(no subject)

There's a really nice image of Nicholas of Bari at the National Gallery of Victoria (15th century? I forget). He has a beard and is dressed in red. Of course I pointed him out and said "Look, there's Santa Claus." Also of course I talked about pickled children and got very enthusiastic about travelling bones.

Mostly, today, though, I have been very well behaved. It's sad, isn't it? I'm saving up my evil for Conflux. That means I'm allowed only medi-evil this week. Except tomorrow, which is all about food.

I was going to apologise for being cheerful, but I have decided to be recalcitrantly cheerful instead. It's very hard not to be cheerful in the face of Medieval art, especially when there are lots of saints depicted and any number of lurid stories involved.

One day, I sadly fear, I might write a novel using the tales of saints as part of the worldbuilding (as opposed to the cosmology that incorporates the possibility of saints, which is how I did the mechanics of the ghost novel, which may take a few more months, but is still happening). This makes me realise why I mostly keep my Medievalist self away from my fantasy-writing self. The saints I like to talk about are sad sods or martyrs or frauds or have a touch of ... well, things like pickled children.

I've already snuck Eulalia into something. Eulalia might have been a pretty young thing (or so the poem says), but she was also a twerp: fortunately it wasn't her personality I snuck into The Art of Effective Dreaming. Still, maybe the Medievalist-self isn't as well-contained as I thought.

Now you must excuse me. I need to ponder the relationship between 15th century Jewish fairies and St Alexis.