Launch of Witan Publishing

Press Release

February 18, 2011
Witan Publishing launched a new service to the medieval academic community today, focusing on e-publishing peer-reviewed scholarship. Witan’s goal is not merely to be another academic publisher, but is instead something much more ambitious: to change the way scholarly research is produced, distributed, and received. This new service will benefit scholars the most, freeing their work from the old market restrictions, distributing scholarship more widely, and putting texts within the budgets of even struggling graduate students.

According to Dr. Richard Scott Nokes, Academic Editor for Witan, “If you look at what other academic publishers are doing in the e-publishing market, they are either putting poorly-scanned and unreadable work online, or they are selling more current scholarship at a very high price. Witan Publishing will offer high-quality peer reviewed professional work and extremely reasonable prices.”

“It is important for academics to embrace the new and ever-growing world of e-publishing,” says Nina McNamara, Technical Editor for Witan. “E-books already outsell paperback and hardcover books on major online retailers, like Amazon.com. Soon, students will replace their hardcover textbooks with e-books all together.”

The existing academic publishing world typically ignores the burgeoning electronic frontier of e-books. Seizing this opportunity, Witan Publishing produces electronic texts of the highest quality, viewable on nearly every platform available to consumers today.

Witan Publishing will be accepting submissions soon.

Firefly Arthuriana

A quick bleg -- has anyone written about Arthuriana in Firefly? I had a student ask me today about Arthurian allusions in Firefly, and I couldn't remember any off the mere 16-or-so episodes, but maybe others have written about it.

Now Where Will We Incarcerate Unruly Anglo-Saxons?

Lancaster Castle, a Norman structure built in the 1090s, has housed a prison for the last few centuries. Now, however, the prison is being closed in part because the age of the structure limits the ways it can be used.

This is one of those places of which we can say "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."

"Medieval" Torture Devices

Even though the word "medieval" is used here, most of what is described is early Modern, but here's a guy who probably lives a half-hour from where I grew up and has a barn full of "medieval" torture devices.

Next time I'm up there I think I'll spend the money to visit Carder's Variety Land.

Starz Camelot Trailer

Here's a trailer for the new Camelot coming out on Starz. h/t Medievalists.net



Joseph Fiennes almost made me spew root beer from laughing.

Modern Illuminators

This is pretty interesting: A studio where artists are producing gold-leaf manuscripts on vellum. The Illumination Atelier website has even more information, including some more images and a series of YouTube videos showing the production of the works.

Hitchcock's Revenge

Just so that we understand there is nothing new under the sun, the other day thousands of birds fell from the sky in Arkansas -- and in 671, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, there was also a great mortality of birds.

If the pattern continues, perhaps we can see the events of 672 repeated this year. In that year, king Cenwahl died, so if I were actor Ken Wahl, I'd watch my step.

The "Ultimate Medieval Glossary"

The awesomely-named Serena Castleton sent me a link to Costume Supercenter's "Ultimate Medieval Glossary." I'm not really sure why it has such a glossary, since many of the terms have nothing to do with costuming.

Academic medievalists won't find anything new there, but it seems like a really great resource for popular medievalists. If you're sometimes confused by the terms you see thrown around, check it out and you might find it helpful.

Jeremy's Dragon Corner

Apparently there is something on G4 (a channel I don't get) called "Jeremy's Dragon Corner." Why wasn't I informed?!

Why Medieval?

I Suppose I Will Often Eat Beans at a BBQ...

When I think of Joan of Arc, the first thing I think of is "kidney beans."

I can't sense any irony in the description on the B&G Foods website, but I really wish I did:

Joan of Arc was an amazing woman – she lived and died for her beliefs. We think Joan would have been proud of the beans that bear her name.

Yes, that's what Joan d'Arc died for ... her pride in her beans.

And when it comes to Latin American and Creole cuisine, Joan of Arc is a real leader!

Yes, she really strove for leadership in Latin American and Creole cuisine. I mean, I'm all about medievalism, but it's got to at least have a fig leaf of relevance.

For Black Friday

For anyone wondering what to get me for Christmas this year, I recently heard that CastlePost in Kentucky is on sale for only $30 million.

Here's a photo gallery of what you'll be getting me.

An Invitation to SEMA from Professor Awesome, PhD

How About a Little Credit Here?

In working on one of my papers for SEMA, I ran across the book review for Wealtheow: Her Telling of Beowulf on Amazon.

It seemed familiar to me. Really, REALLY familiar. Who, I thought, had published these words that were attributed to "My Fox New York"?

Uh, well, ME. Here. Dudes, feel free to quote me if you want, but please attribute the quote properly.

Holy Pecans, Batman!

In the new website "$#!+ My Students Write" we are treated to this little gem about The Canterbury Tales:

“The narrator saw the Parson in an un-sarcastically holy pecan in the middle of the chaos in the church as he showed by stating…”

I plan to make this the thesis statement of the next scholarly paper I write.

Long-Delayed Professor Awesome Medieval Book Club to Shoot Soon

I keep promising, and promising, and promising the first series for the "Professor Awesome, PhD's Medieval Book Club," and 12-parter on Beowulf. Everything was on track, including two different musical bumpers and one in progress, so that all we had to do was shoot (this part is not as much work as it sounds) and edit -- and then I had to send my computer with all the editing software off to be repaired.

Tonight the computer returns, and we'll start trying to put together the standard opening credits sequence. If I get that done significantly before editing the first installment, I'll post it here for your enjoyment.

Geoffroi de Charny's Name

This is perhaps a dumb question, but why is Geoffroi de Charny called "Charny" rather than "Geoffroi" when we're just using one name? Most of the time, the "de" is more of a designation than part of the name, so we just use their proper name, such as in Christine de Pizan, who would normally just be called "Christine."* The case of Joan d'Arc is an odd one since "d'Arc" is actually her name -- she's from a town called Domremy, and as far as I know there isn't even a place called "Arc," so "Joan of Arc" is a misnomer.

But I notice that the practice is to call Geoffroi de Charny "Charny," and I also note that it's the way he signs his own book. So, does anyone out there know why he's called "Charny" rather than "Geoffroi"?



*Though this too is a little complicated, since she's from Venice, and "Pizan" is an inherited name indicating her family's origins in Pizzano.

How Fat Could You Get in the Middle Ages?

In a long-ranging discussion over beer starting from the five acceptable sexual positions according to Albertus Magnus, we got into why "a tergo"* was acceptable -- because a more natural sexual position might be prevented by such problems as extreme obesity.

When I protested that I couldn't imagine being so fat that a tergo was the only possible position, my colleagues brought up images of morbidly obese people who had to be hauled out of their apartments in cranes, etc. To this I responded that I didn't think it was possible for people to get that fat in the Middle Ages. Even if you could afford an unlimited amount of rich foods, you still had to walk everywhere to get around.

This leads me to wonder -- how fat could you get in the Middle Ages? I tried figuring out fat Louis the Fat was, but I can't find anyone who might have figured out how much he weighed. Does anyone know how fat folks like Thomas Aquinas, Henry VIII, and Loius the Fat actually got? Also, as a bonus question, were they too fat for anything in the sack besides a tergo?


*Doggy-style, for those in the peanut gallery.

Video Games as Morality Plays

Here's an interesting article from The Escapist arguing that video games are the rough equivalent of medieval morality plays. What say you, oh MEMO people?

