Interesting. The table of contents is rewritten in modern cursive, though I can't read everything even there.
Contents
The Hunttinge of the Hare.
A Mock Sermon.
...
From there we can flip forward to the actual content and ... yep, can't read it. Honestly the only reason I know it says "huntinge of the hare" centred at the top is because I read it in the table of contents.
I can tell it's English, but that's about all I can tell, and that only because I can read some of the words, but not all of them. :) Maybe I can send the image to GPT-4 for transcription and translation. (lol)
It's definitely English (modulo several centuries of spelling and words that have fallen away). Many words are recognizable but I can't read a whole sentence either - except maybe "But myself tho me to blame". Lots of conventions have changed: you really would need to study and practice to be able to make it through this, but not to the extent of learning a whole other language from scratch.
Here's the best I can do with the first bit, several edits later:
A letyll tale y wyll yow tell
y troye hit wyll lyke yow well
þat ye shall habe gud game ooooo
Bot were(?) it was y dar? not say
for appyr.??ly a nod? day
hit myght t?ne me to blame ooooooo
?ow take gud hede evrython(?)
how a yomon come rydyng alon
hafull fayre way he fond ooooooo
he lokud be syde hym lyght glydand
he fond a hare full fayr syttand
a pon a falow lond ooooooooo
he markyd wyll wher the fatt þ
þkyd to the town as fast as he myght go
þ way þen con he ha? ooooooo
þ fyrst mon þt he mett wt all
was a husbond hyght honkyn of þ hall
a gud mon and a twwe(?) oooooooo
...
We have letyll = little, wyll = will, troye = trust(?), hit = it, lyke = like, yow = you, habe = have, gud = good, yomon = yeoman, rydyng = riding, lokud = looked, be syde = beside, hym = him, fayr = fair, syttand = seated/sitting, etc.
I think the y with dot over is "I", while the þ with a dot is "the" or "thou" etc. I'm not entirely sure what all the abbreviations are supposed to be.
* * *
Edit: there's apparently a full transcription at http://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2010.009 though it's not easy to accurately transcribe something like this so full of abbreviations, old spellings based on old pronunciations, archaic glyphs like ſ and þ, letters like u and v which have since diverged, etc.
If you take a screen capture then paste it into google image search then select the text or translate button - it also detects the English characters, but still makes very little sense to me.
The academic paper has quite a bit more detail. The link to it in the Vice article seems to be broken, but it's available (open access!) on the journal website.
This is no surprise. There's a lot of Monty Python style in Shakespeare, and he was definitely influenced by earlier sources, such as medieval morality plays, etc.
Perhaps we should say that Monty Python draws on Shakespearean comedy, given the relative times and the fact that we know that most, if not all of the Pythons studied Shxpr.
I feel for the poor researcher that wrote "Until then, Heege’s work survives as a “vestige of medieval life lived vibrantly: the good times being as good as they ever have been, and probably ever will,” according to the study."
An intellectual was told by someone: “your beard is now coming in.” So he went to the rear-entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual asked what he was doing. Once he heard the whole story, he said: “I’m not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it’s not coming in by the other gate?”
Most of them suck by today's standards, but that one is genuinely still funny today!
As a noob asking from a place of curiosity, does “Medieval” mean anything outside of the Europe sphere of influence? Medieval evokes a certain imagery in my mind, rather than a time period. It feels weird and Eurocentric to refer to Asian countries in ~1200 as “Medieval” for example.
"Medieval" can sometimes be applied to places like China or India, but it's not used that way by historians. In general historians don't use the terms "Medieval" or "Dark Ages" much anymore, and if they do it's with qualifiers. For Europe "Post-Classical," "Early Middle Ages" or "Late Antiquity" are more often used refer to the earlier Middle Ages.
"Medieval" is certainly still used.[0] "Dark Age" is no longer used interchangeably with Medieval, however. This is because many now see the period starting from the High Middle Ages in Europe as directly leading to the modern period. Refering to the entire Medieval period as a Dark Age is to take a side in that argument.
When this came up a couple week ago, I found examples of people using "medieval Arabic", "Medieval Africa", and even more specifically "Medieval Somalia". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984909 for links.
Medieval refers to a specific European time period, I’m not sure what you expected.
> Minstrels were fixtures of European life in the Middle Ages, but though countless references to these entertainers exist in literature from this era, no clear records of an actual minstrel’s “repertoire,” meaning their act or set, has been identified—until now.
