Medieval History

It's possible that Swarthout's creations have shown in your feeds even if you don't follow the account: Many of the bizarre, adorable, and often ridiculous pictures from manuscripts dating from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries—which feature cheerful skeletons and sad angels, oddly drawn animals, and everyday activities of normal people—have gained popularity as memes when paired with her zeitgeisty narration. Unusual floating infants, a knight stabbing himself and captioning it, a cunning cat with a severed penis in its jaws, and two guys engaging in quite suggestive swordplay are all included.


History is repetitive.
With the same current humor, Swarthout navigates Medieval life in her new illustrated book and helps readers understand Medieval society as a whole from a modern perspective. What would you call yourself? Ratbald? Wulfwynn? For now, how about Guy alone?

You can find attractive Medieval singles in your area by selecting your patron saint, which is just as significant as your astrological sign. You can also learn how to identify poisonous manticore hybrids in the wild (he likes silly hats) and how to resolve conflicts with trial-by-combat advice (if a man and a woman are fighting, the man needs to be chest-deep in a hole to level the playing field).

In a phone conversation with CNN, Swarthout stated, "A lot of the art being made (in the Medieval era) was people drawing on things from their life and experiences... that were part of popular culture." The book's emphasis on life in general and the medieval times felt like a pretty effective method to bring all of those disparate issues together.

She claimed to be startled by her Twitter account's quick growth in popularity. Swarthout studied art history as an undergraduate but is now a freshly graduated statistician. "It still feels very surreal, especially in the beginning," the woman remarked.

While there are plenty of art history humor accounts on Twitter and Instagram, Swarthout's offerings are now far more extensive, including a podcast and Substack for those who want to go deeper into the pieces of art she chooses to feature on social media.

"I think there's a lot of intrinsic humor, but I didn't really intend for it to be a meme account," she stated. "A lot of the stuff is amusing on its own,"

Medieval art is especially, well, strange for a reason. The majority of other historical eras' surviving paintings and sculptures were created by professional artists, while the illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages were frequently written by tradesmen and monks, who weren't always adhering to the time's artistic norms.

According to Swarthout, "it's almost like a look at everyday people's inner lives, which isn't something that you get in a lot of art history."

Perhaps the most significant difference between our time and the Middle Ages is that, for example, how could a 9th-century peasant farmer understand a popular art history meme on Twitter? But each image's comedy flattens time a little bit. Swarthout imagines that some of the pictures, such as a little one that shows a cat making butter, would have delighted people centuries ago in a similar way.

She stated, "You can look at it and imagine that it was just as cute and funny back then." "Most of those kinds of pictures are a great way to establish a connection with people who lived hundreds of years ago."