Chronica Minora

It's only a flesh wound

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:00:09 GMT

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. I was wearing my Brine gloves, which are great for fencing with aluminum blades but a little riskier with steel. Their Achilles "heel" is their capacious thumbs, which sometimes leave the lateral edge of my digit unprotected. Anyway, early in the match Aaron was somehow well ahead of my tempo and gave me a good crack across the right thumb. (I have to watch the video again to see exactly how it happened.) I thought That's going to need ice later and continued fighting. It wasn't until the match was over and I had handed off my sword that I looked down at my thumb and saw that the middle lame was torn half off and the palm side of my glove was all wet with blood.

When you smash your fingers there's always the urge to leave your glove on and prolong the denial, but eventually I got it off and found an impressively sanguinary mess underneath. Once I'd rinsed it off it proved to be a relatively small cut from my thumbnail to just beyond the joint. It's not very deep, but the upper layers of skin are all mashed up. With Leanna's top-notch first aid help, I got it wrapped up in gauze, but it bled like a bingo dauber all night long, through three changes of dressing. Perhaps I should have taken it to a hospital to see if it needed stitches, but emergency rooms are always busy on Saturday nights and sore thumbs don't rate very highly on the triage list, so I decided to stay at the post-gladiatorial party instead.

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.

On Getting Medieval

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:32:09 GMT

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.

Still in Halloween mode II

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:04:51 GMT

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.

Still in Halloween mode

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:05:09 GMT

Via the Carnivalesque at Bavardess, I just ran across this post by J.J. Cohen on Julian of Norwich and zombies a month after it appeared.

While we're rewriting medieval texts, I propose that we continue the series with The Letters of Catherine of Siena, Vampire.

Halloween in Roncy

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:36:00 GMT

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.

Review: The Little Black Book of Violence

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:21:05 GMT

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.

The first thing that’s remarkable about this volume is that most of it is not about fighting techniques. Self-defence instructors tend to be martial artists and, like the proverbial man with a hammer, they often regard the subject as something that’s best resolved with a good pounding. Usually books, courses or DVDs about self-defence will devote some very short lip-service to concepts like awareness and the judicious use of force, and then go straight on to the main subject: eye pokes and the groin kicks. The Little Black Book of Violence inverts that ratio completely. Only 40 of its 325 pages are about fighting techniques, and another 14 are about techniques you shouldn’t use because they’re better suited to the dojo than the street. As the authors put it, “Fighting is what you do when you’ve totally screwed up your self-defense.” This is a refreshing change.

The first part of the book is about awareness, avoidance and de-escalation. This section is where you really see how gendered self-defence instruction is. A lot of women’s self-defence programs tend to avoid these subjects or skirt around them very lightly. They’ve been soured on the issue by the culture of just a few decades ago, which tended to blame the victim of a sexual attack if she had been participating in public life in any kind of way. You can still find “safety tips” from respected public agencies that amount to “Women should not carry a bag. Women should not go to the park. Women should not ride public transit. Women should not leave the house after dark.”

A self-defence book for men just doesn’t have to deal with that baggage, and the results are enlightening. Kane and Wilder point out time and again that avoidance is a perfectly legitimate component of the personal safety toolkit. Using a host of examples culled from personal experiences, they demonstrate that large, privileged white men with advanced black belts modify and curtail their public behaviour all the time. They remain alert to their surroundings; they cross the street to avoid suspicious characters; they leave parties before things get too rowdy; they back down from bullies when nothing material is at stake; they detour around the block when they spot police converging on a neighbourhood. These actions are necessary because, no matter how big and bad you are, there’s always the possibility that someone out there is bigger and badder than you.

The second part of the book is about what to do when your avoidance and de-escalation efforts fail. Targeting the book at young men makes this issue interesting. Males are both more likely than women to be the victims of assault and simultaneously more likely to be the perpetrators. Therefore a self-defence book can’t assume such an audience will always be the innocent party when they get themselves into a fight. As a result, the book has an extended discussion of the use of force. Force, the authors remind us, comes in many different levels, from a hard glance to a lethal shooting. Actions that constitute proportionate and legitimate self-defence in one scenario may be ineffective in another and complete overkill in a third. Under stress, lawful self-defence can degenerate into criminal assault in the blink of an eye. The LBBoV keeps the discussion broad enough to apply across the whole Anglo-American legal world, but specific enough to give you a clear framework for making judicious decisions under pressure.

