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a-wife-punished
AOTK Summer 2010 Contest entry.
A bit of history, for those who don't know their Crusades: Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse, was one of the de facto leaders of the First Crusade (1096-1099), at least initially. After the long siege of Antioch (late 1097-1098), crusader moral was very low. Then, one soldier (Peter Bartholomew) claimed that he had a vision that the Holy Lance was buried in Antioch. It was then dug up. Well, it came to be that Raymond got a hold of the thing, and as crusaders like to do, he waved it about a lot and thought he was hot shit. The only problem was that as time went by, fewer and fewer people believed that this lance was actually the Holy one, for lack of any good evidence. No small amount of derision was brought upon Raymond by this fact. Here, we are pretending that Raymond's young wife Elvira (all of 16 or 17 years old at the time, and one of the first crusading noblewomen) has also expressed some doubt about the Holiness of this particular lance.
The style of this piece is an illuminated manuscript. I borrowed liberally from various French and English manuscripts from the 12th thru the 14th century, for layout, font, style, etc. Note that Raymond is holding a rather strange pose as an attempt to capture the dynamic-yet-stilted style of these type of pieces. Text is in fairly standard gothic book hand.
The Bible verses on the sides are in late Latin from the Vulgate Bible, and are:
Prov 22:15: "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, and the rod of correction shall drive it away."
Prov 23:14: "Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell."
The main text is in classical latin, and reads:
"And Raymond smacked his wife Elvira because she doubted the Power of the holy lance; [he] heavily beat Elvira on her naked bottom with the holy thing very long and very hard. At last, she did not doubt the power and might of the lance."
Thanks VERY MUCH to Marc (AOTK member doutdes) for the latin translation. If anyone ever needs any latin help, this is the man to talk to. 
EDIT: a few more notes for the interested. One. I did in fact invent the idea of the strips on the side with the proverbial text. Never seen it historically, tho I haven't looked hard. Two. The red lines under the text is not a mistake. These are seen commonly enough. Three. So much gold! Whomever wrote this book must have really liked this page, as gold was not cheap and was hard to work with. Four. I think I may have invented a few of the less common gothic letters when I wasn't at the computer... apologies.
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forks
Artist
Registered: March 2010
Location: USA
Posts: 1,046
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Date: Fri July 23, 2010
Views: 4,275
Tags: 8
Filesize: 376.6kb
Dimensions: 799 x 1050
Keywords: awifepunished
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