Welcome back.

In this issue

• A “scat” pun

• Laurus and Baudolino

• The art of the imperial ornithological humble-brag

• Apocalypse then

• Recent music

The hottest new academic disciplines

Last issue I asked for your ideas for important new fields of study, the true cutting edge of academia. This is what you said.

• Forgetymology 
  “Disremembering the origins of words.”

• Somnambulogic 
  “Analysis of reasons for sleepwalking.”

• Sopoforeboding 
  “Identifying sleep apprehension.”

• Causticordiality 
  “The practice of corrosive pleasantness.”
  -Lee

• Es-scat-tology 

  “The amount of speculative crap that one encounters in… fascination with ‘last things.’”
  -Bruce

• Laparoscopic lepidoptery

  “The study of butterfly innards with scoped cameras through tiny incisions.”

• Heliotropic habadasheriology

  “The study of sewing notions (zippers, buttons, thread) of a particular shade of purple.”
  -Sunny

• Neurobaking 

  “It’s not baking, it’s salivating.”

• Banananomics 

  “There’s always money in the banana stand.”
  -Joel

• Quantitative anthropobulbolumentorquology 
  “The study of how many people it actually takes to screw in a lightbulb.”

• A similar but less interesting field of study is expected to see triple-digit growth in the next decade: qualitative organizational and behavioral anthropobulbolumentorquology 
  “The study of describing how they organize themselves in order to do it.”
  -Dave

• Piggyback Transportation

• Outdoor Hospitality

• Magical Performing Arts

• Bicycle Studies

• Therapeutic Screaming

• Feng Shui

• Imaginary Friend Studies

• Mathematical Studies in Making America Greater Than, Lesser Than or Equal To

  (Keep in mind, some of these can only be taken as a concentration)
  -Craig

The winning hilarious entry is from Lee:

• Valoruptuousity 
  “Calculating the ratio of courage to curviness.”

Congratulations to Lee and thanks to those who participated. There’s no contest in this issue, but there is a prompt below with a request for music recommendations.

Medieval adventures featuring medieval adventures

The Alexander Romance and fantastical creatures in two excellent works of historical fiction

In Umberto Eco’s delightful novel Baudolino, the narrating 12th/13th-century protagonist finds himself in the Latin’s siege of Constantinople, telling his life story to a Byzantine noble. Baudolino recounts how he was swept from a medieval Italian hamlet into the service of Emperor Frederick I before traveling east toward the edge of the world in search of the legendary Prester John. Baudolino’s embellished tale includes a menagerie of one-legged skiapods, headless blemmyes, half-goat satyrs, vicious manticores, and other beasts that haunted the daydreams and nightmares of Byzantine children.

The novel’s creatures and journey narrative rely heavily on the Alexander Romance, a collection of legends about Alexander the Great’s journey east to the end of the world. Baudolino also draws on connected legends of Prester John, a mythic eastern Nestorian Christian king, thought to be Indian or, later, Ethiopian. (“Prester” is an abbreviation of Presbyter).

The Alexander Romance is featured in another of my favourite books of recent years, one of my top five novels. Eugene Vodolazhkin’s Laurus tells the story of Arseny, a Russian boy raised by his grandfather, a healer, before he sets off across medieval Russia and the Mediterranean through a series of different names and identities. Replete with pilgrimages, plagues, holy fools, and clairvoyant flashes of future events, Laurus is a Dostoevsky-like account of a holy, tortured soul. As a child, Arseny is enthralled as he reads from from his grandfather’s copy of the Alexander Romance, lending a melancholic otherwordliness to the spiritually-haunted world of the novel. Here is part of one passage quoted in the book at length:

All this is my roundabout way of saying that these are great books with interesting creatures.

Frederick’s fowles

Surely the greatest accomplishment of Emperor Frederick II (not the 1st) is his illuminated manuscript, The Book of the Divine Augustus, Frederick II, Emperor of the Romans, King of Jerusalem and Sicily, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, an Analytical Inquiry into the Natural Phenomena Manifest in Hawking, or The Art of Falconry for short. (I personally would have gone with the more banal Frederick’s Field Guide to Birds of the Holy Roman Empire). The book mostly concerns falconry and hunting, but also has some detailed original ornithological research.

Modern field guide authors could take a hint from his unhumble introduction. “As the ruler of a large kingdom and an extensive empire we were very often hampered by arduous and intricate governmental duties,” Frederick claims, “we did not lay aside our self-imposed task.” I’m sure other birders can relate.

