic Analysis Reveals the Answer

in History, Photography | September 9th, 2021

As long as the 20th century remains in living memory, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy will continue to draw public interest. A great many Americans feel they still haven’t heard the “whole story” behind what happened on November 22, 1963; a few have dedicated their lives to finding out, growing less inclined to accept the possibility of a lone gunman the deeper they get into the documents. But that gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, does figure directly into some of the material held up as evidence of a conspiracy. Take the “backyard photos” that depict him posing with what was ultimately found to be the very gun used to kill JFK.

Such images would seem strongly to implicate Oswald in the assassination, and the Warren Commission seems to have regarded them in just that way. But for nearly six decades now, some theorists have argued that the backyard photos are fake — an idea that began with Oswald himself, who before his own assassination insisted that he’d never seen them in his life, and that someone had “superimposed” his face onto another body.

The Vox video above lays out the main elements of one particular picture that have been called repeatedly into question: the angles of the shadows, the shape of Oswald’s chin, the length of the gun, and Oswald’s unusual posture.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, forensic experts tried just about everything to test the authenticity of this photo,” says the video’s narrator. They couldn’t find any evidence of fakery, but they didn’t have the 21st-century technology at the command of the UC Berkeley School of Information’s Hany Farid, a well-known specialist in the analysis of digital images. Farid and a team of researchers reconstructed Oswald’s body and weaponry (though not the copies of The Militant and The Worker, two ideologically opposed newspapers, he brandished in his other hand) and found that everything added up, from the seemingly misaligned shadows cast by the sun to the stability of his odd stance. If there was indeed a conspiracy to kill JFK, then, it wasn’t a conspiracy of proto-Photoshoppers.

November 22, 1963: Watch Errol Morris’ Short Documentary About the Kennedy Assassination

The Existentialism Files: How the FBI Targeted Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assassination

Noam Chomsky on Commemorating the JFK Assassination: It “Would Impress Kim Il-Sung”

Long Before Photoshop, the Soviets Mastered the Art of Erasing People from Photographs — and History Too

Why the Soviets Doctored Their Most Iconic World War II Victory Photo, “Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The First Air Raid Happened When Austria Dropped Bombs on Venice from Pilotless Hot-Air Balloons (1849)

in History | September 7th, 2021

We surround the phrase “ahead of its time” with a mystical aura. But just because an idea shows up earlier than we expect does not mean it was ever a good idea for human progress. Take, for example, the idea to rain incendiary devices on the heads of civilian populations in wartime. Recent iterations of this technology — unmanned drones surgically bombing weddings and funerals — may be an improvement over Hiroshima or napalm-happy helicopter pilots like Apocalypse Now’s Bill Kilgore. But drones have not, thereby, rendered the nuclear option or trigger-happy death from above obsolete, or made mass civilian casualties less tragic and unnecessary, comparisons of raw numbers aside.

Drone bombing is one of those ideas that showed up ahead of its time — at the very first use of aerial bombing of any kind. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were launched in the service of a military operation 30 years before Edison harnessed electricity for home use.

In 1849, remote piloting was hardly possible. But it was possible to launch a fleet of hot air balloons loaded with explosives from a ship and send them in the general direction of a target. That’s what the Austrian army did — twice — over Venice, in a campaign to recapture the city when its citizens rebelled against imperial rule and built their own republic. Luckily for Venice, the first use of naval air power was also the least effective.

The balloons “carried 33 pounds of explosives,” writes Monash University professor Russell Naughton, “set with a half-hour time fuse, and troops scurried around with them to launch them into the proper wind currents.” The idea for the bombardment came from an Austrian artillery lieutenant named Franz von Uchatius and was initially carried out on July 12, 1849. This attempt “failed because the wind was not in Austria’s favor,” writes Weapons and Warfare, quoting from a contemporary account in Time magazine:

The balloons appeared to rise to about 4,500 ft. Then they exploded in midair or fell into the water, or, blown by a sudden southeast wind, sped over the city and dropped on the besiegers. Venetians, abandoning their homes, crowded into the streets and squares to enjoy the strange spectacle. … When a cloud of smoke appeared in the air to make an explosion, all clapped and shouted. Applause was greatest when the balloons blew over the Austrian forces and exploded, and in such cases the Venetians added cries of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Good appetite!’