Lucky Amateur Medievalists

The last year has been a good one for amateur medievalists -- first the Staffordshire Hoard, and now this new find in Wales. OK, so it's not all gold and precious metals, but it's still invaluable.

I'm heading to my backyard to see if I can't make a major medieval archeological find in Troy, Alabama. Any chance those sprinkler lines I dug up were placed there by Charlemagne?

Mailbag 9-28-10

Professor Awesome answers the question: "Is Beowulf

Click here to download:

Mailbag092810_0001.wmv (64960 KB)

a Christian Poem?"

Hey! You Took Me Off Your Blogroll!

Yes, yes I did. In fact, I removed the whole thing.

As most of you Wordhoarders know, this site is all about community. Unfortunately, some changes have made it more and more difficult to keep the community "feel" to the page. First was the rise of the RSS feed, which made it so people viewed posts without necessarily entering the site. Then for boring technical reasons we had to remove the comment section from the front page, which gave the Wordhoard more of a "hey, this is my page, and you can comment if you want, but you're not all that important" feel.

Now Blogrolling is having script problems, and in response they're simply shutting down the service. Feh.

I may simply expand the existing links to include all the stuff that used to be on my blogroll, but let's face it folks, the blog as a medium is fading. Keep visiting here, but more and more of the action is going on over at Facebook (which, for all I know, may itself fade in another few years).

We'll keep surfing along as different technologies come available: Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. These changes will necessarily force the Wordhoard to evolve, but don't worry -- even though the blogroll came down, we're still about the medievalist community, no matter how you access us.

Professor Awesome Fanfare

I just heard the proposed fanfare for the upcoming "Professor Awesome, PhD" series of videos, I'm planning, and it is literally awesome (unlike Professor Awesome, who is, alas, but a character)!

Clayton Paramore, who set Caedmon's Hymn to music in both West Saxon and Modern English, is doing a delightfully over-the-top fanfare for the title sequence. I can't wait for you all to hear it!

Canterbury Tales Mini-Lecture

Decameron Mini-Lecture

How to Be Professor Awesome, PhD

A couple of years ago I had a conversation with another blogger (I think it was Jeff Sypeck, but memory fades), in which he related an earlier talk with other scholars about how they didn't know how to do the kind of public outreach I was doing. He said, as I recall, "It's not some big mystery; you just do it!"

The more I think about it, though, it's easy to do, but hard to do well. One of my goals has long been not just to do popular outreach myself, but to encourage others too. Eventually, I'd like to see a whole army of Professors Awesome out there interacting with popular medievalists.


So, to that end, I present to you a guide on how to be a Professor Awesome, PhD.


First, you might need an attitude adjustment. I think medieval scholars have a better attitude about this than most, but there's still some snobbiness. As one scholar said to me recently, "What a waste of time!" These folks like to present themselves as casting pearls before swine. Dude, don't be a jackass. You aren't all that important -- hence the pompous schtick in the double-title "Professor Awesome, PhD." I promise if you ever get to be sooooo important that your time shouldn't be wasted on the plebs who are interested in your scholarship, I'll let you know.


Learn who your audience is. Someone who comes off the street to a public lecture you're giving at your school, local library, book club, or some convention isn't going to be an idiot. They don't have a specialist's knowledge, but they're smart and want to know more. I think the average would be like a motivated sophomore in a survey course -- they are smart and eager, but don't yet have any background. Sometimes they have a bit of background, but it has faded since they left school.

Simplify, but don't condescend. Probably the hardest line to walk is how much to simplify things. Leave all your jargon back at the office. Never "interrogate" a subject, "consider" it. Talk about "world-views" rather than "paradigms." Assume they've heard of any canonical texts you're talking about, but they either haven't read them or read them so long ago that they can't remember it. One of my favorite ways to handle this is to call for a refresher, e.g. "I know most of us read at least part of The Canterbury Tales in school, but let me refresh your memories" -- then you can give lots of details without saying, "Hey, you're stupid, and I'm going to treat you that way."

Emphasize the fun stuff. Unlike your students, they don't have to be there, so sex it up a little. If I'm talking about The Saga of the Volsungs, I'll make a joke about french kissing a wolf. If I'm doing The Prose Edda, I'll point out the passage where Tolkien gets his dwarf names. If I'm talking about "The Dream of the Rood," I'll make comparisons between the depiction of Christ there and professional wrestlers. Remember all the fun stuff that drew YOU to medieval studies? Share that with your audience.

Involve the audience. If there's some kind of activity you can do, do it. For example, if I have to do The Decameron, I do my trauma exercise. At the very least, leave copious amounts of time for Q&A -- my general rule of thumb is to always have twice as much time for Q&A as I spend talking. They don't just want to hear, they want to be involved -- so let them.

Use any AV equipment at your disposal. Make PowerPoint presentations, but don't let them be bullet points. Instead, if you're talking about the Crusades, have an image of a crusader, or a map showing major battles of that particular crusade, or whatever. The role of AV here is similar to the role of the over-the-shoulder graphic on TV news -- meant more to illustrate than explain. Of course, if you must use a long quote (which I discourage), always put the text up so they can read along. There's no need to overload the audience with information; after all, there won't be a test later.

Above all, try to have fun. Just as dogs (supposedly) sense fear, audiences sense when you're not enjoying yourself. Bring the joy of medievalism to them!

Professor Awesome, PhD's Dragon*Con Adventure 2010, Episode IV

I'm having trouble distributing this through Posterous.com, so for the time being here's my last report from Dragon*Con.

Professor Awesome, PhD's Dragon*Con Adventure Sept. 4, 2010

Professor Awesome PhD meets a medieval Batman, interviews a maker of tiny medieval structures, and swills mead with a bunch of ne'er-do-wells.

Download now or watch on posterous

DragonCon090410_0001.wmv (57007 KB)

Dragon*Con Report Sept. 3, 2010

Dragon*Con 9-2-10 Report

A little belated, and with an ad at the beginning, here's my Dragon*Con report for Thursday.

Dragon*Con Videocast

I'm leaving for Dragon*Con this afternoon, and I hope to have semi-daily video reports on the popular medievalism there. I would have liked to have more from the academic conference, but most of the papers submitted were science fiction and comic book stuff; I think my own session is the only identifiably medievalist one.

One warning: It'll just be me, my shakycam, netbook, and whatever child/friend I can get to shoot for me. Editing will be minimal (if there's any at all), so these reports will be anything but polished. Still, better than nothing.

Oooh, Sinfjotli Burned Granmar! That's Just Cold.

One of my favorite scenes in The Saga of the Volsungs is one in which Sinfjotli and Granmar are exchanging insults, in a custom similar to "the dozens" in American culture. What I like best about it is that the insults aren't exactly insulting to us outside medieval Norse culture; they're just odd.

For example, Sinfjotli finally gets the best of Granmar with this beauty:

Do you remember when you were a mare, with the stallion Grani and I rode
you at full speed on Bravoll? Afterward you were the goatherd of the giant
Golnir.

I'm not sure how I would react if someone used this on me. I'd probably looked stunned for a moment, then say, "What? Your granny is a stallion and you rode her on the Bravo channel?"

As for saying I was a goatherd of the giant Golnir, I'd punch him in the face. I may be a goatherd, but I'm no goatherd for Golnir!

Beowulf Mini-Lecture

Just as a little test of things to come, here's my Beowulf mini-lecture I'm using for my online course.

