| 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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| Trial by Combat |
[Jun. 24th, 2009|12:07 pm] |
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. |
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| Professor Awesome, Ph.D. |
[Jun. 11th, 2009|04:42 pm] |
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.
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| Internet awesomeness and the future of academe |
[Feb. 4th, 2009|04:51 pm] |
Hey, wow! The first 39 volumes of the Selden Society series are now online. The whole world (or at least the privileged minority with an internet connection) can now geek out on medieval English lawsuits.
You know, two or three years ago, you could tell when a student had researched a paper without bothering to get up from their computer. Nowadays? Not so much. The other day an acquaintance who's writing a fantasy novel asked me for some leads on medieval feuds and dueling, and I discovered that all the sources I thought he should see are available as either Google books or articles that I can e-mail to him in pdf form.
When I think about this in light of the bitter recent strike by the contract faculty at York University, I wonder about the future of higher education in general. Increasingly, universities are opting to hire people to teach only one or two courses at a time on a part-time basis. Full-time faculty who have the luxury of doing their own research are becoming rarer. I think it's getting to the point where people who want to do history research are realizing that they're better off getting a nine-to-five job outside of academia and an alumni library card for the online databases. Maybe I'm being overly dramatic here, but I wonder if universities aren't turning into teaching factories while the exciting ideas of the future are going to come from the hobbyists. |
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| French Custumals / Coutumiers de la France |
[Jan. 14th, 2009|03:05 pm] |
Custumals are reference guides that medieval jurists wrote for one another so that they could learn and remember the unwritten customary laws in the region where they worked. I use them quite often in my research, and in the process of tracking down some of the more obscure ones, I've discovered that many of them are available online now. For the benefit of anyone else who finds this stuff useful, I'm going to list some of the important ones here.
Editing French custumals seems to be academically unfashionable at the moment (and by "at the moment" I mean for the last hundred years), so nearly all of these editions are the most recent ones you can get.
Ableiges, Jacques d'. Le grand coutumier de la France. Eds. Laboulaye & Dareste. 1868.
Ancien coutumier inédit de Picardie (1300-1323). Ed. M.A.J. Marnier. 1840.
Beaumanoir, Philippe de. Coutumes de Beauvaisis. Ed. A. Salmon. Vol. 1, 1899. Vol. 2, 1900. (The Akehurst translation is available for a fee from Questia.)
Boutillier, Jean. Somme Rural. Ed. L. Charondas Le Caron. 1621. This is hardly the most recent edition, but since the text is hard to get, it's better than nothing.
Coutumes et institutions de l'Anjou et du Maine. Ed. M. C.-J. Beautemps-Beaupré. Vol. 1.1, 1877. Vol. 1.2, 1878. Vol. 1.3, 1879.
Coutumier d'Artois. Ed. E.J. Tardif. 1883.
The Etablissements de Saint Louis: Law Texts from Tours, Orléans and Paris. Ed. and tr. F. R. P. Akehurst. 1996. This is a Google Book with only some of the text.
Le grand coustumier du pays et duché de Normandie. Ed. Le Rouillé. 1539. This is a very old edition, but it's what's available online. Tardif's edition of the other custumals of Normandy doesn't seem to be available on the internet.
Li Livres de Jostice et de Plet. Ed. Rapetti. 1850. |
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| Medieval history/HEMA news flash!!! |
[Sep. 25th, 2008|04:49 pm] |
There are now officially four extant manuscripts of Fiore dei Liberi's Flower of Battle. Fabrice Cognot, a doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne, announced this morning that he'd found images from #4 hiding in plain sight on an online database belonging to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. For the medieval martial arts community, this is like finding another Beowulf manuscript.
You can see the new "De Arte Luctandi" by going here and typing 11269 into the search field.
ETA: I should also credit Ken Mondschein, who apparently got the BN to scan the manuscript. |
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| Woot! |
[Sep. 10th, 2008|10:35 pm] |
Hey, Google Books has some of the Rolls Series online. You can search the texts electronically. *Happy dance!*
I swear, modern technology is totally leveling the playing field for historians. Research that used to require the entire career of a mad German baron and his army of research assistants can now be done by anyone with a free weekend, an internet connection and a working knowledge of Latin. |
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| 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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| 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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| 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://l-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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