Book of the Day: "The Suffering Middle Ages" - bizarre drawings from ancient manuscripts with commentaries by historians

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Dive into the amazing world of art from the authors of memes about knights, dragons and strange hares.

“The Suffering Middle Ages” is a real phenomenon in modern book publishing. First, the publishing house "AST" itself offered the authors to compile it, which is rare. More often it is the other way around: writers push the doorstep, persuading to release their work. Secondly, even before the book was published, the number of pre-orders exceeded 5,000. The first black-and-white edition was printed in early 2018 and instantly sold out. In January 2019, a deluxe edition was released with color illustrations and a new cover.

The Suffering Middle Ages began as a small one for students of history, who posted drawings from medieval books, supplying them with funny captions. Yuri Saprykin, one of the founders of the group, describes it:

The essence of what we do is to capture and show a funny connection between a medieval scene and what is happening in the lives of modern people. Or simply with the help of a signature to make this scene absurd and comical.

The relevance of the topics raised and the humor that was unlike anything began to attract a variety of subscribers. Now the public has about half a million of them. They are the main distributors of jokes about knights, their caring mothers, dragons destroying the most intimate moments, and strange medieval beasts.

Nevertheless, the founders of the public approached the compilation of the book seriously and attracted historians Sergei Zotov and Mikhail Maizuls, as well as Dilshat Harman, a specialist in Western European art.

The result is a unique encyclopedia of Christian iconography with a huge number of illustrations and comments to it. The authors have included not only historical references, but also modern finds in this area. The Middle Ages in their version appears to the reader from an unexpected side: it turns out that the monks not only prayed and suffered all day. A sense of humor was no stranger to them. Even in the most sacred books, you can stumble upon ambiguous drawings: for example, images of a centaur with a face instead of buttocks or a woman in bed with a half-reptilian half-bull.

That which to the modern reader may seem strange, ugly, and simply disrespectful to Christian relics, was stored in the archives at that time and was guarded.

Strange body parts in the most unexpected places, genitals enlarged to absurd sizes and trees with fruits in the form of penises are just a small part of what awaits the reader on the pages of this book.

It has three thematic sections. The first, "Bestial," shows strange, animal-like monsters and people with animal attributes such as horns and tails. The second, "Human", is dedicated to Jesus, his family and his different hypostases: Jesus the carpenter, Jesus the doctor, Jesus the man. The last section, "Divine", predictably introduces the religious side of art: hell, heaven, devils, saints and the Apocalypse.

The authors pay special attention to detail and symbolism. For example, they explain why in the margins near a painting depicting a Roman soldier who chops off the head of St. Paul, an unnamed monk drew a similar warrior, only now a hare is his victim. The explanation for the picture indicates that these animals were associated with cowardice and duality of nature - creatures that do not have firmness in thoughts and actions. In another picture, the phalluses growing on a tree, which the nuns collect, refer to the sinful fruit that Eve ate.

Considering that there are not very many modern books on medieval art, this is a historical and cultural event that cannot be passed by. It is expected that in 2018 the book received the prestigious Enlightener Prize in the Humanities category.