| It's only a flesh wound |
[Nov. 8th, 2009|06:19 pm] |
AEMMA had its annual longsword tournament yesterday. Good times.
I spent the entire two weeks beforehand battling the Zombie Flu That Will Not Die, and not doing any sparring, so I was happy just to be able to come out and hold my own. Hopefully some video of the event will show up on the internet shortly.
We had thirteen fighters representing Toronto, Guelph and Ottawa, as well as Dale Gienow from Muskoka. The tournament was round-robin style, with bouts going to five palpable hits. (We started by playing to three hits, but switched to five to prolong the entertainment.) The only other significant rule was that hand hits weren't counted. This limited the number of bruises and smashed fingers.
Unfortunately, in my ninth match I managed to mess up my thumb anyway. ( Read more... )
All this reminds me of an illustration I ran across once. This is a fifteenth-century Wound Man from Wellcome Library MS 290. The wound man usually shows up as the last picture in late medieval anatomy books. He illustrates all the different kinds of injuries that a medieval surgeon might encounter.
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| On Getting Medieval |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|07:31 pm] |
Steve Muhlberger pointed out yesterday that Richard Kaeuper has a new book called Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry and bits of it are available on Google Books.
As You Know Bob, Richard Kaeuper is the historian responsible for such awesomeness as Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe and the latest edition of Charny's Livre de Chevalerie. He's one of the leading authorities on the ideology of medieval chivalry and I have a bit of an intellectual crush on him.
I've yet to read the new book in its entirety, but a couple of things jumped out at me in the first few pages. Mere paragraphs into the first chapter, while discussing the allegorical image on the cover of the book, he writes "Even the parts of the horse are assigned religious meanings, the horse's rump being unfortunately termed good will." Unfortunately? No medieval reader would see it that way. A warhorse's rump is like the engine of a car: that's where all the power comes from. Take a look at a Portuguese bullfighting horse if you want to see what I mean (but stop at 3:20 if you don't want to see any bulls being tormented).
A little later Kaeuper uses the b-word: broadswords. This is a bit of a pedantic nitpick, but the HEMA practitioner in me feels obligated to point out that in the Middle Ages there weren't any narrow swords, so the term is anachronistic.
These examples are reminders that there is still much work to be done in closing the communication gap between academic medieval history and Historical European Martial Arts. I think the martial arts community would have a better understanding of the fighting treatises they study if they also understood the social and spiritual ideas that underlay them. At the same time, academics need to take a closer look at some of the better efforts to reconstruct medieval fighting techniques. There's only so much you can learn from reading books. |
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| Still in Halloween mode II |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|05:53 pm] |
I don't have a digital camera, but fortunately it looks like one of my neighbours took a picture of the jack-o-lantern I made this year.
That's my pumpkin on the right. Thank you KateDW!
Every year, on the day after Halloween, everyone in my neighbourhood brings their pumpkin to a local park and lines it up for display. Some of those gourds are incredible works of art. Check them out. I have talented neighbours. |
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| Halloween in Roncy |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|08:17 pm] |
My neighbour refers to my new street as "Halloween Highway." It has the perfect mix of high density, high income and young families to bring out hordes of trick-or-treaters. I bought 140 pieces of candy and I was all out by 7:45.
All the neighbours really get into the spirit of things. There are giant cobwebs, skeletons and spooky music everywhere. One house had flaming tiki torches around the edge of the lawn and a display that included a dummy in an electric chair that buzzed and jerked every few minutes.
The dominant themes in this year's costumes were Batmen, princesses, hippies and Star Wars characters. Pirates have fallen out of fashion, but ninjas are back in. There also seem to be a number of scary princesses with frilly dresses and vampire faces.
The best costume was Headless Girl. She had cut a hole in the chest of a large man's sweater and her head protruded through it. The shoulders of the sweater were filled with stuffing so that they rose above her head and the bloody stump of a fake neck protruded from the collar. The arms of the sweater were also stuffed, sewn to gloves, and positioned so that it looked like they were holding her head. Her real arms poked out of holes under the sweater's arms. When she put her real arms behind her back, the illusion was very convincing.
I love my neighbourhood. |
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| Review: The Little Black Book of Violence |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|03:24 pm] |
A couple of days ago, Statistics Canada came out with an interesting new report. Apparently the homicide rate for Canadian women is at its lowest point since 1961. Men now account for 76% of homicide victims in this country. It reminds me that there’s a book I’ve been meaning to review here. The Little Black Book of Violence by Lawrence A. Kane and Kris Wilder is another one of those works that has given my worldview a tweak. It’s a book about self-defence, but with a twist. Instead of being aimed at women, it’s intended for an audience of young men, who are, after all, the ones more likely to be victims of violence in North America (at least if we leave sexual violence out of the equation). I’m not actually a male and I’m getting to be a little older than the authors’ target audience, but I think it’s an interesting read because it highlights how heavily gendered our society’s ideas about violence and self-defence are.