In an era when Aristotle’s History of Animals and Parts of Animals were the supreme zoological companions (with his claims of hibernating swallows), Frederick and his scribes were more than willing to ruffle some Phoenix feathers by making their own ornithological observations. “We discovered by hard-won experience,” Frederick asserts, “that the deductions of Aristotle, whom we followed when they appealed to our reason, were not entirely to be relied upon.” The detailed illustrations are impressive. With notes on bird structure, diet, nesting, migration, identification and very basic avian taxonomy (“Waterfowl, Land Birds, and Neutral Birds”), this is not just another guide on how to train falcons and care for them while you are on a crusade or putting down a rebellion.

The emperor also wants his readers to know that falconry is no common matter.

You heard it from the emperor first: birding is a classy hobby.

Those interested can read a bad pdf version here.

Joachim of Fiore, medieval apocalypticism, and the second generation of Franciscans

In which St. Francis became a messianic warrior angel

Umberto Eco’s better-known medieval novel, The Name of the Rose, is a sort of intellectual detective thriller about the rediscovery of a lost Aristotle work in a late thirteenth-century Franciscan monastery. It’s a gripping story. Eco’s historical treatment of controversy around the radical or “Spiritual” Franciscans leaves a lot wanting in terms of accuracy, but he gets the apocalyptic urgency of the moment right.

Having studied evangelical interest in St. Francis, I took the opportunity of a medieval history class to explore the saint’s more immediate legacy. What I found was a fascinating and dramatic mix of religious ideas and prophecies that helped catapult St. Francis from an inspiring leader of a monastic order to an apocalyptic, messianic angel within a few decades of his death.

When St. Francis came on the scene in the Italian countryside with his message of poverty, compassion and strict religious observance, he came into a southern Europe primed with apocalyptic expectation. Joachim of Fiore, a late twelfth-century Cistercian monk, popularized an apocalyptic vision of history based on a system of ages: the age of the Father in the Old Testament, the age of the Son since the time of Christ, and a coming age of the Holy Spirit, an age of faith where all would understand scripture. In his interpretation of the ever-inscrutable book of Revelation, the final age would involve new groups of reformist monastics who would overthrow the Antichrist.

St. Francis promoted the poverty and holiness of the gospels as the template for Christian life, leading his to followers to claim that he rediscovered the apostolic heart of Christianity. (Earlier medieval Christian morality had emphasized more Old Testament themes). “A shoot of the ancient religion,” asserted Thomas of Celano, “suddenly renewed the old and decrepit.”

In the late thirteenth century, Bonaventure combined a few of these ideas to portray St. Francis as the angel who holds the seal of God in Revelation 7, a status confirmed by Francis’ receipt of the stigmata (the wounds of Christ). By recovering evangelical poverty, St. Francis inaugurated a new apocalyptic age.

The Franciscan order became divided over how strictly to follow the rule of Francis in terms of poverty, education, and holding ecclesiastical office. The conflict pitted the rigorist “Spiritual” Franciscans against the main order. Peter of John Olivi, one Spiritual Franciscan, would expand on the apocalyptic ideas from Bonaventure. He layers a system of seven ages on top of Joachim’s three, claiming that the penultimate sixth age “begins in one way with the time of our blessed father Francis, but should begin more fully with the destruction of the great whore Babylon, when the aforesaid angel of Christ, sealed with his sign, will inaugurate the future army of Christ through his followers.” Olivi ascribes to Francis an angelic identity, mentioning a rumour that St. Francis would be resurrected after a time to combat the beast representing the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Olivi’s apocalypticism contains strong premonitions of a coming conflict not yet in motion.

By the 1290s, many Spiritual Franciscans were facing open opposition, exile and even imprisonment from a series of unsympathetic popes and from the general chapter of the Franciscans. This persecution added more apocalyptic urgency to the Spirituals’ view of St. Francis. Ubertino da Casale contrasted Francis’ perfect inauguration of the age of the Holy Spirit with the carnal church, “Babylon and ‘shameless whore.’” To Ubertino, popes Boniface VIII and Benedict XI were the “mystical Antichrist,” whereas St. Francis is the angel who announces vengeance against the kings of the earth (in Revelation 17 and 19). For Angelo Clareno, a Spiritual Franciscan writing in the early fourteenth century, the followers of the rule of St. Francis were in perpetual conflict with Satan. Satan had infiltrated the Franciscan Order, causing many Franciscans to abandon poverty, chastity and obedience. But St. Francis would be the angel to battle and defeat Lucifer, Christ’s instrument to defeat evil through poverty and humility.