This kind of information should be dealt with in women’s self-defence books too. Nowadays in feminist circles, it’s fashionable to talk about the “intersectionality of oppression” (which is academic-speak for “In some circumstances you’re the statue, but in others you’re the pigeon”*). WSD needs to recognize this intersectionality too. While women may be statistically more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators of violence, that doesn’t mean we can assume all women everywhere will be justified in their use of force all the time. If you’re going to teach people to use violence in the real world, it’s critical to provide detailed guidelines about when that violence is appropriate.

The final section of the book is also valuable. It examines the consequences of violence. If you are ever involved in a situation where you have to use serious physical force to defend yourself, no one is going to hand you a medal and congratulate you. You’re going to have to deal first with sceptical police, and then very likely with jail guards, a lawyer and the court system as your plea of self-defence receives due legal process. This will not be good for your career or your finances. Your friends and family may not be thrilled either. This information may seem a little more obvious to grown-ups, but I think it’s good to include it in a book meant for youthful readers.

Overall, the book manages to condense an amazing amount of information between its covers. However, when I contrast it with the better texts on women’s self-defence, I can also see places where a second edition could fill in some gaps. The section on domestic abuse is short, although the latest stats here in Canada show that last year 21% of male victims of serious assaults were attacked by family members. Kane and Wilder write “It can be tough to leave but you must do it," They add, rather optimistically, "You can work around economic issues such as loss of housing, income, health insurance or transportation. It’s a bit tougher, but you can work through emotional, cultural, religious, or family issues too.” This is good advice as far as it goes, but I suspect that any actual abuse victims reading it are going to need some help with the strategies for implementing it.

The content of the book also seems to carry a certain amount of unacknowledged privilege. There is an assumption that the reader is a person much like the authors, possessed of a good deal of freedom to walk away from trouble. The book scarcely hints that dealing with violence in a situation of power imbalance is a different kind of problem. As a result, if the reader is a kid who’s coping with beatings from an abusive parent, an altar boy facing increasingly creepy attentions from his minister, or a gay teen trying to figure out how to not to become the next Matthew Sheppard, he may find that the Just Say No to Violence message either strains credulity or inspires guilt.

In addition, The Little Black Book of Violence has absolutely nothing to say on the subject of sexual assault and rape. It may be that this was a genuine oversight on the part of the authors, or it may be that the subject of sexual victimization still carries too much shame and stigma to be mentioned among men. This topic should really have gotten at least a short acknowledgement. It wouldn’t hurt to introduce an audience of aggressive young men to the concept of enthusiastic consent either.

And speaking of enthusiastic consent, I do hope that the authors obtained it from the woman whose naked photograph appears on page 71. The photo is credited to Marc MacYoung, and a younger Marc is clearly the other person in the picture, but the woman is clearly not Diana Gordon MacYoung and does not seem to be one of the people named in the photo credits. Given that the surrounding text is a about avoiding the kind of girlfriend who thinks it’s cool to make you fight on her behalf, and that Marc MacYoung occasionally mentions “psycho exes,” I have a bad feeling about it. I hope I’m completely wrong, because getting revenge on girlfriends by means of sexual shaming is deeply uncool and it would be terribly ironic if MacYoung failed his own jackass test.**

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.

_{*And sometimes you're both at once. That's when the trouble starts.

**Cranky historian's footnote: he also has some truly muddled comments around page 301, where this video gets used as evidence that preindustrial people valued human life less than we do today (because medieval people held cat massacres!). He goes on to claim that the belief that feminist historians are wrong to assume that men lived longer than women in pre-industrial societies because men did back-breaking manual labour and women didn’t, doncha know. *Sigh.* I respect his expertise on self-defence, but Marc MacYoung could really use a course in history, not to mention Women’s Studies 101.}

A bucket for monsieur?

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:01:23 GMT

If you study medieval history long enough, you eventually come across a manuscript illustration for every aspect of medieval life.

This one's from the Casanatense manuscript of the Tacuinum Sanitatis.

Signs and Portents

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:18:27 GMT

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.

Schrödinger’s Rapist

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:40:08 GMT

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.

The internet is awesome.

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:07:52 GMT

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.

Winter is coming

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:20:46 GMT

I've been Up North again. Some of the trees are starting to turn already.

A half-digested idea

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:51:16 GMT

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...

On Gambesons

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:51:06 GMT

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.

Up North

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:24:10 GMT

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.

My summer vacation

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:50:44 GMT

Here's where I was this weekend. Whomping good fun.

John vs Dave OMSG CW 2009 from Motley on Vimeo.

OMSG Pas D'Armes 2009 Fight 1 Chris vs Dave from Motley on Vimeo.

Dave has more photos here.

Urban wildlife

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:31:46 GMT

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.

RIP Virginia Brown

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:25:45 GMT

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.

