I’m posting this as a continuation for a dead thread I found on merkins.
I’ve recently been working on a decoding of the Lady of the Unicorn Tapestries. They have proven to be based on the secret courtship correspondence between Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry of Anjou in the mid-12th century. They involve a lot of punistry including multiple levels of the text - one of which is lewd.
It appears that Eleanor had adopted the oriental practice of depiliation to avoid the lice infestations which plagued locals and crusaders alike in the Holy Lands. There is a plethora of references to her merkin in the tapestries. One of the most interesting involves the possible derivation of the name from the Flemish for sea-mouse - a little marine worm which it resembles. To view this and the full translation, please visit my document:
Dude, you’ve got to change the font. I would really like to read this stuff to find out what you’re talking about, but the font hurts my eyes. Can you change it and let us know somehow?
It is my belief that, since Eleanor was still married to the King of France at the time, they had to be quite circumspect. The tapestry designs were probably never actually meant to be made up into a finished piece. There is even a suggestion in the tapestries as to who was her courier and, based on his famous descendant, the troubadour Francois Villon’s likely involvement in passing the designs on to an appropriate patron, Rene the Good of Anjou, who actually had the designs made up.
II
P.S. I’m working on an alternative font version. This one’s nice if you’ve got the font - should be there for MS Office users. If you’re having probs, meantime, you could always save it and edit the font yourselves.
Ironically enough, when this was first posted I had just returned from the eye doctor and my eyes were all dilated; I had my screen set to 800x480 so the writing would be big enough for me to read. I opened that link and thought, “Cool. Something I can read without having to put noseprints on the screen.”
Today I can read it from 20 feet away, but my mouse doesn’t reach that far.
The font in the document is “Parchment, cursive”. It shows up on my system as 24pt Old English Text MT. Still a pain to read. If someone more persistent than me really wants to wade through the text, in IE go to tools/options, click on the “accessibility” button, and check “ignore font sizes” and “ignore font styles”.
The 300-year gap is implausibly long. Arguing that only the designs date from the twelfth century just won’t do. Everything about the way in which the subjects are depicted screams late-fifteenth/early-sixteenth century. That was why it was possible for art historians to estimate their date, even before other evidence was found supporting a date circa 1500. To say nothing of the fact that tapestries of that sort and on that scale probably didn’t exist in the twelfth century. (The Bayeux ‘Tapestry’ is, of course, an embroidery.) Nor, once large-scale tapestry manufacturing did develop in the thirteenth century, did people bother to keep the preparatory designs, whether or not they had been used. In fact, until the sixteenth century, no one in France was much interested in keeping preparatory designs of any sort.
Then there is the fact that you fail to mention the one detail about the designs that has been pinned down, which is that the armorial bearings are those of Jean le Viste. That discovery neatly confirmed the circa-1500 date. What little is known about le Viste’s career hardly supports a connection with René of Anjou.
Firstly, let me say that as far as I am aware, the Le Viste cover story may well have involved a real person of that name or of that assumed identity. I am fairly certain that the intended meaning of the little pavillion flag on top of the tent in ‘le Desir’ makes this into ‘la dame en tente a Sion’. The Priory arms being, as described, a cilice lying across a blood-filled sangreal basin.
It is important to understand that the discovery of unusually sophisticated tapestry designs from the mid-12th century as a ‘first’ which were then developed into the finished tapestries from the late 15th might be important but it is certainly not precluded by the existence of more primitive works completed at that earlier time. It is entirely possible that the designs were substantially enhanced whilst rigidly preserving the core story elements - as we can see with the final tapestry design taken for the hunt of the unicorn series.
I have been as sceptical as anyone about the dating of this work, but I’m pretty sure that the references to French popes and specifically Calixtus and the abbey of St Lo place this exchange firmly in Henry’s and Eleanor’s time. The cultural richness of the Cathar, Jewish, Muslim and Christian mixture which was such a threat to the Roman church was actively attacked by them both in terms of all physical traces and in all records in history. The Albigensian Crusade was as much a burning of the books as anything Adolf Hitler might have intended.
I failed to mention the most obvious pointer to Eleanor - the above text on the tent, A mon seul desir. Actually, closer scrutiny reveals a P at the end - Plantagenet?
I interpret the text as an anagram - actually an incomplete one - ‘Eleanor dispu[te] / dis pu[-te] / [-re] M.’ Eleanor disputes Monsieur. In this case, the ‘dispute’ is a Languedoc punning game called ‘jeu de chats’ - indicating the medium of the secret exchanges. I believe the anagram was quite deliberately left incomplete so that it, too, could be played with. Hence ‘Eleanor calls herself slut, Monsieur’ and ‘Eleanor calls herself pure, Monsieur’ - i.e. a disavowal of the coomon slurs on her character.
However, if we capitalise the P, as it would be for the Plantagenet initial, we have the important Cathar title Pure. She is actually making a secret - very secret - confession of being a Cathar queen!
The problem with any argument relying on anagrams is that they prove absolutely nothing. A random selection of letters can always, with sufficient ingenuity, be rearranged to produce a message of some sort. Your supposed anagram doesn’t even use all the letters and needs additional letters to be added to make sense. This is exactly the same method that ‘proved’ that Lewis Carroll must have been Jack the Ripper. At least Lewis Carroll lived in the right century.
Which only goes to show that you’re very easily convinced. Those ‘references’ are just further examples of anagrams and puns (often anachronistic) that almost certainly exist only in your imagination. You seem to have no sense of just how easy it is to invent such readings where there are none. It’s therefore not a great surprise that you evidently think that the Prieuré de Sion was real and not a hoax made up in the mid-1950s.
This song was deliberately chosen by the leaders of the Revolution because it had been composed by Darnell de Valois, Duc d’Alencon, and in some opinions the rightful king. He had been attempting a coup d’etat which had been ruthlessly prevented thanks to the decoders at St Sulpice. Since his death, only his daughter remained to assert her claims, which were constantly blocked. In revenge, she had engineered the Affair of the Necklace which brought the court and Marie Antoinette into widespread disrepute. Eventually probably murdered in exile in England, Darnell’s daughter became a martyr of the people. The choice of this song was thus very much an in-your-face attack on the Royal family for its sins of the recent past.
Those who choose to believe that the Sion Priory revelations are an invention are probably falling into the very trap that the Priory itself sets. The concept of plausible deniability is not new.
As for the anagram being random, I think you’ll find that the identity of the initiator of a love letter is often withheld and to be guessed at - here Eleanore (yes, sorry, I left out the extra ‘e’) becomes the key to the decoding of the anagram. Of course, one or two items pointing to a particular result might be pure chance. I have found six lots of four mutually consistent subtexts.
As for the apparently more advanced culture demonstrated by the tapestries, I can only point out that cultures do not always advance - compare our own with the high society artistry of the 18th century - nor are they usually monocultures. It is a very bold antiquarian who claims to know all there is to know about any age of the past simply based on what is currently unearthed about it.
No, this bullshit should not be moved elsewhere. It should be allowed to stand here as imperishable evidence of Ian_Ison’s limitless stupidity. Remember, this stuff gets archived for the amusement of future generations of Dopers.