More spectacle than threat, the balloon bombs might have been abandoned as a failed experiment, but the Austrians were persistent; they had besieged the city, determined to subdue it. Another attack on August 22 seems to have also done more damage to the Austrians than their targets. Although the balloons could not be piloted, the detonation of their charges was controlled, Scientific American wrote that year, “by electro magnetism by means of a long isolated copper wire with a large galvanic battery placed on the shore. The bomb falls perpendicularly, and explodes on reaching the ground” … theoretically.

It is not clear from the sources how many bombs were launched. Numbers range from 2 to 200. In any case, the bombing would have little effect on ending the siege, which went on for five more months afterward, and they received little notice in the press. They did, however, have the effect after their second appearance of producing “extreme terror,” the British Morning Chronicle reported, documenting the first appearance of “shock and awe.” And terror was “clearly what was intended,” Brett Holman writes at Airminded, rather than a strategic offensive. “The bombs used were filled with shrapnel, which isn’t much use for anything but killing and maiming people. So there were few qualms on the part of the Austrians about targeting and killing civilians.” They were simply killed more efficiently with conventional artillery and starvation.

The example of the Austrians was not followed by other armies, who weren’t eager to have explosive balloons blow back on their own lines. The idea of bombing cities from the air, writes Holman, “had to be invented all over again. Which it was, of course, and Venice’s next air raid was on 24 May 1915.”

Just last year, the entire city shut down — “even planes were barred from flying to and from Venice’s Marco Polo Airport,” DW reported — as authorities led an effort to “remove and defuse a World War II-era bomb” on what local media dubbed “Bomba Day.”

via Marina Amaral

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

A Drone’s Eye View of the Ruins of Pompeii

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

100 Days of Dante: Join the Largest Divine Comedy Reading Group in the World (Starts September 8)

in History, Literature, Religion | September 6th, 2021

This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death — which means it also marks the 701st anniversary of his great work the Divina Commedia, known in English as the Divine Comedy. We’ve all got to go some time, and it’s somehow suitable that Dante went not long after telling the tale of his own journey through the afterlife, complete with stops in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. It remains a journey we can all take and re-take — and interpretively grapple with — still these seven centuries later. Starting this month, you can take it as a group tour, so to speak, by joining 100 Days of Dante, the largest Dante reading group in the world.

A project of Baylor University’s Honors College (with support from several other American educational institutions), 100 Days of Dante has launched a web site “through which modern seekers and pilgrims can follow the great epic poem with free video presentations three times a week.”

So writes Aleteia’s John Burger, who explains that “the three books of the Divine Comedy, known in Italian as Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, are divided into 33 chapters known as cantos. [Inferno actually had 34.] Each video will present one canto, with commentary on it from leading experts in Dante studies.” You can also read the entire work on 100 Days of Dante’s web site, in English or Italian — a language Dante’s own poetry did much to shape.

Nobody interested in the language of Italy, let alone the country’s history and culture, can do without experiencing the Divine Comedy. One of 100 Days of Dante’s aims is a re-emphasis of its nature as a thoroughly religious work, one that renders in vivid, sometimes harrowing detail the worldview held by Christians of Dante’s place and time. But believer or otherwise, you can join in the reading from when it begins on September 8, to when it concludes on Easter 2022. You may well find, as the long Italy-resident English writer and translator Tim Parks observes, that Dante has a way of slipping through convenient interpretative frameworks cultural, historical, and even religious. “Long after the fires of Hell have burned themselves out,” he writes, “the debate about the Divina Commedia rages on.” Find more educational resources on Dante and The Divine Comedy below.

