Major Acid's E-Rag
What Else Is There?
Volume 1, Number 6
Medieval History Magazine
(Is That a Lance in Your Pants or Are You Joust Happy to See Me?)
The film A Knight�s Tale has been making the rounds on cable TV of late. I first ran across a copy of the film on video disc in a souk in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. For 30 riyals, about $8 Canadian, if I recall the exchange rate at the time, I took a copy to my apartment and settled in for the night. The film had been released in theatres in the western world perhaps only two weeks before. Can you say bootleg?
In properly legal stores, the film might have been censored, but in the bootleg world, it was complete. And popular. Even in the Middle East, where time is curiously warped, where the middle ages can seem as yesterday, this tale of knights, those first colonial invaders, found a rapt audience, and not one restricted to bored ex-pats.
The appeal of grown men trying to skewer each other with long pointy lances while riding flat out on thundering warriors� horses still holds us all in thrall, and the editors and marketers of Medieval History Magazine are fully aware of this. In fact, they chose to center their Issue 1 (actually their second � more about that later) around knights and jousting, including an infuriating article about one Ulrich Von Liechtenstein, Heath Ledger�s nom de combat in A Knight�s Tale.
If we are to believe Kelly DeVries, a professor of history at Loyola College, there was a real Ulrich. And Ulrich ran off at the pen, writing down a fanciful history of himself as a knight. Ulrich lived in a peculiar part of 13th century Europe, however: there wasn�t much in the way of wars going on close by. Ulrich and other knight wannabes, then, took to tournaments and to jousting. DeVries tells his story, which involves lopping off a finger, cross-dressing, jousting all comers, and generally being a knightly layabout, only to end the whole article with this:
�Was all this true? Did Ulrich von Liechtenstein really take part in all of the tournaments he said he did, sometimes dressed as Venus and sometimes calling himself Arthur? Do we really care? After all, half the fun of having a cinematic hero, in this case the real Ulrich von Liechtenstein, is not knowing if his adventures are real or not.�
To which I say, bull. I didn�t wade through six pages of highly dubious storytelling to be told that reality doesn�t matter. Still, that paragraph does echo the opening of Medieval History Magazine, the editorial note by Dr. Philip Shaw, Editor.
The editor�s column is on the inside of the front cover, apparently to avoid aggravating the reader with unnecessary advertising, and it starts with this off-putting sentence: �As an Anglo-Saxonist, I was tempted to open the very first issue of Medieval History Magazine with a resounding �hwaet!��
Say hwaet? I, it appears, am not an Anglo-Saxonist despite my very British background. I can live with that, but I should have been warned by Shaw�s further comments about the way medieval readers (who would have been few and far between, but that�s nitpicking) would have been confused by our modern insistence on the difference between history and fiction. Thus, the infuriating Ulrich piece.
The editing is suspect, and not just for the insider nods and winks, which include a eulogy of sorts for one Ewart Oakeshott. (Ewart was, it seems, an Anglo-Saxonist.) The first major piece tells the reader the evolution of the joust, and goes to some pains to point out that a tournament was very distinct thing from a joust. The distinction is explained and very reasonable, and the casual reader will happily go along with it. However, the estimable Dr Shaw apparently didn�t read the article. Had he done so, as editor, he would have politely requested some small changes in the very next article (the Ulrich article) which claims that the Heath Ledger version of Ulrich was a squire turned �tournament� champion.
Editing is a lost art, it seems, and there are other oddities throughout the first issue of Medieval History Magazine. Yet, for all my quibbles, I enjoyed the read. The articles are generally light, which is important for a non-Anglo-Saxonist like me. They go well beyond jousts (and tournaments) and include a short �day in the life� type piece about a sailor from the 15th century, a much longer piece about how to �read� a medieval church, and others ranging from Jews in Spain to papal assassinations to Viking wrestling.
The medieval period was a busy one, and a long one. Despite the range of articles, there isn�t any danger of using up all the good bits too soon. As long as all those Anglo-Saxonists out there don�t suddenly go the way of Ewart Oakeshott, there should be a full and diverse Issue 2 sometime soon. (This is not necessarily a sure thing � apparently many Anglo-Saxonists get together for modern day jousts, at which point they attempt to skewer each other with long pointy lances, which seems a dubious way to spend an afternoon to me.)
Unfortunately, I don�t know how soon. Issue 1 is dated September 2003, which means it has been on the shelves for a while now, and it includes a lot of medieval themed event announcements, almost all of which are (were) summer events. Nowhere, however, does it tell the reader whether the magazine is a quarterly, or an annual, or what.
It isn�t a one-off, piece though. Issue 1 is actually the second issue. Apparently there was a �test� issue, marketed as Issue 0, so the magazine is actually two issues old. I never saw Issue 0, and I still, I don�t know the publication frequency, about which I�m tempted to say to Dr Shaw the Editor, �What the hwaet are you doing?"
Medieval History Magazine sells for $8.50 Canadian