Up-Coming Nokes Sightings

Over the next couple of weeks, Wordhoarders will have several opportunities to see me at public venues:

• As many have already discovered, I've been setting up mini-lectures for my online World Lit class at http://unlockedwordhoard.blip.tv/. Those aren't really part of the outreach I plan to do with "Professor Awesome, PhD's Medieval Book Club," but I'll probably host them on the Blip.tv site. At the moment, most are not on medieval topics, but I'll post my Beowulf mini-lecture Monday or Tuesday. When we do the Medieval Book Club our first topic will also be Beowulf, but those will be a series of 10-or-so posts over as many weeks. I'll re-announce those when I post them.
  
• I'll be appearing next week at the academic conference within the Dragon*Con convention. That's one of the places where it's hardest to keep my regular academic self and my Prof. Awesome alter-ego separate. One place I will definitely be appearing as Dr. Richard Scott Nokes is the "Mythology and Stargate" session on Saturday at 4PM in the Marriot A706, where I'll be talking about Norse mythology and the Stargate franchise. As many people have asked me since, no, I will not have an autograph-signing session (it just feels so weird to me when people ask for my autograph), but if you ask me for one, I'd be happy to sign as either myself or Professor Awesome.
  
• I'll be appearing on the Strait Talks radio program on Sunday the 29th at 6:30 PM EST. Though it's a show based out of Philly, I think you can listen to it streaming live from the website. Since the show appears to be a lot about voting, economic, and political issues, I'm not sure yet what medieval stuff they want to talk about, but hey, I'm game.
  
• I'll also be appearing in my classes, but you've got to pay tuition for that. And suffer the indignity of my lectures.

Chaucer-Themed Cruise

In the film Tenure (the 2009 comedy, not the 2007 film of the same title), the department chair is telling her colleagues of the "Chaucer-themed Caribbean cruise" she went on.

Just as I was thinking, "Aw, cool!" they had to go and spoil it. As the scene fades out, she's heard to say, "And of course the captain spoke absolutely flawless Old English..."

*sigh*

Add to that disappointment that I immediately went online to see if there were such a thing as a Chaucer-themed Caribbean cruise, but I found none. Now, an Old English-themed cruise would be pretty exciting, what with the potential for Viking issues.

Saturday Night Special: The Flutists

Saturday Night Special: The Flutists

Some people think the medieval is dorky. These people are the cause of that belief.

RIP: Bernard Knox

This is classical, not medieval, but I devoured all of Bernard Knox's writings I could lay hands on when I was a freshman. For some reason, I got it into my head to read every extant ancient Greek play (or at least every one in our library), and though I didn't finish, I got a lot farther than you might think. I read a lot of Bernard Knox.

I was pretty amazed to find he had been in the OSS (predecessor to the CIA). How many people can have a story as cool as this one in his obituary?

The O.S.S. later sent him into northern Italy for an equally dangerous mission with the Italian underground, and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics. Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.”

Really, who could be more awesome than that?

Medieval Car & Boat Rally

Usually I'm pretty good and picking up what the medievalist metaphor is in pop culture emanations, but I'm bumfuzzled by the 15th National Car and Boat Rally in Cardiff. Is it just that the Medieval Melee happened to be going on at the same time, or is there some kind of connection I'm missing?

It seems like a great opportunity to show off some reconstructed medieval boats, but if that's happening, it's not in the article.

Fireheart!

Chowder spoofs about everything in the fantasy genre from the 80s.

Staffordshire Hoard Origins

I was talking about the Staffordshire Hoard in class yesterday, when the subject of its origins came up. I had previously heard two, opposing theories:

1. That the hoard had been stripped from the losers' weapons by the winners. This seems pretty plausible, until you ask the question -- wait, the winners lost a huge hoard of gold and silver and didn't go back to find it? Surely the hoard would have been too heavy and bulky for just one guy to carry, so several guys lost it?
2. That the hoard had been stripped from the losers' weapons and buried for safekeeping by the losers themselves, but everyone who knew where it was died in the battle. Again, plausible, but I'm trying to imagine a scenario in which you're in the middle of a battle, losing, then take a time-out to strip your weapon and bury the appointments.

After class, though, I realized that I heard these two theories in the fall -- in other words, shortly after the Hoard's discovery. These weren't fully-developed ideas; they were probably just barely beyond the point of speculation, whipped up on the fly.

Now that a year has passed and specialists have had time to examine and discuss the Hoard a bit more carefully, has some sort of consensus been reached as to the Hoard's origins? Have either of the above explanations been further developed, or has some third explanation perhaps emerged?

The Frozen Edda

I couldn't find my copy of the Prose Edda. I looked everywhere for it. Finally, I gave up and opened the refrigerator to get a drink -- and there it was cooling in the fridge.

Snorri Sturluson, still chillin'.

Why I Won't Sign

Fashionable medieval scholars have of late seized on an issue to use as a shibboleth, to distinguish us from them, culminating in the boycott of the Medieval Academy of America. The Medieval Academy is the oldest and most venerable organization of medieval scholars in North America. In 2011, the MAA is scheduled to hold its annual conference at Arizona State University.

A couple of months ago, scholars began to call for the MAA to reconsider meeting in Arizona, in order to protest Arizona Immigration Law SB1070, particularly provisions that allowed police to check the immigration status of people stopped during the enforcement of other laws (such as, for example, a traffic violation). The Obama Administration sued the State of Arizona, and a federal judged blocked the more controversial elements of the law. As of this writing, it seems likely that the case will eventually wind up in the Supreme Court.

Over the last month-and-a-half, about 170 people signed an open letter to the MAA condemning the law as “racist and inhumane” and calling for its repeal, and urging the MAA to consider meeting elsewhere or cancelling the meeting [Full disclosure: I consider myself a friend of many of the signatories]. Earlier this month, the MAA met and decided to go forth with the meeting, though promised to “ensure that the program of the meeting reflects and relates to similar issues at stake in medieval society, including such topics as race, ethnicity, immigration, tolerance, treatment of minority groups, protest against governmental policies judged unjust, and standards of judicial and legislative morality.”

The decision and letter provoked outrage, and calls to boycott not just Arizona or the 2011 conference, but the Medieval Academy altogether. Blogs and listservs have be inflamed with accusations that the MAA is complicit in transforming Arizona into a fascist police state, and (in a stunning about-face) that it’s to be expected anyway since the MAA is just a bunch of old white male fuddy-duddies who don’t like women and minorities.

At first, I ignored the controversy. These sorts of eruptions are an unfortunate part of scholarly life, and generally fade away on their own as one group postures for itself, easily assured of their own piety and the ethical degeneracy of others. Every so often, however, the great Academic Beast is aroused by these eruptions, swallowing the unwary into its maw. I fear the Beast is on a rampage now, and all that remains is to either capitulate or resist. I choose resistance.

I did not sign the letter calling for the boycott of Arizona, nor will I sign similar future letters. I will not boycott the Medieval Academy of America, though I have no plans to go to their 2011 conference (a decision based entirely on my limited travel budget).

Why won’t I sign? Why won’t I boycott?

One of the most important writings in my intellectual development as a young man was Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless. Published in 1985, it calls for citizens to live in truth – and Havel wrote it as man who had just gotten out of prison, living under an actual authoritarian government. When he published it, he wasn’t posturing or being hyperbolic; his very life was at stake.