( Read more... )
These caveats aside, I think the book fills a very real need for literature of this sort. I can see it being a useful tool in a high school librarian's arsenal.
( Cranky footnotes ) |
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| A bucket for monsieur? |
[Oct. 16th, 2009|06:49 pm] |
If you study medieval history long enough, you eventually come across a manuscript illustration for every aspect of medieval life.
( The Hangover ) |
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| Signs and Portents |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|06:16 pm] |
I parted my hair in a different place this morning and discovered that I have half a dozen grey hairs.
I take this as nature's way of telling me that it's time I finished my dissertation. |
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| Schrödinger’s Rapist |
[Oct. 10th, 2009|07:49 pm] |
I always thought the statement "All men are potential rapists" was more than a little over the top. But yesterday Phaedra Starling rephrased it in a way that made the little light bulb go on over my head.
See, the problem that I--and I think a lot of people--had was that we skipped over the word potential. All men are also potentially not rapists. From my perspective, until I've opened the box by talking to them, getting to know them, and comparing them to known profiles, all men are Schrödinger's rapist. Now usually my rapist-identification program is running in the background, at the subconscious level, somewhere down below the don't-forget-where-you-put-your-keys program, but you'd better believe it's always present.
Dudes, here's a handy hint: want to know why women smile insincerely and sidle away when you try to talk to them? There's a good chance that it's because you're pinging their rape-avoidance radar. Don't do that.
Also, to male self-defence instructors: Want to know why all those silly women went and read your carefully-researched profile of a rapist and then disregarded it? Maybe it was because you prefaced your remarks by telling them that it was paranoid of them to actually apply your test on an ongoing basis. |
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| The internet is awesome. |
[Sep. 9th, 2009|04:27 pm] |
The awesomeness of the internet always seems to increase in direction proportion to how desperately I need to finish a chapter. Therefore, today the internet is truly fascinating. Here's a selection.
The folks at Science-Based Medicine thoroughly debunk flu vaccine scare-mongering. I think the key sentence is this one near the end: "The same [vaccine opponent] pointed out that shots hurt and that alone should tell you something." Some people will go to great lengths to rationalize their fear of getting poked.
I want this T-shirt and this one.
Lost worlds of the North Sea.
The Canadian Council on Learning has published a map of literacy levels in adults across the country. It's interesting to see that in Toronto it coincides roughly with the maps of average household income and homicide.
Okay, back to the chapter. |
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| A half-digested idea |
[Aug. 28th, 2009|07:14 pm] |
Via a great post by Magistra et Mater, I just ran across an interesting article about the reasoning processes of people who have not been exposed to scientific thought. It paraphrases an interview conducted in a remote part of Russia several decades ago.
White bears and Novaya Zemlya
Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?
A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.
Q: But what do my words imply?
A; If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.
Camels and Germany
Q: There are no camels in Germany; B is a city in Germany; are there camels there?
A: I don't know, I have never seen German villages. If B is a large city, there should be camels there.
Q: But what if there are none in all of Germany?
A: Perhaps this is a small village within a large city and there is no room for camels.
This mode of thinking sounds similar to some of the things I've found in my research on medieval legal procedure. In the Middle Ages, things start to get interesting when the reputation of the man from Novaya Zemlya is challenged... |
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| On Gambesons |
[Aug. 23rd, 2009|07:33 pm] |
I attempted to wash my sparring gambeson last night and made a little discovery about military history.
My gambeson is a Matuls aketon, made similarly to fourteenth-century ones out of many layers of raw linen quilted together. It looks a lot like this image (only grimier). I put it in the washing machine with a couple of towels to keep the load from unbalancing. When I pulled it out, it weighed--I'm not exaggerating--forty pounds. The spin cycle on the machine did nothing to get the water out.
I took it to the sink at the laundromat and squeezed about two liters of water out of it. Then I lugged it home, put it in the bathtub and trod on it for awhile. After that I hung it over the rail of my balcony and I've been squeezing a cup or two of water out of it every few hours all day. Matt2 says that when he washed his kit, it took a week to dry.
