 Genealogy of the West Saxon Kings, highlighted text: 'This Scef was Noah's son and he was born inside the ark.' From Textus Roffensis (Rochester, c.1122-3), fol. 104r, detail. Image of full page below. The copyright of these images belongs to the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral. These images are reproduced here by permission of the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral.  | Everyone knows Noah had three sons, surely? Well, not according to Anglo-Saxon royal genealogists. The Anglo-Saxon Monk investigates...Now, blessed readers, I do hope you've been keeping up with your Old Testament history. I hear some dreadful tales about folk not knowing their Malachi from their Melchizedek, but I'm quite sure that can't possibly be you, can it? Well, never mind, no one is going to call your spiritual competency into question for not knowing what I have to tell you here about Noah, that great patriarch of ark-building and Flood-surviving fame. Noah, of course, was one of the key figures of faith in the Old Testament for Anglo-Saxon Christians. And perhaps it is no surprise that his status as God's obedient servant was exploited by royal genealogists. And they did just that, manipulating the biblical story to bolster the credentials of the Wessex kings, and in doing so asserting that Noah was engaged in a little more than just animal husbandry whilst on the ark. So allow me, beloved, to bring you up to speed with the story of Noah and the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogists. |
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 Turning the pages of Textus Roffensis. Image by Christopher Monk ©2014 with permission of the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral. That unstoppable gad-about, Dr Chris Monk, is off on his travels again, only this time it's closer to home, and not the marvellous world of Buenos Aires. On Saturday June 20th he will venture into the capital of nine and tenth-century Viking culture, York city – I'm sorry, blessed readers, I cannot quite bring myself to utter its Viking name. He will be speaking at the conference, 'Researching and Representing the Early Medieval: the 2015 Richard Hall Symposium'. The program has papers on: the Lindisfarne monastery; a Vendel-period helmet in Grobin; Scandinavian female dress in Grobin; Manx Vikings; the boat grave of Scar, Orkney; representations of Merovingian queens in 19th-century France; and early medieval ships and ideas of nation. Dr Monk's paper is entitled 'Textus Roffensis: Turn the Pages of this Hidden Treasure', in which he discusses the work being done at Rochester Cathedral to make this important twelfth-century manuscript accessible to the public. (You can read an update of the project here.) If this all sounds very worthy, beloved, and you're not too afraid to wander into the deviant region of the Danelaw, then you can find out more about the conference at the JORVIK website. Dammit!
Any monk, but especially an Anglo-Saxon one, must keep his word; so please enjoy the pictures below from the world premiere of Daisy Black's 'The Bayeux Tapestry: The Stitches Speak', which was performed as a rehearsed reading last Saturday at the 50th annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. If you missed my review (may the Lord forgive you), you can catch up with it here. All images courtesy of William the Bastard, aka Patricia Bracewell.  Eminent scholars lie dead on the field of Hastings. The play employed the dramatic device of two embroiderers interacting with the scenes of the Bayeux Tapestry as they finish embroidering its text. Here, Master Embroiderer, Gale Owen-Crocker (left) and Apprentice Embroiderer, Daisy Black (the writer and director of the play, right) assess the final battle scene. A bloody mess, by all accounts.
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