ba ba baaa ba da da bee be bop bop da doot doot doo pic.twitter.com/KWIdjLiIi5
— weird medieval guys (@WeirdMedieval) October 20, 2023
If you follow the Twitter feed Weird Medieval Guys, it might be because we profiled them last year. It has a delightful collection of odd and often nonsensical medieval art with added captions that make them even funnier. It's heavy on marginalia, the doodles made in manuscripts by bored monks, but is not limited to it. It turns out that the "guys" do not refer to the team behind the account. It's run by one woman, data scientist Olivia M. Swarthout, as a hobby. But it has become so popular that she's written a book, titled Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times.
In discussing her book with The Guardian, Swarthout compares weird recurring motifs in medieval marginalia with internet memes.
“People ask about certain motifs in medieval art – for example, there are a lot of images of rabbits committing acts of violence. And you can really only explain the persistence of something like that by assuming that it was something that started off funny but was repeated so much that it became interesting. And that’s often the basis of a meme – it’s something that is stripped of its original context.”
Swarthout goes on to give her impression of five weird medieval artworks from the book, which will be released November 2. -via Digg
Comments (0)