Havel writes of a shopkeeper:

The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the World, Unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? [….] If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached from not having the proper “decoration” in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say. (“The Power of the Powerless” in Without Force or Lies: Voices from the Revolution of Central Europe in 1989-90, San Francisco, Mercury House, 1990. 48-49)

Replace the shopkeeper with an academic, and you have the situation in which we find ourselves. It isn’t that the shopkeeper is necessarily against the workers uniting – that’s beside the point. No one imagines the workers of the world will suddenly see that sign among the vegetables and say to themselves, “You know what? Now that I’ve seen that sign, I think I’ll throw off the shackles of capitalism,” any more than anyone imagines that the citizens of Arizona will hear of the dozens of medievalists clamoring for a boycott of their state and say to themselves, “You know what? Now that I know these medieval scholars are unhappy, I think I’ll vote for completely open borders.”

Rather than being about altering the situation, these initiatives are about capitulation. As Havel translates the sign, “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” (Havel 49). Canny graduate students and untenured scholars know this message, and know that their future success relies in part on the zeal with which they proclaim it.

Not that anyone will ever tell them they must place such a sign (or sign such a letter). Indeed, such an explicit command would be counter-productive. In such a case,

The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides the behind the façade of something high. And that something is ideology.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. (Havel 49-50)

And such we have here. I’m sure that in their hearts, some really do feel passionately, but medievalists happily go off to conferences in other states and countries that have objectionable laws. I myself narrowly missed being caught up in a police raid for illegal immigrants in a country where I was (legally) working, yet I have since attended conferences there several times. No, the point is not to change the Arizona law – no one is so pathetic to think that such an impotent boycott is going to cause any legal change – the point is to get others to acquiesce, to coerce others into acknowledging the scholars supposed ethical and moral superiority.

Havel tells us, from personal experience, that if the greengrocer begins to live within the truth, “the bill is not long in coming” (Havel 62). I’m sure I’ll be paying the bill for this – but I should acknowledge that the risk to me as a tenured professor is small compared to what Havel experienced. Some will no doubt openly hurl hateful accusations at me, probably accusing me of being racist, classist, or sexist (the three favorite accusations of academics). Others will just mutter darkly. Articles that would have once passed peer review may be rejected on vague grounds. Invitations that might have been offered to contribute to a conference or book will be withheld. I’ll lose some Facebook friends, and will probably have my website delinked.

But for me, this is a tiny price to pay for opposing the Academic Beast. Graduate students and junior faculty could find themselves devoured. To these I would say, live and speak according to your conscience, but know what happens to the greengrocer in the story. Tread carefully, and avoid the trap of believing that this medieval scholars’ debate has anything to do with immigration. In the future, when you see other similar issues, understand what is really being demanded of you.

Medieval Miscellany

• Got Medieval is now available on Twitter.
• Henchminion's got photos from Ottawa Medieval Camping Weekend.
• The Naked Philologist on women heroes in Arthurian literature, and whether talk might sometimes just be talk.

An "Old English Accent"

In this article about people auditioning for the Sarasota Medieval Fair, we're told of one of the castmates:

"I'm going to do everything correctly with your daughter, at least twice," he declared in a broken, old English accent.

Uh, I'm guessing they just mean "fake English accent" -- what would be an "old English" accent? And how could that accent be "broken?"

There's a photo gallery of the auditions here, and if you want to see a REAL Old English accent, there's one below.

Still Here

Sorry for the delay -- I've started working the video blogging, but a series of unrelated technical problems have kept me from posting. It's coming, really!

Sims Medieval

We can expect Sims Medieval at the end of next year. Apparently it'll be like the SCA for very lazy people who don't want to get up out of their desk chair.

Given my daughter's love the The Sims, I suspect we'll own this game when the time comes. I wonder if the armor rusts when a knight wets himself because his player won't let him go to the toilet?

Danger: Pothead Medievalism Ahead

Uh, despite the fact that this has James Franco, I doubt I'll be rushing out to see the film Your Highness next year. I'm guessing with the title and the reference to "wizard's weed" in the synopsis, this film plans to do for the Middle Ages what Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers did for the French Revolution.

So, basically this takes all the stoner jokes about hobbit pipeweed and extend them into feature-length.

Humidity and Bald Eagles

First, in this article about the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period, do the findings about moisture mean that, in Europe during the MWP, people first began saying, "Yeah, it's hot, but it's a dry heat"?

Second, exactly what role did the North American bald eagle play in the Middle Ages on the Isle of Wight? Seriously, like why did they have the eagle there at all? It seems rather like having llamas or kangaroos.

Ruins of Medieval Church Found in Switzerland

According to this article, the Swiss have found the remains of a medieval church under the town of Moutier. The article has no estimate as to the century, but there has been a monastery there since the middle of the Seventh Century.

As of today, no medieval churches have been unearthed in Troy, Alabama -- but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Pennsic 2010 Meet-Ups

I won't be there, but anyone interested in doing a meet-up at Pennsic this year can sound off on our Pennsic 2010 Meet-Ups Facebook discussion thread.

Woruldhord Project

Most of you out there already know about this from the days of the Wordhoard's hiatus, but Stuart Lee has an exciting project called the "Woruldhord Project" (no relation to the Unlocked Wordhoard, which is a shame because Lee and his work are both really groovy). Right now, The Woruldhord is just open for submissions, but lots of our Wordhoarders probably have things to submit. They are looking for:

Members of the public, of academia, of special interest groups are asked to submit via an online web site any images, documents, audio, video they have of material they would be happy to share with the rest of the world to further the study of Old English and the Anglo-Saxons.

We would welcome images of buildings, sites, artefacts; teaching handouts or presentations; audio of readings or interviews; video clips of crafts, sites; and so on. In fact anything that you feel would benefit teachers, researchers, and interested parties who wish to learn more about the Anglo-Saxons.

Oxford University will collect the material together and then make everything submitted freely available on the web for educational purposes to a worldwide audience.

Go forth and submit!

Recreating the Seneschal of Hainault's Challenge

Anyone going to Pennsic this year and interested in recreating the single combats resulting from the Seneschal of Hainault's Challenge, contact Will Mclean at A Commonplace Book.

Medievalist Gun Rack

I just realized that instead of having a gun rack in my car, I had three different swords in the back over the weekend. While I could claim I'm prepared for the zombie apocalypse, it probably signifies some weird sort of medievalist redneck.

Killing Your Friends and Father for Fun & Profit

I've been reading Usama ibn Munqidh's Book of Contemplation lately. Ibn Munqidh was an aristocrat who lived in 12th-century Syria, and his Book of Contemplation is about fate, and is mostly illustrated with events from his own life. It's also of interest because we get to see a bit of the Crusades from the Muslim side.

One event in the book has gotten me thinking about the problems of understanding other cultures -- not just other ethnic cultures, other religious cultures, or cultures separated from us by the long centuries of time, but also differences in social class.

We're told by UiM that "Al-Zafir [a caliph] now concocted a plan with Nasr [an amir of the same age, and son of the vizier 'Abbas], convincing him that, in Nasr killed his father, he would appoint him to the vizierate in his place." Later UiM hears about the plot, and warns Nasr that to kill his own father would leave him damned come the Day of Judgment. "He [Nasr] later acquainted his father ['Abbas] with the whole affair. So the latter behaved kindly towards him, won him over -- and plotted with him to murder al-Zafir. Al-Zafir and Nasr were the same age, and they used to go out together at night in disguise. So Nasr invited the caliph over to his house [....] As soon as the caliph was all settled in the sitting room, Nasr's men rushed out at him and killed him." (Paul M. Cobb's translation, Penguin edition).

