As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from the thirteenth century. Indeed, even many specialists in the field would hesitate to take on the challenge of such a manuscript in full. But what if we told you it comes with illustrations of demons running amok, knights battling snails, killer rabbits and other animals taking their revenge on humanity, a dead ringer for Yoda, and the penitent harlot Thäis?
These are just a few of the characters that grace the pages of the Smithfield Decretals, the most visually notable of all extant copies of the Decretales of Pope Gregory IX. When it was originally published as an already-illuminated manuscript in the 1230s, writes Spencer McDaniel at Tales of Times Forgotten, “the margins of the text were deliberately left blank by the original French scribes so that future owners of the text could add their own notes and annotations.” Thus “the manuscript would have originally had a lot of blank space in it, especially in the margins.”
“At some point before around 1340, however, the Smithfield Decretals fell into the possession of someone in eastern England, probably in London, who paid a group of illustrators to add even more extensive illustrations to the text.”
They “drew elaborate borders and illustrations on every page of the manuscript, nearly completely filling up all the margins,” adhering to the contemporary “trend among manuscript illustrators in eastern England for drawing ‘drolleries,’ which are bizarre, absurd, and humorous marginal illustrations.”
Bearing no direct relation to the text of the Decretals, some of these elaborate works of fourteenth-century marginalia appear to tell stories of their own. “These tales have analogues in a dizzying variety of textual and visual sources, including the bible, hagiography, romance, preachers’ exempla, and fabliau” (a humorous and risqué form of early French poetry), writes Alixe Bovey at the British Library’s medieval manuscripts blog. “Some of the narratives have no surviving literary analogues; others constitute isolated visual renditions of once-popular tales.”
If you view the Smithfield Decretals’ illustrations here or in the British Library’s digitization at the Internet Archive, you’ll also see the medieval satirical impulse at work. Take the aforementioned, by now much-circulated “Yoda,” who, as McDaniel writes, “is probably supposed to be a representation of the Devil as a professor of canon law.” It seems that “legal scholars in Middle Ages had a similar reputation to lawyers today; they were seen as slimy, dishonest, and more interested in personal gain than in justice.” They might have been good for a cryptic turn of phrase, but those in need of benevolently dispensed wisdom would have done better to ask elsewhere.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, the “book trade declined with the educated elite that had supported it. The copying of secular texts slowed, and finally ceased. The books in Roman libraries, public and private, crumbled on their shelves. Only a small contingent of survivors found their way into monasteries.” As went the reading culture of the empire, so went the empire itself.
Some may be tempted to draw parallels with certain countries in existence today. But what may be more surprising is the extent of Roman reading at its height. Though only about one in ten Romans could read, Ryan explains, “the Roman elite defined themselves by a sophisticated literary education, and filled their cities with texts.”
Those included the Acta Diurna, a kind of proto-newspaper carved into stone or metal and displayed in public places. But from the reign of Augustus onward, “the city of Rome boasted an impressive array of public libraries,” filled with texts written on papyrus scrolls, and later — especially in the third and fourth centuries — on codices, whose format closely resembles books as we know them today.
Rome even had tabernae librariae, which we’d recognize as bookstores, whose techniques included painting the titles of bestsellers on their exterior columns. Some of them also published the books they sold, setting an early example of what we’d call “vertical integration.” Roman readers of the first century would all have had at least some familiarity with Martial’s Epigrams, but even such a big contemporary hit would have been outsold by a classic like the Aeneid, “the one book that any family with a library owned.” With 99 percent of its literature lost to us, we’re unlikely ever to determine if, like modern-day America, ancient Rome was really saturated with less-respectable works, its own equivalents of self help, business memoir, and genre fiction. Who knows? Perhaps Rome, too, had romantasy.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all time, Homer’s Iliad has proven surprisingly resistant to adaptation. However much inspiration it has provided to modern-day novelists working in a variety of different traditions, it’s translated somewhat less powerfully to visual media. Perhaps people still watch Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, the very loose, Brad Pitt-starring cinematic Iliad adaptation from 2004. But chances are, a century or two from now, humanity on the whole will still be more impressed by the 52 illustrations of the Ambrosian Iliad, which was made in Constantinople or Alexandria around the turn of the sixth century.