An Illustrated and Interactive Dante’s Inferno: Explore a New Digital Companion to the Great 14th-Century Epic Poem

A Digital Archive of the Earliest Illustrated Editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1487–1568)

Visualizing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Drawings of Dante’s Inferno from the Renaissance Through Today

Explore Divine Comedy Digital, a New Digital Database That Collects Seven Centuries of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy

Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Comedy? An Animated Video Makes the Case

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Velvet Underground: Get a First Glimpse of Todd Haynes’ Upcoming Documentary on the Most Influential Avant-Garde Rockers

in Film, History, Music | September 2nd, 2021

To the question of the most influential band formed in the 1960s a list of easy answers unfolds, beginning with the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones. As three of the makers of the best-selling records of all time, those bands all lay fair claim to the title. But even within the commercial dynamo of postwar America, it was also possible to exert great influence without topping the charts, or indeed without even reaching them. This is proven by the story of avant-garde rockers the Velvet Underground, whose meager success in their day as compared with their formidable cultural legacy inspired Brian Eno to sum them up with a quip now so well-known as to have become a cliché.

But not even a mind like Eno’s can truly sum up the Velvet Underground. Better to tell the band’s story — the story, in its way, of art and popular culture in mid-to-late 20th-century America — in a feature-length documentary, as Todd Haynes has done with The Velvet Underground, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and debuts on AppleTV+ on October 15th.

“Haynes appears to have vacuumed up every last photograph and raw scrap of home-movie and archival footage of the band that exists and stitched it all into a coruscating document that feels like a time-machine kaleidoscope,” writes Variety critic Owen Gleiberman. He introduces the Velvets and their associates “by playing their words off the flickering black-and-white images of their Warhol screen tests.”

The Velvets were, in a sense, a product of Warhol’s Factory. The pop-art icon managed the band himself early on, connecting them with the singer who would become the second titular figure on their debut The Velvet Underground & Nico and designing that album’s oft-visually-referenced banana-sticker cover. Having died in 1987, Warhol couldn’t grant Haynes an interview; having followed Warhol the next year, neither could Nico. Band leader Lou Reed, too, has now been gone for the better part of a decade, but he does have plenty to say in the 1986 South Bank Show documentary above. Haynes’ The Velvet Underground includes Reed in archival footage, but also features new reminiscences from surviving members like Maureen Tucker and John Cale. Like all human beings, the Velvets are mortal; but their expansion of rock’s sonic possibilities will outlast us all.

Watch Footage of the Velvet Underground Composing “Sunday Morning,” the First Track on Their Seminal Debut Album The Velvet Underground & Nico (1966)

A Symphony of Sound (1966): Velvet Underground Improvises, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

The Velvet Underground Captured in Color Concert Footage by Andy Warhol (1967)

Watch The Velvet Underground Perform in Rare Color Footage: Scenes from a Vietnam War Protest Concert (1969)

Hear The Velvet Underground’s “Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes,” Which Showcases the Brilliance & Innovation of Lou Reed’s Guitar Playing (1969)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Archaeologist Creates the Definitive Guide to Beer Cans

in Food & Drink, History | August 31st, 2021

Image via Wikimedia Commons

As a beverage of choice and necessity for much of the population in parts of the ancient world, beer has played an important role in archaeology. Beer cans, on the other hand, have not. Unlike millennia-old recipes, beer cans seem like no more than trash, even in a field where trash is highly treasured. This is a mistake, says archeologist Jane Busch. “The historical archaeologist who ignores the beer can at his site is like the prehistoric archeologist who ignores historic pottery.”

David Maxwell, an expert in animal bones who trained as a Mayanist, has recognized the truth of this statement by turning his passion for beer can collecting into beer can archaeology, a tiny niche within the smaller field of “tin can archaeology.” Maxwell became the reigning expert on beer can dating when “in 1993, he published a field-identification guide in Historical Archaeology,” notes Jessica Gingrich at Atlas Obscura, “which has since become an industry standard and his most-read work.”

The first commercial canned beer appeared in 1935, after several unsuccessful experiments starting in 1909. Experiments in beer canning took a hiatus during Prohibition, and canned beer itself went off the market during WWII as supplies of tin plate were rerouted to the war effort. During that interregnum, only the military shipped canned beer, to soldiers overseas in olive and camo-colored cans. When sales resumed after the war, beer cans assumed more routinized design elements. Maxwell himself became fascinated with beer cans from afar. “While canned beer sales exploded in the United States after World War II, Gingrich writes, “the industry failed to take off in Canada until the 1980s.”