Here's my problem with this -- I have trouble conceiving of this social situation arising at all. When I look at the family life of, say, Henry II, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but this is even more difficult to understand.

I try to imagine fictionalizing the dialogue, and can't come up with anything that would sound even remotely believable to modern audiences. Let's say two friends are out on the town -- how do you get around to "Hey, let's kill your dad!" And then, even assuming you're down with that, later telling your father about it, who says, "Hey, let's kill your friend!" It can't be true that all Syrian aristocrats were sociopaths, but the matter-of-fact way ibn Munqidh writes about it, and the number of people involved in the subsequent bloodbath makes it seem that way. Somehow this situation was a natural outgrowth of world they lived in.

Wordhoarder Reviews

One of the new features of the Unlocked Wordhoard will be "Wordhoarder Reviews," found on the discussion tab of the Facebook page. Though I'll still be the only one posting material to the Wordhoard blog, the Facebook page will encourage more community interaction.

Wordhoarder Reviews is a feature in which I invite people to give their own movie reviews on the discussion board. While sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb often provide both professional and amateur reviews, the online medievalist community can offer well-considered and often expert opinions on medievalist popular culture.

Our first Wordhoarder Review is of Valhalla Rising. If you've seen it, go to the Facebook discussion boards and tell us what you think!

FaceHoard

As some of you know, the Wordhoard has been in hibernation as I worked out various problems, particularly the connection with new social networking sites and some other conceptual issues. I'd become worried that the Wordhoard's identity as a meeting place between the popular and the scholarly was no longer tenable, that blogs were becoming an outdated medium.

So, today I'm beginning a process that will likely take some weeks: the re-emergence of the Wordhoard, more closely intertwined with new ways of accessing information online. Most of the content will be of the sort you've grown used to, some old features will wither away (RIP: Morning Medieval Miscellanies), and I plan to develop some new features.

I invite you to "Like" the Wordhoard on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and generally just beam medievalism directly into your brains in whatever ways are technologically possible. For now, the wall on the Facebook page is wide-open for your own posts and commentary on all things medieval, and I'll keep it as open as possible unless spammers, trolls, and other Grendel-kin become a problem.

Dragon*Con CfP

Call for Participation / Call for Abstracts

Institute for Comics Studies
Comic Book Convention Conference Series

DRAGON*CON 3rd ANNUAL COMICS & POPULAR ARTS CONFERENCE

Atlanta, Georgia September 3-6, 2010

The Institute for Comic Studies and Dragon*Con present their third annual academic conference for the studies of comics and the popular arts. The conference will take place at Dragon*Con, the largest multi- media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the US. For more info on Dragon*Con, visit http://dragoncon.org/

Please submit a proposal abstract for a 15/20-minute presentation that engages in substantial scholarly examinations of comic books, manga, graphic novels, anime, science/speculative fiction, fantasy, or other parts of popular culture. A broad range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives is being sought, including literary and art criticism, philosophy, linguistics, history, and communication. Proposals may range from discussions of the nature of the comics medium, analyses of particular works and authors, discussions of the visual language of comics, comics pedagogy, cross-cultural and cross-medium comparisons, and more.

This year, we're especially interested in proposals dealing with anime and manga, though we're open to any topics relevant to the study of comics and the popular arts.

This conference at Dragon*Con represents the Institute for Comics Studies' mission to promote the study, understanding, and cultural legitimacy of comics and to support the discussion and dissemination of this study and understanding via public venues.

100 to 200 word proposals due: May 30, 2010

Please submit your proposals at: http://www.hsu.edu/form.aspx?ekfrm=40054

More information at: http://www.utdallas.edu/~mattbrown/DragonCon.html

Send any questions to: thehangedman@gmail.com Participants must register for the convention. Information can be found here: http://dragoncon.org/members.php#DC_Memb

Prospective participants are encouraged to submit a guest application in advance at the following address: http://dragoncon.org/dc_guest_app.php

Acceptance to the academic conference is no guarantee of "guest" status at the convention (and indeed, it is very unlikely).

Matt Brown
Dragon*Con Academics Chair
thehangedman@gmail.com
www.instituteforcomicsstudies.org

Friday Child Sacrifice

Today I Stumbledupon this page of odd facts, at it includes this little gem:

The Anglo-Saxons believed Friday to be such an unlucky day that they ritually slaughtered any child unfortunate enough to be born on that day.

I've never even heard such a claim before. Does anyone know where it comes from?

The Ubiquity of Dante's Inferno and Breasts

In the run-up to the release of the new Dante's Inferno game, even before the marketing campaign hit high-gear, I noticed that the pop culture medieval flavor of the month had moved from Beowulf to Dante's Inferno. The culmination of this phenomenon occured earlier this week, when a student showed me his 19th-century edition of The Inferno, and within three minutes of that I ran into two other non-English majors reading Dante for fun. Of course, in the case of the two non-English majors, each was inspired by the game; one said, "my friends said I'd enjoy it more if I read the book first," and the other had already played the game and said, "the book is really different."

For more on the differences and the ubiquity of Beatrice's breasts, see Got Medieval's review of the game.

As a scholarly graybeard, I'm supposed to be immune to mass market commercialization of a classic of medieval literature in console game format, but I have to confess I'm so completely swept into it that I'm actually considering buying a console system just so I can play the game. I mean, look at this trailer:



I mean, how can I resist diving into Hell after Beatrice (and her breasts) to battle demons?

Beware of D&D LARPers!

Beware! If your colleague plays D&D, and even acts that crap out*, she'll probably open fire at a faculty meeting. Me, I have a shield in my office and a chainmail bowtie, so I'd no doubt survive, except in the unlikely event that she would roll a natural 20.

Really, now. I could understand if she had pulled a blade, or if she were addicted to Call of Duty or some game with a gun, this might, might be relevant. Good job, Boston Herald.


* I'm assuming the "acted that crap out" means she did LARPs, or Live Action Role-Playing.

On Chaucer and Valentine's Day

Friend of the Wordhoard K.A. Laity has a piece about Chaucer and Valentine's Day.

An Idea

As I complained in the comments of a previous post, aside from things like joining Facebook groups and online petitions, there's little pressure those of us can bring to bear outside the UK to save paleography at King's College London.

One thing we can do, however, is create a visual image. If enough of us make images like this, it just might have an effect.

Paleography at King's College London Petition

There's a petition to save paleography at King's College London here. I'm going to sign it, but I would especially urge us to encourage our colleagues in the UK to sign it. I suspect their voices will get more attention than mine.

A Passive-Aggressive Post for Google Reader

Dear Google Reader,

Please stop re-marking all my read posts as "unread" so that I have hundreds and hundreds of old posts to wade through every day, making it impossible for me to keep up on the news. Weeks of dealing with this stupidity has left me out of all the latest happenings.

For example, I just found out today about the threat to the King's College London Paleography Chair, something the rest of the medievalist world has apparently known about for a while. In fact, I just joined the "Save the King's London Paleography Chair" Facebook group about two minutes ago.

I love you Google Reader, but sometimes I don't know if you requite my feelings.

XOXOXO
Scott

RIP: Bruce Mitchell

Word has gone out that Bruce Mitchell has passed away. I have no further information at this time, but I believe he was in his 90s.

Pastist and Presentist

I'm using Kathleen Biddick's The Shock of Medievalism in something I'm writing. Though I generally have little good to say about the book, Biddick offers up terminology useful in establishing a framework for talking about medievalism.

