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
