Teacher’s Practicum Week #5 Blog

There’s this TED-Ed animated lesson by Michelle Brown titled “What is a butt tuba and why is it in medieval art?”, yet it immediately goes on to describe various common oddities seen in medieval art. The objectives of this particular lesson include addressing what each visual detail that sticks out in the works of art symbolizes in accordance with the norms of society at the time they were made. The lesson starts with a written quote by an anonymous monk saying “Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.”, then goes on to reveal the illustrations to have a second meaning behind them that is just as important as whatever’s written on the respective materials that they’re found in. According to the lesson, the illustrations are intended to reinforce the religious message that their source materials are trying to convey, which makes a great deal of sense considering that the majority of authors during that time consisted of monks and nuns. It should be noted that in the Middle Ages, religion and law played such an inseparable role in daily society that authors and scribes found it necessary for each illustration established to bear a double meaning as to remind people what was tolerable or intolerable, both socially and religiously. That aside, the lesson shows three examples: a rabbit working an organ, a knight versus a giant snail, and a naked guy sticking a trumpet in his butt, hence the eponymous title of this lesson. Brown’s mention of the butt tuba in his lesson’s title can be explained with the notion that the image of the naked guy with the trumped sticking out his butt can be readily pointed out as the most obscene illustration ever made in the Middle Ages, yet Brown recognizes that it was drawn for some reasonable purpose, which is why he brings up “butt tuba” as part of the lesson’s title to get the audience riled up as to find out why in the world something like that would ever be drawn in the first place. Brown states in the lesson that the butt tuba represents disapproval or irony of a certain action in the text that it’s placed alongside; this clearly reinforces the notion that the butt tuba, like all the other medieval illustrations, possesses a double meaning behind its very appearance for itself as well as for whatever text it ends up getting placed right next to.

The lesson goes on to state that most of the manuscripts were copies of religious and classic works, just with varying illustrations. In one instance, it briefly mentions the segment in the “Smithfield Decretals” that details the church’s laws and punishments but then reveals the margins to show a fox being hanged by a party of geese, which may represent the people’s urge to overthrow their oppressors. This suggests that whoever established that particular illustration within the margins of the Decretals may have recognized what the public was dealing with and put it there on purpose to spread the message to other fellow readers in the most discreet manner possible. The lesson mentions more examples of illustrations that fall in a very similar vein to what the hanged fox illustration implies, being that their respective drawers had their own interpretation about what they were supposed to document and couldn’t help but address their own piece of mind to the ones reading whatever they ended up writing in the process. Again, this is a reinforcement of how the illustrations serve a double meaning, seeing as how they are an offshoot of their respective makers’ piece of mind and at the same time, they also a bear a political or religious meaning in general as according to the source material they hail from; it is at this particular point that Brown does an intricate job in maintaining that the illustrations have a double meaning no matter how they’re viewed. The lesson ends by noting that the practice with those illustrations spanned over a millennium, and that the manuscripts served a multitude of purposes, ranging from private prayer aids to protective charms for war. This exemplifies the notion that “We often find expressions, characteristic traits, and methods passed from one generation to the next… whether we are aware of it or not,” as Matthew O. Richardson puts it in Peer Observation: Learning From One Another. Due to the frequent mentions of religion and social norms in medieval society in lieu with what certain images represented, the central focus of Brown’s lesson is clearly for the audience to recognize that the butt tuba and its fellow medieval illustrations each serve a wider multitude of purposes than their readers may have assumed all this time.