Two of the most useful terms, however, are two of the ugliest: pastist (which “argues for radical historical difference between the Middle Ages and the present”)and presentist (which “looks into the mirror of the Middle ages and asks it to reflect back histories of modernist or postmodernist identities”). They're ugly on the page and ugly rolling of the tongue, and are kind of unsophisticated in their construction.* The terms are, however, very useful.

So, a plea -- has anyone out there run into terms that are roughly synomous with pastist and presentist but have a bit more elegance to them?



*That contemporary sage Ferris Bueller mocked the ugly and promiscuous slapping of suffixes on ideas during his notorious day off. As he teaches, "Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism." I would argue that the same goes for -ists. Also, let us not call this idea "Buellerism" except in the most ironic way.

K'zoo Schedule Up

The 2010 International Congress on Medieval Studies program is up!

Medieval America: Progress Report

Someone asked me recently how my monograph I'm working on, tentatively entitled Medieval America, is coming along. Since I haven't mentioned it in so long, here's a progress report.

Everything came to a crawl in the Fall semester, when a heavy teaching load (5 general education courses) and service responsibilities stopped me from doing much of anything else. I had nearly completed the chapter entitled "Medieval American History" when a technological failure ate most of what I'd done on it.

You would think that I'd be discouraged, but honestly it was a relief. When I write too slowly I lose my sense of voice, and instead turn out that horrible turgid academic prose that relies on footnotes where an explanatory argument would be better. I had all the material down, but I hated the way I had written it.

This semester (God willing) I'll have much more time to devote to Medieval America, and I think that lost chapter will be re-written much better than the first time I did it.

So, as a practical matter, I'm not much further along now than I was at the open of the fall semester, but I'm in a much better place. I'm going to start chopping the chapters up into conference presentations (no venues selected yet), so if you want a preview, by the end of the year you should be able to hear one.

Jewish-Christian Marriage

This is interesting: Archival evidence suggesting that despite prohibitions against it marriage between Jews and Christians in 15th-century Poland may have been more possible than previously thought.

Medieval Queens

Spinning Clio has re-printed an old post on medieval queens, which would be an excellent resource for non-academic medieval history buffs, particularly if you think you might be interested in medieval women's history.

The Six Million Dollar Beowulf

Easily in the top 10 cool things on TV in the 1970s was the episode of the Six Million Dollar Man in which Steve Austin fights Bigfoot, who as it turns out is also bionic and has been created by aliens for some reason that I cannot recall all these many decades ever.

One thing I didn't notice as a kid was the possible Beowulf analogue that we see around minute 6 of the clip below:



Steve Austin rips off Bigfoot's arm, then Bigfoot flees into some sort of underground lair. As I remember (and if anyone has seen the full episode more recently, please correct any of my errors), as it turns out, Bigfoot is just misunderstood, and they end up freezing him in cryogenic stasis or some other such thing.

It's possible that the arm-ripping isn't a Beowulf allusion, and is just a coincidence -- but then I wouldn't get the chance to post something so awesome on the Wordhoard, would I? Oh, and by the way, if you don't think the Six Million Dollar Man fighting Bigfoot is cool, then you are a bad person.

Girl Medieval Nerds

Medieval Living has a couple of recent posts revisiting the discussion of girl medieval nerds, one recommending girls read the works of Steven Till.

My own daughter fled from medieval geekdom* a few years ago, primarily because I would have liked it -- and there's nothing less cool than something your dad likes. All things medieval got jettisoned with all things literary.

I'm started to see the veneer cracking, though, as her own natural curiousity is getting the better of her. It started with history (with a brief enthusiasm for the Egyptians), then moved into Latin. Now, after hearing that a non-academic adult male friend was finding Pride and Prejudice "freakin' hilarious,"** she nonchalantly expressed an interest in that. We recently watched the movie Labyrinth, and she really enjoyed that -- the first open interest in anything vaguely medievalist.

So, for the female Wordhoarders out there, what medievalist bait would you suggest for a high school girl who's desperately trying not to show an interest in anything medieval? It has to be subtle, or she'll suspect the trap and I'll lose my quarry.


*I prefer the word "geek" to "nerd." For a brief overview of the difference, see here. Dork, of course, rarely applies to medieval enthusiasts.
** If you don't find Pride and Prejudice funny from the very first line, you're not reading it right.

Sypeck's Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier Available

Jeff Sypeck's The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier is now available in all sorts of different forms, from paper to PDF.

I wonder how much for a copy inscribed on vellum?

1999 Beowulf Still Bad

The 1999 futuristic film version of Beowulf starring Christopher Lambert was on TV the other day, so I decided to record it to see if maybe it had become fun in an ironic sort of way now that some time has passed. I wanted to write something about how medievalism is adapted to science fiction in the film.

I regret to report that it remains unwatchable. It took me three tries to get 20 minutes into it, and I can go no further. It still holds a 0% rating at Rotten Tomatoes which is, in a perverse way, impressive.

Medieval Style Brick Oven

While searching for something completely unrelated, I ran into these instructions for building a medieval-style brick oven. It's clearly not meant to be super authentic, since it has materials such as a cheap plastic tarp.

What I found fascinating was the claim that "Our oven is based on one from the 12th century found in an excavation at York, England (i.e., Norman period), although it is similar to earlier Viking Age ones. The original was made out of wickerwork and completely covered inside and out with daub."

A wickerwork oven? I never would have thought of that, but protected by daub, properly dried and fired, there's no reason that wouldn't have worked.

Here's someone else who underestimated the power of wicker for baking.

Demands that I Leave the Field

Over at History News Network, Jonathan Jarrett (perhaps better-known for his excellent blog, A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe) expresses annoyance with me for my piece on the Medieval Warm Period. If I take his argument correctly, he suggests that it is irrelevant whether the MWP occurred because MWP denial allows policies to be made today that he and other "thinking people" support.

Obviously I disagree, and have no immediate plans to seek non-medievalist employment, but his piece is worth a read.

Medievalists without Borders Redux

Medievalists.net recently re-ran an old article of mine, "Medievalists without Borders." Reading it now, it seems quaint that I had to explain what a blog is.

Still, the point I've made there is still valid. Others have argued with some justification that the blog is a dying genre, and that the new locus of community is social networking sites, like Facebook. I'm not sure we're quite using social networking right as a scholarly community, and I'm not even sure as a medium they are suitable for scholarly discourse except in a very narrow band.

We shouldn't be surprised to find the same issues today as three years ago -- after all, these are the same issues King Alfred faced. Only the context changes.

The Round Table of Pick-Up Artists

Someone sent me a book to read over Christmas Break: The Game, by Neil Strauss. It's a memoir of how Strauss fell into a group of pathetic losers who decided to re-make themselves into "pick-up artists," and mostly follows his own arch of becoming a leading figure within that community to his epiphany of the emptiness that life.