As noted at HistoryofInformation.com, “along with the Vergilius Vaticanus [previously featured on Open Culture] and the Vergilius Romanus, [the Ambrosian Iliad] is one of only three illustrated manuscripts of classical literature that survived from antiquity.” It’s also the only ancient manuscript that depicts scenes from the Iliad. Its illustrations, which “show the names of places and characters,” offer “an insight into early manuscript illumination.” They “show a considerable diversity of compositional schemes, from single combat to complex battle scenes,” as Kurt Weitzmann writes in Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination. “This indicates that, by that time, Iliad illustration had passed through various stages of development and thus had a long history behind it.”
Above, you can see the Ambrosian Iliad’s illustrations of the capture of Dolon (top), Achilles sacrificing to Zeus for Patroclus’ safe return (middle), and Hector killing Patroclus as Automedon escapes (bottom). You can find more scans at the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database, along with other Iliad-related artifacts. Some of the later artistic renditions of Homer in that collection date from the fifteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and even the nineteenth centuries, each interpreting these age-old poems for their own time. Indeed, the Iliad and Odyssey have proven enduringly resonant for the better part of three millennia, and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t continue to find new artistic forms for just as long to come. But there’s something especially powerful about seeing Homer rendered by artists who, though they may have come centuries and centuries after the blind poet himself, knew full well what it was to live in antiquity.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Nobody opens a Stephen King novel expecting to see a reflection of the real world. Then again, as those who get hooked on his books can attest, never is his work ever wholly detached from reality. Time and time again, he delivers lurid visions of the macabre, grotesque, and bizarre, but they always work most powerfully when he weaves them into the coarse fabric of ordinary, makeshift, down-at-the-heels America. Though long rich and famous, King hasn’t lost his understanding of a certain downtrodden stratum of society, or at least one that regards itself as downtrodden — the very demographic, in other words, often blamed for the rise of Donald Trump.
“I started thinking Donald Trump might win the presidency in September of 2016,” King writes in a Guardian piece from Trump’s first presidential term. “By the end of October, I was almost sure.” For most of that year, he’d sensed “a feeling that people were both frightened of the status quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They wanted to upset the motherfucker, and would worry about picking up those spilled apples later. Or just leave them to rot.” They “didn’t just want change; they wanted a man on horseback. Trump filled the bill. I had written about such men before.”
King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”
Further Stillson-Trump parallels are examined in the NowThis interview clip at the top of the post. “I was sort of convinced that it was possible that a politician would arise who was so outside the mainstream and so willing to say anything that he would capture the imaginations of the American people.” Read now, Stillson’s demagogical rhetoric — describing himself as “a real mover and shaker,” promising to “throw the bums out” of Washington — sounds rather mild compared to what Trump says at his own rallies. Perhaps King himself does have a touch of Johnny Smith-like prescience. Or perhaps he suspects, on some level, that Trump isn’t so much the disease as the symptom, a manifestation of a much deeper and longer-festering condition of the American soul. Now there’s a frightening notion.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
“How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation.
While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore of Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be.
Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important.
It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of 1,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Clubends with a 33-page long whopper with 13,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect.
But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all 1,288 words of it, below.
Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying ‘Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power has been a popular book since its first publication over a quarter-century ago. Judging by the discussion that continues among its fervent (and often proselytizing) fans, it’s easy to forget that its title isn’t How to Become Powerful. Granted, it may sometimes get filed in the self-help section, and certain of the laws it contains — “Never outshine the master,” “Always say less than necessary,” “Enter action with boldness” — read like straightforward recommendations. Yet like Machiavelli, one of the book’s many historical sources, it’s much more interesting to read as a study of power itself.
In the video above from Greene’s official YouTube channel, you can hear all 48 laws accompanied by brief explanations in less than 30 minutes. Some of them may give you pause: are “Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit,” “Pose as a friend, work as a spy,” and “Crush your enemy totally” really meant to be taken straightforwardly?
Perhaps they both are and aren’t. Descriptive of the ways in which individuals have accrued power over the course of human history (images of whom provide visual accompaniment), they can also be metaphorically transposed into a variety of personal and professional situations without turning you into some kind of evil mastermind.