As a child in Canada, Maxwell collected bottle caps. “All the beer came in the same shape bottle,” he says. Cans seemed exotic, especially those of an older vintage. “They had punches to open them instead of pull rings, and all I knew was that they predated me.” The value of disposable artifacts less than 100 years old isn’t immediately apparent to most people, says Jim Rock, a pioneer of tin can studies who calls cans “the Rodney Dangerfield of archeology. They just don’t get any respect.” But the fact is “all archeology is garbage,” says Maxwell.

Dating cans gives archeologists a picture of modern consumption patterns — and patterns of ecological destruction — in the refuse tossed on highways and the strata of trash found in construction sites, landfills, and even ancient dig sites, where dating beer cans can tell archeologists when earlier trespassers might have arrived, removed or altered artifacts, and left their trash behind. Maxwell, who has recently downsized his collection from 4500 to 1700 cans to save space, admits that a narrow focus on the beer can takes a special combination of skills.

“Collectors are a fabulous resource for academics,” he says. “These are the guys who do the grunt work” — the endlessly curious citizen scientists of archaeology. “I can’t think of anyone else who would do that except someone who is obsessive about what it is that they are collecting.” In Maxwell, the obsessive collector and rigorous academic just happened to come together to produce the definitive guide. (See Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist online.) But even he has had to “face the question of what deserves to be archived and kept,” Nicola Jones writes at Sapiens. In discarding 3,000 of his own cans, most of them acquired through collectors online, he had to admit that “though the rusty cans were a part of history, they weren’t worth much to the rest of the world.”

Related Content:

Beer Archaeology: Yes, It’s a Thing

The Science of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promises to Enhance Your Appreciation of the Timeless Beverage

The First Known Photograph of People Sharing a Beer (1843)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads “the Best Cover Letter Ever Written”

in Film, History, Letters | August 26th, 2021

In the 1930s, many a writer journeyed to Hollywood in order to make his fortune. The screenwriter’s life didn’t sit well with some of them — just ask F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner — but a fair few made more than a go of it out West. Take the Baltimore-born Robert Pirosh, whose studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin landed him a job as a copywriter in New York. This work seems to have proven less than satisfactory, as evidenced by the piece of correspondence that, still in his early twenties, he wrote and sent to “as many directors, producers and studio executives as he could find.” It wasn’t just a request for work; it was what Letters Live today calls “the best cover letter ever written.”

Pirosh’s impressive missive, which you can hear read aloud by favorite Letters Live performer Benedict Cumberbatch in the video above, runs, in full, as follows:

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s‑sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words.

May I have a few with you?

Though not known as an unsubtle actor, Cumberbatch seizes the opportunity to deliver each and every one of these choice words with its own variety of exaggerated relish. Though none of these terms is especially recherché on its own, they must collectively have given the impression of a formidable mastery of the English language, especially to the ear of the average Hollywood big-shot. One way or another, Pirosh’s letter did the trick: according to Letters of Note, it “secured him three interviews, one of which led to his job as a junior writer at MGM. Fifteen years later,” he “won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work on the war film Battleground.”

A World War II picture, Battleground was written at least in part from Pirosh’s own experience: a few years into his Hollywood career, he enlisted and made a return to Europe, this time as a Master Sergeant in the 320th Regiment, 35th Infantry Division, seeing action in France and Germany. After the war he went right back to writing and producing, remaining active in the entertainment industry until at least the 1970s (and in fact, his writing credits include contributions to such programs that defined that decade as Mannix, Barnaby Jones, and Hawaii Five‑O). Pirosh’s was an enviable 20th-century career, and one that began with a suitably brazen — and still convincing — 20th-century advertisement for himself.

