Still alive, honest

WHAT IS BUZZ BUZZ, BABY DON'T HURT ME

...anyway, sorry for being totally AWOL on LJ for like two weeks; I haven't even been keeping up with my flist, sadly. (So, er, if anyone's had some major life news or something, comment and let me know so I can congratulate/commiserate!)

In return, let me entertain you with a couple of the things from my latest reading! (Sorry for not locking this to my medieval filter, but it's short and I figured most of you wouldn't mind.) From Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills' The Monstrous Middle Ages (specifically Jeremy Harte's essay "Hell on Earth: Encountering Devils in the Medieval Landscape"):

Thomas of Cantimpré tells a story...of a pious virgin, who used to go alone to a church at night to observe the canonical hours. One evening, unknown to her, a body had been laid out in the church, and as she knelt in prayer a devil entered the corpse and started to climb out of the coffin. She shouted at the fiend 'Lie down, you wretch, you have no power over me!', and when that did not work, she knocked it out cold with a processional cross.

Quite feisty, as pious virgins go! Another classic:

The Dialogue on Miracles is a laborious collection, but through its sheer exhaustiveness it has come to include several stories which subvert the intended moral purpose. John of Prüm slept with a woman, as he thought, who afterwards admitted to being a devil: 'to this John, who was a strange man, replied with a strange word, which modesty forbids me to repeat, scoffing at the devil, and no whit disturbed'. No ill effects followed.

I am far too entertained by imagining what that "strange word" was; what kind of expletive do you use in return to a sexual partner who tells you "by the way, I'm a devil"? I'm sure Miss Manners would know; I should ask her.

Also this book has an entire essay on Hellmouths, it's awesome (it in fact has a close reading of the second Hellmouth picture on that Wiki page, from the Winchester Psalter).