I can't imagine fighting in that thing in a downpour. It would eventually weigh more than steel armour. The battle of Agincourt must have sucked. |
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| Up North |
[Aug. 19th, 2009|02:20 pm] |
German fairy tales made perfect sense to me as a kid. After all, my grandparents lived in a cottage in the deep, dark forest and I grew up being admonished not to pester large carnivores when I went to Oma's house. When my grandparents died, their home became the family's summer cottage. This is where I go when I disappear from cyberspace in the summer.
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| Urban wildlife |
[Jul. 24th, 2009|05:58 pm] |
I have to admit that I'm less dismayed by the month-long Toronto civic workers' strike than I could be. The garbage in the streets is pretty bad, but the upside is that there's been an explosion of urban wildlife.
As I was eating dinner one evening last weekend, I got the feeling that someone was watching me. I turned around and right outside my second-floor window there were three raccoon kittens hanging from the TV antenna. They were so small, they could barely reach from one rung to the next. I was terrified that one of them would fall to its death as they climbed down. I know they'll grow into aggressive bandits, but OMG kittens! Nothing has the right to be that cute.
This week I've also noticed that the local snakes are enjoying the untrimmed grass in the city parks. There are garter snakes and milk snakes all over the place. I also discovered a brown snake, a species I hadn't seen before.
Today's discovery is chamomile and wild bergamot growing among the weeds in the park. I left them standing, but if the strike ends any time soon I'm going to pick them for my own tea before someone mows them down. |
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| RIP Virginia Brown |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|02:11 pm] |
Professor Brown, Paleographer Extraordinaire, passed away over the weekend. There are details here.
Whenever I come across a difficult document, I hear a voice with a strong southern accent saying "You must develop the oculus!"
In memory of Professor Brown, some Precious Beneventan.
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| When snails attack |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|05:20 pm] |
Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval has a good post this week about the motif of a knight fighting a snail in the marginal illustrations of manuscripts. He shared this image from the Macclesfield Psalter.
I see two things in that picture.
1. The knight is drawing his sword with his left hand. There aren't many illustrations of left-handed swordsmen in medieval art. The only other one I can think of is from 1497 and shows up in the statutes of the Collegium Sapientiae in Freiburg. You can see it on the cover of Ruth Mazo Karras' From Boys to Men.
2. The left-handedness may be part of the joke. It looks to me like we're supposed to understand that the knight was out for a stroll, carrying his sheathed sword wrapped up in his sword belt, like the statues on Naumburg cathedral. Suddenly, he was ambushed by a snail! It all happened so fast that he didn't have time to transfer his scabbard to his left hand. (It was a racing snail, ok?) So now he has to use a variation of the quick-draw technique from the last play of the sword vs. dagger section in Fiore dei Liberi's Flos Duellatorum. He's about to poke the snail in the eye with his scabbard chape in order to buy a moment to sort himself out.
It's a joke about speed, but it's also an arming sword play, complete with encoded information about weight transfer and footwork. That's the cool thing about medieval fighting illustrations: they're more like little video clips than single stop-motion photographs. If you study enough fechtbucher, you start to recognize the motion compressed into them. You see how the knight has taken his right foot off the line of attack? You can tell because the background gives you some perspective and because his weight is on his left. After he hits the snail in the eye, he clears his sword, pivots around his right foot and strikes the beast from its now-blind side. It's all one tempo; Fiore would love it. |
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| Medievalist geekery |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|02:25 pm] |
I was looking at Alexander Neckam's De Nominibus Utensilium today and I couldn't understand why it was giving me a vague sense of déja vu.
The text is a twelfth-century primer for learning medieval Latin vocabulary. It uses the ancient mnemonic device of the memory palace: the narrator walks through an imaginary medieval manor and names everything he sees. Students can later recall the Latin vocabulary by calling up a visual image of the manor.
But where had I seen a vocabulary book like that before? Then I remembered...
( Read more... )
Somebody really ought to publish an edition of De Nominibus Utensilium as a picture book. They could illustrate it with little squinchy-faced people, like the Luttrell Psalter. It would be awesome. |
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| A random question |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|04:18 pm] |
Backpacking in Romania a few years ago reminded me that I usually take for granted the role that animal control agencies play in modern cities. When a city doesn't have a functioning pound or humane society, packs of stray dogs start to congregate in the streets and squares. The sleep on park benches and beg for scraps like furry panhandlers. Sometimes four or five of them will try to slouch after you into a dark side street with the air of hungry coyotes.
It occurs to me to wonder if medieval European cities had the same kinds of semi-feral animals as modern ones do. There are certainly no Tantony pigs in Toronto. What about pigeons? Were wild pigeons quite so common when pigeon was considered good to eat and meat was expensive to come by? |
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