Near the end, about the time that he's figured out that all the pick-up artist strategies have left him surrounded by insecure, manipulative men (rather than the women he'd hoped for), one of his friends tells him the fable about the scorpion and the frog (the one in which the scorpion stings the frog even though they'll both drown because it's in his nature). Strauss, though, sees his situation as more Arthurian than Aesopian:

I went up to my room, showered, and paged through a copy of the medieval legend Parsifal I had recently bought. People often read books to search for themselves and find someone who agrees with them. And, right now, the nature of Parsifal agreed with me a lot more than the nature of the scorpion.
As I interpreted the legend, it's the story of a sheltered mother's boy who meets some knights and decides he wants to be just like them. So he goes off into the world, has a series of adventures, and progresses from legendary fool to legendary knight.
The country, at the time, has become a wasteland because the grail king (who guards the holy grail) has been wounded. And it just so happens that Parsifal is led to the grail castle, where he sees the king in terrible pain. As a compassionate human being, he wants to ask, "What is wrong?" And, according to legend, if someone pure of heart asks that question of the king, he will be healed and the blight on the land will be lifted.
However, Parsifal does not know this. And as a knight he has been trained to observe a strict code of conduct, which includes the rule of never asking questions or speaking unless he is addressed first. So he goes to bed without talking to the king. In the morning, he wakes to discover that the grail castle has disappeared. He has blown his chance to save king and country by obeying his training instead of his heart. Unlike the scorpion, Parsifal had a choice. He just made the wrong one.
When I walked through the living room to get a drink from the kitchen, I saw Mystery nursing another cocktail in front of the TV. He was watching a video of The Karate Kid and crying. "I never had a Mr. Miyagi," he sobbed, wiping tears off his reddened cheeks. He was drunk. "My dad didn't teach me anything. All I wanted was a Mr. Miyagi."
I suppose we were all searching for someone to teach us the moves we needed to win at life, the knightly code of conduct, the ways of the alpha-male. That's why we found each other. But a sequence of maneuvers and a system of behavior would never fix what was broken inside. Nothing would fix what was broken inside. All we could do was embrace the damage. (p. 415)

The book is a bit tedious (over 400 pages for Strauss to figure out what most men figure out in their early 20s, of what he could have learned just by reading Proverbs), but here in the end we see the bond to the leige depicted as a desirable father-son bond, rather than a socio-economic bond. Mystery here is enacting the sorrow of Anglo-Saxon elegies like The Wanderer, cut off not just from family and friends, but also from the lord and mentor. Perhaps the real Grail quest is for a Mr. Miyagi.

What Santa's Elves Wrought

This year I didn't get a lot of medievalist gifts (I'm now at that age when I'm genuinely excited to get socks) but Santa's elves did make me something special at his workshop: A custom-made chainmail bow tie.

Of course, this was quality elf workmanship (workelfship?), but if you like what you see here and want something similar, I've heard rumors that Chained Elegance consults with the North Pole. They're the same outfit Allegra Torres gets her stuff from.

So what about all of you? What exciting medievalist gifts did Santa bring you? Any cool new books? Games? Recreational garb? If it's something that has to be seen to be appreciated, go head and send me an image and I'll try to post it.

End-of-the-Year Round-Ups

Medieval News has the top 10 medieval news stories of 2009, and here are all the Ancient/Medieval Carnivalesques of 2009:

Carnivalesque 47
Carnivalesque 49
Carnivalesque 51
Carnivalesque 53 (This one is now password protected; Sorry, I can't do anything about that)
Carnivalesque 55
Carnivalesque 57

Getting Medieval's Medieval Christmas

Getting Medieval has a nice post on medieval Christmas.

Robin Hood Trailer

Someone who really hates high taxes:

When Medieval Cathedrals Attack!

Berlusconi has learned the hard way -- never turn your back on a medieval cathedral, or even a replica of one. Here's more on the actual cathedral itself.

Perhaps Saint Ambrose is unhappy about something?

December Saints Calendar

Got Medieval has the saints up for the first half of December, including one particularly famous one you may have heard of...

Update on the CRU Scandal and the Medieval Warm Period

We’ve now heard back from the Wordhoard’s resident Science Dude* on his review of the CRU e-mails and the kerfuffle they’ve caused. In addition to the e-mails, he’s looked at some of the published results that came out of them. As promised, I report to you his findings.

Some of the public sturm und drang over the e-mails is over things that are either misunderstood by laymen or simply the casual way that two academics might talk with one another over presumably private e-mails. For example, a lot of cry has gone up over the sentence, “Next time I see [prominent global warming skeptic] at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.” Well, heck, there are some colleagues in my own field I’m tempted to beat the crap out of, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I had expressed that in an e-mail to a friend. It’s the kind of thing you write in an e-mail to someone you know well, not the kind of thing you publish in a footnote.

Science Dude does find, however, that at many points the e-mails reveal “bad science,” “deception,” and academic bad behavior ranging from the “sloppy” to “beyond the pale.” Beyond the unethical behavior, he notes, there also appears to be illegal behavior in the requests to delete e-mails to avoid FoIA requirements, something that is illegal as “anyone getting grants at that level would know” ((though I should note he is Science Dude, not Legal Dude). Because you can’t really be fined or prosecuted for being a bad scientist, but you can be for violating the Freedom of Information Act, Science Dude says “I can also say I would rather be Michael Mann than Phil Jones right now,” and he notes that even the other participants in the e-mails are quickly distancing themselves from Jones – a very bad sign indeed.

To see “the most honest thing written” on the CRU scandal to date, Science Dude recommends reading Eduardo Zorita’s “Why I Think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and Stefan Rahmstorf Should Be Barred from the IPCC Process.” Science Dude notes that Zorita has probably done serious damage to his career by writing it – which also explains why I’m respecting Science Dude’s anonymity.

Now, for the part that affects us here at the Wordhoard – the Medieval Warm Period. In one now-notorious e-mail, Michael Mann wrote that “it would nice to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’” (or Medieval Warm Period), but Mann has since argued that what he meant by that was that he simply wanted to identify exactly when the MWP began, not deny its existence. Science Dude, however, finds Mann’s explanation unbelievable, both in the context of the e-mail and Mann’s other publications. Read enough of what Mann has written about the MWP (or what he prefers to call the “Medieval Climate Anomaly”), and you’ll see that his explanation doesn’t pass the laugh test. Whether the MWP was just an anomaly or not, Mann clearly meant to hide it in the data.

At the end of the day, the requests by Jones to delete e-mails were not just probably illegal – they were also clear signs of conscious deception. At best they were like Colonel Jessep in A Few Good Men, shouting “You can’t handle the truth!” As Science Dude points out, deciding what the public can and can’t handle is “a dangerous business for scientists to get into.”

Even more troublesome within the scientific community is the reliance on the CRU for binned data. Binning data is a process that that’s intended to eliminate small observational errors, but it can be very computer intensive, so other scientists have been acting in good faith using the CRU’s binned data for their own work – but if that data was massaged to aim toward a particular end rather than eliminating error, the hard work of honest scientists has been compromised. Science Dude doesn’t have access to the unbinned data to compare with the binned data (nor would he likely have the time or resources to do so just as a favor to me) regarding the Medieval Warm Period, but the CRU scandal opens the possibility that some of what we think about the MWP will have to be revised as we get more honest data.


*Science Dude is a legitimate university scientist – millions of bucks in grants over the years, full professor, etc. He characterizes himself as a believer in climate change, and would not call himself an anthropogenic climate change “skeptic,” but notes that climate is always changing. He would argue that the question as to whether and to what degree human activity affects that climate change is uncertain.

The Third-Millennium Scriptorium

Here's an article about how a monk is preserving manuscripts digitally. Unfortunately, it's behind the Chronicle's subscriber firewall, but you get the idea.

You're All in Trouble

There is a Medieval Games for Wii and I was not informed?! You're all in trouble now.

Medievality

Here's a website that's new to me: Medievality. h/t Ninalog.

