Throw some unicorn on the grill

The British Library has discovered a long-lost medieval cookbook. The highlight? Roasted unicorn.

After recipes for herring, tripe and codswallop (fish stew, a popular dish in the Middle Ages) comes that beginning "Taketh one unicorne". The recipe calls for the beast to be marinaded in cloves and garlic, and then roasted on a griddle. The cookbook's compiler, doubtless Geoffrey Fule himself, added pictures in its margins, depicting the unicorn being prepared and then served.

This is so f-ed up but I can't stop laughing. More illuminations after the jump. 

A Meditation on Medieval Marketing

Over at the Harvard Business Review blog (!) Grant McCracken muses on the marketing secrets of the middle ages (via Boing Boing):

The medieval world took for granted that the universe was filled with secret messages, placed there by God and the correspondences on which the world was built. What did not come from God or nature was made by man in the form of emblems, icons, and insignia insinuated into public life. The home of Sir Francis Bacon was covered with arcana. Only people with a keen eye and a university education could make sense of it.
By the 20th century, all of this was stripped out by the modernist impulse that said form should be about manifest function, not secret meaning. This world was rendered perfectly clear, rational, and transparent. No decoding necessary. Consider Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building. Or Charles and Ray Eames' lounge chair. What you saw was what you got.
Marketing was created in this moment. And the idea was complete transparency. Marketing came to stand for big, bold, simple messages, fired repeatedly at a mass target. "Keep it simple, stupid" was the order of the day. This was a world of absolute clarity and shameless repetition. How things change. The 21st century loves a puzzle. We have the skill and the patience. We have quicker eyes. No couch potatoes, we. Perhaps it's that we now live with so much noise that we are better at decoding signals. We are ready for secret messages. To judge from the rest of popular culture, we are hungry for them.

This is a take on Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world. After a while, complete simplicity starts to look like idiocy. For some reason this makes me think: were the semiotics of the hipster moment - the emphasis on exclusivity, in-jokes, and irony, symbolized by the elevation of banal products like Pabst Blue Ribbon beer - an attempt to re-enchant this world of spare, obvious, distinctly un-magical consumer products?

The Staffordshire Hoard Revealed

The hoard was revealed this morning, and it's a doozy: over 1,500 items, 5 kg of gold, and 2.5 kg of silver. Metal detectorist Tony Herbert called in experts after finding the first 500 pieces, and archaeologists uncovered the rest. They suspect there may be more yet buried. The location of the find, of course, is being kept fairly tightly guarded.

The BBC article is here, along with a photo gallery. A Flickr page has over 600 photos for you serious gold geeks out there. It's stunning stuff.

Conservator's comments here and video of the excavation here, behind short ads. (BBC won't allow embedding until October.) They apparently haven't cleaned many of the objects yet, which you can see in the photographs.

You can't highlight a find like this without also talking about the UK's Portable Antiquities Scheme. The PAS is a system of voluntary reporting of archaeological finds - instead of fighting the hobbyists and metal detectorists, the government decided to recruit them to report what they found, and where. Over 140,000 objects have been recorded so far (you can see some especially interesting ones here). The project is administered by the British Museum and was fully funded in 2006.

Unlike many countries, English common law allows the finder to keep archaeological objects. What the PAS does is encourage finders to record the provenance of objects and make information about them available to the public. It has helped promote education about and public involvement in archaeology on a wide scale. Read about the history of the project here.

Finds like the Staffordshire Hoard are governed by the Treasure Act 1996, which is the exception to the common law: it requires finders of gold and silver artifacts over 300 years old to report them to the government within 14 days. Local or national museums can take possession of the objects, but they have to pay the landowner and/or discoverer the market rate for the finds.

The Hoard was declared "treasure" today by the Staffordshire Coroner, which everyone expected: the declaration was needed for the British Museum to keep the objects. Tony Herbert and the unnamed landowner, however, will split the reward for the treasure and are likely to become very rich men.