When snails attack

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:16:21 GMT

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.

Medievalist geekery

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:56:18 GMT

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...

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.

A random question

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:01:47 GMT

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?

Happy first of July

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:00:28 GMT

It's almost Canada Day, and you know what that means. It means it's time for the Dominion Institute to issue its annual media release to tell us that we suck at Canadian history. This year, apparently we suck because only 8% of us can identify Sir Frederick Banting by his face. I'm trying to work up the appropriate sense of horror at this revelation, but somehow I can't quite do it.

Every year the Dominion Institute release reminds me of a conversation I once had with a prominent Canadianist while I was TAing for his colonial history course. "It's great that there's a lobbying organization dedicated to Canadian history," he said (in these words or something close to them), "but I suspect that I lose good students over it. The smart ones know when they're being manipulated and they associate this field with nationalist manipulation, so they take other courses."

With this in mind I went and took a peek at the Dominion Institute site. After looking around for a bit, I'm a little less worried about Canadians' ignorance of their history. That's not to say that the site is completely without its teachable moments. If I ever TA an introduction to Canadian history again, I think the Canada quiz would make a good jumping-off point for a tutorial discussion. Maybe the first tutorial of the year, or one around essay time when you know that no one has done any reading.

Lots of discussion questions come to mind when I take the quiz.

What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of multiple choice tests? Can a multiple choice test adequately evaluate someone's understanding of history?

When I first took the test, seven of the ten questions asked me to identify politicians. Is the history of politicians the most important kind of history? What other fields of Canadian history could you study?

Under what circumstances might someone's ignorance about the Lafontaine-Baldwin coalition impede their ability to function as a Canadian citizen? Provide specific scenarios.

The question about Vimy Ridge is the only one referring to an event that happened outside Canada's borders. Should a course on Canadian history stick to events that happened inside Canada? If not, how much of the course should be about Canadians interacting with the rest of the world? What about the history of Canadian immigrant groups before they came to Canada? Should that be part of a Canadian history course too?

Did all Canadian women get the right to vote in the same decade? Why does the test accept only one correct answer? Does this suggest something broader about the Dominion Institute and its mandate?

I've TA'ed Canadian history courses at the University of Toronto, but I flunked the question about which hockey team won the most Stanley Cups. Have I failed my students?

I took this quiz a few years ago and I think they used the same questions. What are the advantages and disadvantages of always using the same questions versus thinking of some new ones? Does history change?

What's the difference between national history and national propaganda?

That would keep a class talking for an hour or so.

One hundred push ups (er, sixty-six)

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:26:13 GMT

I've been amusing myself lately by doing the one hundred push up challenge that has been going around cyberspace. It purports to be able to transform you in the space of six weeks from a noodle-armed weakling into someone who can do one hundred push ups in a row. While the program is more than a little ambitious, it's not completely bunk.

I've always hated push ups. Actually no, I think I liked them before those stupid Canada Fitness Program tests in elementary school convinced me that they were all about failure and humiliation. (Now there was a government program that richly deserved its eventual death. But I digress.) Anyway, when I saw the Hundred Push Up program, I thought it was past time to sand off that particular emotional rough spot.

It turns out that the program works. I started by being able to do eight push ups and when I took the final test a few days ago, I could do sixty-six. So I guess I'm not a complete failure after all.

The pace of the program is somewhat ambitious, as I said. I often had to repeat workouts or even whole weeks in order to level up. It took me about nine weeks to get to the end of Week Six. I also think the workouts should be done in conjunction with some kind of pulling exercise so that you don't end up with imbalanced muscle development. Still, it's hard to argue with the obvious improvement in strength.

Now I feel kind of like the dog who caught the car. What does one do with sixty-six push ups anyway? It's kind of like having a degree in medieval studies.

Dance craze

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:45:14 GMT

Via kalivor, here's an interesting article that just came out in The Psychologist. It talks about the plague of compulsive dancing that broke out in various cities along the Rhine in 1374 and speculates about whether it could have been a kind of mass anxiety attack.

Trial by Combat

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:20:26 GMT

Attention medieval fighting geeks: George Neilson's Trial by Combat has appeared on Google Books. That used to be a difficult volume to get your hands on in hard copy.

I have no idea what's up with the cover art in the online edition. It's about the most inappropriate stock photo I've ever seen on the front of a book.

Professor Awesome, Ph.D.

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:50:41 GMT

Ever wonder what English professors get up to when the term is over? Apparently they make videos. ~~Dr. Scott Nokes at Troy University~~ Professor Awesome, Ph.D. describes his curriculum vitae here.