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Letter to the High School That Burned Slaughterhouse-Five

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in “Distress” Before His Conviction For “Gross Indecency”

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Albert Camus’ Touching Thank You Letter to His Elementary School Teacher

“Stop It and Just DO”: Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Advice on Overcoming Creative Blocks, Written by Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse (1965)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Medieval Scribes Discouraged Theft of Manuscripts by Adding Curses Threatening Death & Damnation to Their Pages

in Books, History, Religion | August 26th, 2021

I’ve concluded that one shouldn’t lend a book unless one is prepared to part with it for good. But most books are fairly easy to replace. Not so in the Middle Ages, when every manuscript counted as one of a kind. Theft was often on the minds of the scribes who copied and illustrated books, a laborious task requiring literal hours of blood, sweat and tears each day.

Scribal copying took place “only by natural light — candles were too big a risk to the books,” Sarah Laskow writes at Atlas Obscura. Bent over double, scribes could not let their attention wander. The art, one scribe complained, “extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.”

The results deserved high security, and Medieval monks “did not hesitate to use the worst punishments they knew” for manuscript theft, writes Laskow, namely threats of “excommunication from the church and horrible, painful death.”

Theft deterrence came in the form of ingenious curses, written into the manuscripts themselves, going “back to the 7th century BCE,” Rebecca Romney writes at Mental Floss. Appearing “in Latin, vernacular European languages, Arabic, Greek, and more,” they came in such creative flavors as death by roasting, as in a Bible copied in Germany around 1172: “If anyone steals it: may he die, may he be roasted in a frying pan, may the falling sickness [epilepsy] and fever attack him, and may he be rotated [on the breaking wheel] and hanged. Amen.”

A few hundred years later, a manuscript curse from 15th-century France also promises roasting, or worse:

Whoever steals this book
Will hang on a gallows in Paris,
And, if he isn’t hung, he’ll drown,
And, if he doesn’t drown, he’ll roast,
And, if he doesn’t roast, a worse end will befall him.

The plucking out of eyes also appears to have been a theme. “Whoever to steal this volume tries, Out with his eyes, out with his eyes!” warns the final couplet in a 13th-century curse from a Vatican Library manuscript. Another curse in verse, found by author Marc Drogin, author of Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses, gets especially graphic with the eye gouging:

To steal this book, if you should try,
It’s by the throat you’ll hang high.
And ravens then will gather ’bout
To find your eyes and pull them out.
And when you’re screaming ‘oh, oh, oh!’
Remember, you deserved this woe.

The hoped-for consequences were not always so grimly humorous. “Gruesome as these punishments seem,” the British Library writes, “to most medieval readers the worst curses were those that put the eternal fate of their souls at risk rather than their bodily health.” These would often be marked with the Greek word “Anathema,” sometimes “followed by the Aramaic formula ‘Maranatha’ (‘Come, Lord!’).” Both appear in a curse added to a manuscript of letters and sermons from Lesnes Abbey. Yet, unlike most medieval curses, here the thief is given a chance to make restitution. “Anyone who removes it or does damage to it: if the same person does not repay the church sufficiently, may he be cursed.”

Curses were not the only security solutions of manuscript culture. Medieval monks also used book chains and locked chests to secure the fruit of their hard labor. As the old saying goes, “trust in God, but tie your camel.” But if locks and divine providence should fail, scribes trusted that the fear of punishment – even eternal damnation — down the road would be enough to make would-be book thieves think again.

The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe: A Free Online Course from the University of Colorado

Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Paul McCartney vs. Brian Wilson: A Rivalry That Inspired Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, and Other Classic Albums

Is the Famous Photo of Lee Harvey Oswald Posing with the Gun Used to Kill JFK a Fake?: 3D Forensic Analysis Reveals the Answer

The First Air Raid Happened When Austria Dropped Bombs on Venice from Pilotless Hot-Air Balloons (1849)

100 Days of Dante: Join the Largest Divine Comedy Reading Group in the World (Starts September 8)

The Velvet Underground: Get a First Glimpse of Todd Haynes’ Upcoming Documentary on the Most Influential Avant-Garde Rockers

An Archaeologist Creates the Definitive Guide to Beer Cans

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads “the Best Cover Letter Ever Written”

Medieval Scribes Discouraged Theft of Manuscripts by Adding Curses Threatening Death & Damnation to Their Pages

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