Medieval Innovations

When last in Freiburg somewhat to my dismay I was cheerfully informed by an official that the figure on the right, seemingly a woman on a monster, was in fact Samson (the long hair for strength) subduing a lion, while the two cowled men with the two clothed monsters were telling two different “frames” from the story of Wolf Inngrim, in which a monk dresses a wolf up in human clothes and tries to educate him (there is a little book and pen) but he keeps being distracted by a nearby sheep. The sense of the Swiss as relentlessly capable, implacable, and sitting in a sort of ice fortress has been appropriated by what is now the country’s “northern rim”: cheery commercial cities such as Basel, Schaffhausen, Zurich, and indeed Bern, southern bits of the Holy Roman Empire, at best sited on steep slopes. The political chaos of the first half of the thirteenth century turned out to be a boon not just for Bern and Amsterdam but for many other individual princes and cities.

Source: www.laphamsquarterly.org