A drawing of a musical lion from 14th-century France @WeirdMedieval on X
To today’s audiences, medieval art can look outright bizarre. Before the stylistic shifts that defined the Renaissance, medieval illustrations often featured flat, unrealistic figures and fantastical scenes.
“A lot of it is about showing characters, people or creatures in medieval art that jump out of the page and have their own personality,” Swarthout tells Artnet’s Min Chen. “Humor is a really big part of it. I think it’s what makes people connect with it—they want to be in on the joke.”
Explore what your medieval life would have been through a choose-your-own-adventure full of quizzes, how-to guides, diagrams and flow charts that takes you from your birth to your gruesome end, revealing your patron saint, the fate of your love life and the trials and tribulations you faced along the way.
Swarthout is a London-based data scientist. She became interested in medieval art thanks to an art history class she took while studying for her statistician’s degree. Four years ago, she started an account called Weird Medieval Guys on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“It’s been thrilling to see the interest in medieval art that my account has sparked,” she tells the Bookseller’ Lauren Brown. In the new book, “I think we’ve done a brilliant job of capturing the spirit of the original Weird Medieval Guys account while adding lots of brilliant new content for people to enjoy over and over again.”
Swarthout also has an Instagram account, a Substack newsletter and a podcast dedicated to medieval history. She hopes to debunk myths and misunderstandings surrounding the period. For instance, most of the artists drawing the “weird medieval guys” were “just people with a job to do,” she tells the Guardian’s Phil Harrison. “They weren’t imbuing their illustrations with a unique artistic spirit; they were just tradespeople.”
— weird medieval guys BOOK OUT NOW !! (@WeirdMedieval) November 10, 2023
Although the illustrations in the book are otherworldy, Swarthout manages to connect them to the present day, “noting the many parallels between medieval and modern life,” says Marianne Tatepo, publishing director of the imprint Square Peg, to the Bookseller. “From how hard wooing is, to landlord issues and the whole plague thing, we have much in common with our forebears.”
At the same time, Swarthout tries to avoid focusing too much on contemporary narratives or judgments about the images. Instead, she aims to provide new insights into everyday life during this period of history—which requires looking beyond criticisms of the art’s quality.
“People might ask why they couldn’t draw animals right or why certain things look weird, but I think that’s a reductive way of looking at it,” Swarthout tells the Guardian. “There’s so much contained in this art—and particularly in the fact that a lot of it isn’t all that well-executed or approached with the artistic precision that we’re familiar with—that actually tells us so much about medieval life.”
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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
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