I often think about this fascinating process whereby the memory of a charismatic figure was transformed by apocalyptic expectation and persecution, elevating a man into an angel, an apocalyptic deliverer, even a second Christ. Even some who knew Francis himself shared early versions of these apocalyptic views. This human capacity for rapid development in religious ideas informs how I think about other times in history, including the present.

So if you want to to leave behind a similar eschatological legacy, just inspire a dedicated following, leave difficult instructions that might trouble the authorities and divide your followers, and make sure that weird end times ideas are in the air. It’s really that simple!

Hit subscribe for more afterlife hacks.

Music of the decade part 1

Nothing medieval here

For the next few issues I’m planning to highlight albums from 2020 or later that I’ve enjoyed. My contemporary music knowledge is pretty limited, so I’ll ask for you recommendations below. But for now, here are two of mine.

Low – HEY WHAT

Since the 1990s this husband-and-wife duo (a trio live) has been known for their slow, harmonic, beautiful, sometimes haunting, but usually very, very slow indie rock. I saw them play in Seattle in 2004 headlining a tour with Pedro the Lion in tow. I had particularly liked their eerie minor key anthems like “Murderer” and “Pissing” (Their best known song is probably the holiday classic “Just Like Christmas”).

In 2020 they released what would be their last album (Mimi Parker, half of the duo, died of cancer in 2022). Unlike their early sound, this is an enormous sonic adventure. HEY WHAT is still harmonic, but with a huge dynamic range, with jagged but compressed distorted guitars and moody synths creating clashing atmospheres and keeping mechanical rhythm with haunting harmonies over the top. Loud anthems alternate with whispery ballads. This is noise rock at its most beautiful.

Three tracks to listen to: White Horses, I Can Wait, Days Like These
You can listen on Bandcamp

 Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters

I long dismissed Fiona Apple’s music as something like a B-side from a Wes Anderson soundtrack. I lumped her in with the sappy-sweet-singer-songwriter-chamber-folk-pop of Regina Spektor or Ingrid Michaelson (some of my least favourite music). But Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a delightful, angsty, badass, triumphalist, introspective escapade, with layered off-kilter vocals over tempo-flexible percussion and minimal jazz bass.

Apple sings in her alternating gorgeous and discordant vocals about desire and heartbreak, abuse and survival, petty jealousy and dignity. “I spread like strawberries/I climb like peas and beans” she yells on “Heavy Balloon” with her grit-your-teeth triumph that beats the innumerable self-empowerment pop songs that play on repeat at the drug store (Fiona Apple offers the actual roar that Katy Perry claims you are going to hear). On “Under the Table,” Apple sings to a cruel ex:

“I'd like to buy you a pair of pillow-soled hiking boots
To help you with your climb
Or rather, to help the bodies that you step over, along your route
So they won't hurt like mine
Kick me under the table all you want
I won’t shut up / I won’t shut up”

The subject matter can be harrowing, but there are wry gems interspersed: “Check out that rack of his/Look at that row of guitar necks.” While some of Apple’s old staccato hooks show up here and there (I could do without the choruses to “Cosmonaut” and “Relay”), this album is more mature, cynical, and unpolished. The combination of lyrical surprise and gravelly, world-weary intensity is fascinating. Give it a try. She won me over.

Three tracks to listen to: Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Newspaper, Heavy Balloon
(Tipper warning: Explicit lyrics and intense themes)

Music recommendations from you

Do you have a music recommendation from the 20s? I will happily share single-paragraph guest album reviews in following issues.

Plus, as always, let me know if you have any topics you’d be interested in. This newsletter is for you!

Stuff of the issue

• Onomatopoeia: Clash

• Bird insult: Chuck-will’s-widow

• Book: Paul Ellie – The Life You Save May Be Your Own

• Highbrow takedown: “I know Weber’s book has been long and widely thought to merit respect. Try as I may, I can find no grounds for this view.” – Marilynne Robinson, 1998

• Ukulele string: C

• Song: Cadence Weapon - Conditioning

• Birding hotspot: Tuyttens Road, Agassiz, BC.

-Paul