Staffordshire Hoard Valued at £3.285 million

H/t to Archaeology in Europe for the first three links:
BBC News
Culture 24
Guardian
Telegraph

For those like me who are too lazy to convert to dollars, it's about $5.4 million.

Assassin's Creed II

I've never even seen Assassin's Creed played, but I hear enough about it to know that for a certain segment of the population, it's the main thing they know about popular medievalism.

This Christmas, Assassin's Creed II might be the most popular medievalist product out there. Here's Medievalists.net story about it.

Has anyone out there played it yet? How is it in terms of historical accuracy or literary themes?

Medieval HOs and Gunpowder

Medievalists.net has a set of videos of the Historical Ordnance workshop testing medieval gunpowder recipes. Though we think of the sword, spear, bow and the shield as the mainstays of medieval warfare, there was gunpowder. The problem with gunpowder is that it required ingredients that often couldn't be found locally and therefore couldn't really be mass-produced in the way required for transforming warfare.

In a sign of my continuing immaturity, I snickered every single time the speaker on the Historical Ordnance Seminar referred to it as the "HO group."

h/t Cronaca

The Medieval Warm Period and the CRU E-Mails

Recently hackers broke into the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit and posted about 62 megs of internal e-mails about the CRU's work.* The e-mails have caused a scandal because they appear to suggest that the CRU researchers have been burying and manipulating data to create the illusion of man-caused global warming.

For a layman reading the e-mails, it is hard to tell -- sometimes in private conversations academics have short-hand ways of talking about things that could be misconstrued if overheard. I'm going to contact a friend much more expert in such things than me to get his take, to see if these are innocent remarks, evidence of sloppiness, or outright nefariousness.

As regular Wordhoarders know, I've been very critical of the treatment of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in this country. In the past, NOAA has posted summaries of its research on their paleoclimatology page that I found misleading and at odds with the actual research cited. Until last year, NOAA's page suggested there there was no Medieval Warm Period, but they quietly began to acknowledge it (along with the Little Ice Age), but they fudge it by writing, "In summary, it appears that the late 20th and early 21st centuries are likely the warmest period the Earth has seen in at least 1200 years." Incidentally, elsewhere NOAA still calls it the "so-called Medieval Warm Period."

In any case, some of the commentary about the CRU e-mails has been regarding the Medieval Warm Period, but much of it has been redacted to just include the dirty stuff, so here I offer you the more complete context from an e-mail exchange started on June 4th, 2003:

[W]hat I had in mind were the following two figures: 1) A plot of various of the most reliable (in terms of strength of temperature signal and reliability of millennial-scale variability) regional proxy temperature reconstructions around the Northern Hemisphere that are available over the past 1-2 thousand years to convey the important point that warm and cold periods where highly regionally variable. Phil and Ray are probably in the best position to prepare this (?). Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back--I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back [Phil and I have one in review--not sure it is kosher to show that yet though--I've put in an inquiry to Judy Jacobs at AGU about this]. If we wanted to be fancy, we could do this the way certain plots were presented in one of the past IPCC reports (was it 1990?) in which a spatial map was provided in the center (this would show the locations of the proxies), with "rays" radiating out to the top, sides, and bottom attached to rectanges showing the different timeseries. Its a bit of work, but would be a great way to convey both the spatial and temporal information at the same time. 2) A version of the now-familiar "spaghetti plot" showing the various reconstructions as well as model simulations for the NH over the past 1 (or maybe 2K). To give you an idea of what I have in mind, I'm attaching a Science piece I wrote last year that contains the same sort of plot.

Anyway, there you have it in fuller context for you to form your own opinion. Obviously, the dirty part people are talking about here is where the writer discusses trying to "contain" the Medieval Warm Period by consciously employing the logical fallacy of cherry picking a data set.


*I hesitated at first to post something that was illegally hacked, but I decided to press forward because 1.) the e-mails are already now fully public, and 2.) now that people know they are there, they've also been made public through legal means as well, and 3.) when in doubt, it's better to talk about the facts. My apologies to any Wordhoarders who find this ethically questionable.

Beautiful Odin Figurine

What I want for Christmas can be found at Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa: a stunning figurine of Odin on his throne.

Did They Have Thanksgiving in the Middle Ages?

This is the time of year that people invariably ask me about Thanksgiving in the Middle Ages. Did they have it? What was it like?

Tolkien tells us, "Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both yes and no," and the same could be said about academics. The answer about medieval Thanksgiving is both yes and no.

Let's start with the "no." Thanksgiving as Americans think about it is a national holiday. Though the general idea of thanking God for the harvest is so ancient as to be pre-historic, for Americans it is also tied into a particular historical moment: The first (American) Thanksgiving at Plymouth* in 1621, when the pilgrims invited the Wampanoag indians to join them in thanking God for saving them (with the Wampanoag people and their interpreter, Squanto, as God's presumed primary instruments).

So in that sense, Thanksgiving is a strictly American holiday. That being said, it is part of a broad, global ritual of thanking God (or the gods) for the harvest, and so is not at all particularly American.

Lots of other countries have harvest festivals today, called any number of things, including Thanksgiving. Indeed, I've never lived in any country that didn't have some kind of harvest festival, but it may be that some cultures don't. Whether you're thanking Demeter, or the spirits of your ancestors, or the Christian God, the general forms are similar -- a merry feast of thanksgiving.

So what about the Middle Ages? Well, if you think about the liturgical calendar, you'll see that there are lots of feast days just as there are days for fasting. Those feast days often functioned much as we might consider Thanksgiving. Indeed, a town with a local saint whose feast day was in the fall might find very little gap between the saint's day and the harvest celebration.

Want an example? Read the opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- the setting is a Yule celebration at Camelot. Yule, of course, is today closely related to Christmas, but if you read the description it will also sound a lot like Thanksgiving. In that description I think we see an idealized version of what a medieval harvest festival might look like.

What did they eat? This is a tough one, since the "Middle Ages" spans many centuries and spills over from Europe onto north Africa and west Asia -- it no doubt differed from place to place. One place might have pork as a tradition, while another might have goose, while another might have venison. Some of the foods Americans traditionally associate with Thanksgiving are New World resources, and so would definitely not have been eaten, turkey being the prime example of this.

Regardless of what you eat or what you call it, Thanksgiving is part of a tradition that stretches back beyond the Middle Ages, probably into pre-history. Agrarian societies are very aware of the various forces beyond are control that can lead to a good or lean harvest, and even today when most of us don't grow our own food, we see that forces beyond our control can shape our financial ability to buy that same food. Even today, we understand that we need to thank God for all we have.


*Yes, I know you Jamestown folks claim the first, so please don't write any angry e-mails. I'm talking about the popular imagination here, and outside of Virginia, when people think of the first Thanksgiving they think of Plymouth.

Still Breathin'

I've received many concerned e-mails about the lack of blogging on the Wordhoard -- it's been about three weeks.

No need for concern. I had a string of terrible technical problems that all got repaired about the same time that I entered the busiest two-week period of the semester, a time that I'd planned for slow blogging.

Basically, I'm taking a short haitus from blogging, during which time I'm thinking about some changes I'd like to make to it. Unless the muse strikes me, I'll probably take just a few more days of thought. During this time I've not been reading other people's blogs either.

Think of it as a sort of sabbatical, after which I hope to tweak the direction of the Wordhoard a bit. Don't worry -- I'll be back shortly, no I'm not sick or injured, and yes I plan to keep the Wordhoard going.