When The 48 Laws of Power came out in 1999, we didn’t live on the internet in the way we do now. Re-read today, its laws apply with an uncanny aptness to a social-mediated world in which we’ve all become public personalities online. We may not always say less than necessary, but we do know how important it can be to “court attention at all costs.” Some of us “cultivate an air of unpredictability”; others “play to people’s fantasies,” in some cases going as far as to “create a cult-like following.” The most adept put in work to “create compelling spectacles” in accordance with “the art of timing,” taking care to “never appear too perfect.” Though Machiavelli himself would understand practically nothing about our technology, he would surely understand our world.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Brian Eno was thinking about the purpose of art a decade ago, as evidenced by his 2015 John Peel Lecture (previously featured here on Open Culture). But he was also thinking about it three decades ago, as evidenced by A Year with Swollen Appendices, his diary of the year 1995 published by Faber & Faber. This year, that same house is bringing out What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, a new book on that very subject written by Eno, in collaboration with the artist and novelist Bette Adriaanse, better known as Bette A. It deals with the questions Eno lays out in the video above: “What does art do for us? Why does it exist? Why do we like art?”
These matters turn out to have preoccupied Eno “since I was a kid, really,” when he first got curious about a “biological, psychological explanation for the existence of art” — a drive not so readily followed, it seems, by young people today. Eno relates a conversation he had with an acquaintance’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who said to him, “I wanted to go to art school, actually, because I really love doing art, but my teacher said I was too bright for that, so I should go for science subjects.” He sees it as “the death of a culture, when you take the brightest young people and stop them from thinking about a huge area of human activity.”
Clearly times have changed since Eno’s youth, when art school could be a gateway to making a permanent mark on the culture. With What Art Does, Eno and Adriaanse set about creating a book that could easily be read by a bright teenager — or even her teacher — and consequently clarify that reader’s thinking about the importance of art. Eno has been discussing that subject for quite some time, and to Adriaanse fell the “thankless task” of reading through his many writings, lectures, and interviews in search of material that could be distilled into a single, pocket-sized book.
Eno clarifies that What Art Does is not an explanation of the whole of art, nor does it represent a definitive answer to the question implied by its title. It’s more important to him that the book expands the swath of human endeavor that its readers consider to be art. “Creativity is something that is born into humans,” he says, and the goal is “reawakening that, saying to people, ‘You can actually do it. Whatever it is, it’s your thing, you can do it.’ I like to say, it’s everything from Cézanne to cake decoration.” As “the place where people experiment with their feelings about things” and come to understand those feelings, art can happen anywhere, from the painter’s atelier or musician’s studio to the hair salon and the bakery: all settings, Eno’s fans would surely agree, that could benefit from the occasional Oblique Strategy.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of book illustration, particularly that from the form’s golden age—the late 18th and 19th century—before photography took over as the dominant visual medium. But while photographs largely supplanted illustrations in textbooks, magazines, and newspapers over the course of the 20th century, works of fiction, which had been routinely published in lavishly illustrated editions, suddenly became the featureless banks of words we know today. Though image-heavy graphic novels and comic books have thrived in recent decades, the illustrated literary text is a rarity indeed.
Why did this change come about? “I really don’t know,” writes Christopher Howse at The Telegraph, but he points out that the era of illustrated fiction for grown-ups ended “after the death of the big Victorian novelists,” like Dickens and Trollope. Before adult picture-books went out of style, several now-famous artists made careers as book illustrators. When we think of the big names from the period, we think of Aubrey Beardsley and Gustave Doré, both of whom we’ve covered heavily here. We tend not to think of Irish artist Harry Clarke—a relative latecomer—but we should. Of the many incredible illustrations from famous works of literature we’ve featured here, my favorite might be Clarke’s 1926 illustrations of Goethe’s Faust.
So out-there are some of his illustrations, so delightfully nightmarish and weird, one is tempted to fall back on that rather sophomoric explanation for art we find disturbing: maybe he was on drugs! Not that he’d need them to conjure up many of the images he did. His source material is bizarre enough (maybe Goethe was on drugs!). In any case, we can definitely call Clarke’s work hallucinatory, and that goes for his earlier, 1923 illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination as well, of which you can see a few choice examples here.
Dublin-born Clarke worked as a stained-glass artist as well as an illustrator, and drew his inspiration from the earlier art nouveau aesthetic of Beardsley and others, adding his own rococo flourishes to the elongated forms and decorative patterns favored by those artists. His glowering figures—including one who looks quite a bit like Poe himself, at the top—suit the feverish intensity of Poe’s world to perfection. And like Poe, Clarke’s art generally thrived in a seductively dark underworld filled with ghouls and fiends. Both of these proto-goths died young, Poe under mysterious circumstances at age 40, Clarke of tuberculosis at 42.
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