| Free medieval research resource |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|06:28 pm] |
The International Medieval Bibliography, the grandaddy of all research tools for medievalists, is offering free month-long trials in honour of its fortieth anniversary.
If there's an obscure topic in medieval history, literature or archaeology that you've always wanted to look up, but you don't have access, now is your chance to find out that there are five brilliant new articles in your field and they're all in Hungarian. |
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| Legal history geek love |
[Mar. 7th, 2008|11:27 pm] |
This wiki of medieval English legal documents has a lot of stuff that I didn't know was online. Very cool.
http://emld.usc.edu/tiki-index.php |
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| Medieval technology and social continuity |
[Dec. 18th, 2007|06:59 pm] |
Histories of technology (*cough*) tend to treat the breast-strap horse harness as something that was rendered obsolete by the padded collar and disappeared by the year 1200 AD. However, it turns out it's alive and well in Romania and it has certain advantages over the padded collar. Transylvanian Horseman has an interesting photo-filled post on the relative merits of both harnessing systems over at his blog. |
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| IM IN UR SCRIPTORIUM, $ING UR C~Z |
[Sep. 23rd, 2007|06:21 pm] |
Hey, cool! I didn't know you could get Capelli online. |
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| Medievalist geek alert |
[Sep. 5th, 2007|07:41 pm] |
You can get Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis online as a series of massive PDFs. It would probably take my creaky old computer all night to download it, but still: how cool is that? |
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| Whee! |
[Mar. 27th, 2007|01:07 am] |
You know you're an incurable medievalist geek when the accidental discovery of an online database of French cartularies fills you with glee.
And check out the Ordonnances de l'hôtel du roi, which ennumerate all the staff of the French kings around 1300. Those are just such nifty records of the daily life of royalty. If my dissertation was coming along faster than it is, I would take the time to translate them for the benefit of fantasy writers trying to do some realistic worldbuilding. |
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| Medievalist porn |
[Jan. 12th, 2007|01:46 pm] |
I was leafing through the Boydell and Brewer catalogue in the student lounge of the Centre for Medieval Studies just now. It's a good thing it didn't come with a Buy Now button, or I'd be even poorer than I already am. Check out these titles.
Medieval Obscenities, edited by Nicola F. McDonald. "The essays examine topics as diverse as Norse defecation taboos, the Anglo-Saxon sexual idiom, sheela-na-gigs, impotence in the church courts, bare ecclesiastical bottoms, rude sounds and dirty words, as well as the modern reception and representation of the medieval obscene."
Wolves and Wilderness in the Middle Ages by Aleksander Pluskowski. "The wolf, a common metaphor for vice in medieval Christian literature, is today an iconic symbol of the intense fear and insecurity that some associate with the middle ages. In reality, responses to wolves varied across medieval Europe. Although not dependent on the wilderness, wolves were conceptually linked to this environment - which although on the fringes of medieval society, became increasingly exploited from the eighth to fourteenth centuries, so bringing people and livestock closer to the wolf."
Obscenities is already in the U of T collection, but Wolves isn't yet. I wonder whom I should lobby if I want the library system to buy a particular book? |
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| Bibliophilia |
[Jan. 2nd, 2007|03:36 pm] |
Hello, my handle is ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) henchminion and I have a book addiction. I went into Atticus today to get a single volume. I'd seen on the Internet that they were selling it for the lowest price in North America and I was determined to walk out with Just One Book.
Seven books later, I'm considerably poorer than when I walked in.
Did you know that the medieval studies section on the ground floor is only part of their collection? There are whole shelves of medieval studies paperbacks lurking in the very back of the basement. Fearing just this sort of motherlode, I'd never ventured that deep into the book mines before. And the sections devoted to European countries have medieval history books in them too. And, they've been marking down the price on their hardcovers, making them more competitive with the going rates on the Internet.
I found Charles Henry Ashdown's European Arms and Armor! And Steane's Archaeology of the Medieval English Monarchy in hardcover! And Rossiaud's Medieval Prostitution! (Swords, castles and sex: I admit I have all the intellectual sophistication of a teenage boy. I will try to vindicate myself by saying that I also bought a collection of Christopher Dyer's essays on economic history.)
I am a very bad henchminion. All this reminds me of that Internet classic, the Self-Test for Literature Abuse. |
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| What an education will do for you |
[Nov. 5th, 2006|10:56 pm] |
Some time back, possibly in the comments of one of night__watch's posts, I was musing about the past participle of the verb "to shit". Is it shitten? Shitted? Shatten?
At last, a reference from the English morality play Mankind (ca. 1470) provides an answer:
I have etun a dyschfull of curdys,
And I have schetun yowr mowth full of turdys
And from John Stanbridge's 1509 Vulgaria, a book on Latin translation for schoolboys:
I am almost beshytten
So now I'm puzzled. If "have shitten (schetun)" is the present perfect tense, what tense is "am beshitten"? Perhaps it's also the present perfect tense, but beshitten is the intransitive form of the verb? Or does the be- prefix simply imply that the shitting has been accomplished thoroughly?
Ah, life's little mysteries... |
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| News for historians |
[Jul. 20th, 2006|05:07 pm] |
According to some Florida legislators:
"American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence."
You heard them, folks. We can all go home.
Amusing commentary from Occam's Hatchet at the Daily Kos, via eulistes. |
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| What Toronto medievalists do for fun |
[Jun. 7th, 2006|06:14 pm] |
We correct misspellings in Latin. *Tsk!* That should be potestatem.
And now you do know the power of the dark side.
Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You?
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| Breeding in the wild |
[May. 9th, 2006|03:53 pm] |
Oh my sweet heavens. I've found more spawnlings of the infamous Magna Carta paper. They're here and here. Flee puny plagiarists! Bwa ha ha ha! |
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| Medievalists |
[Sep. 17th, 2005|02:01 am] |
It's good to be hanging out with my people again. Tonight I was at a party where there had to be about thirty medievalists present. I have so missed this.
Five graduate students have a house together near Bloor and Dufferin. It's a really spiffy place with three levels, glossy hardwood floors and new-looking appliances. Their communal reference shelf even has two copies of Niermeyer (now that's really luxurious!)
You know you're partying with medieval studies students when snippets of conversation sound like this:
"We ought to pact to get together and watch Firefly episodes once a week."
"To pact? Is pact a verb now?"
"Sure it is. Pango, pangere, panxi, pactum. English verbs come from the fourth principal part, right?"
Ah yes. And attached to the fridge was the following ditty.
Theoden sings....
I am the very model of a mediaeval Anglian
The truth of this suffuses every nerve and every ganglion
While some proclaim my folc to be Germanic (miscellaneous)
I am in in fact bewildered by this theory extra-aneous
See the rest here. |
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