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.

French = Medieval Terrorists

Though I take his point in this article on the Battle of Agincourt, I doubt the French will appreciate the comparison to al Qaeda -- or maybe that was the point of the comment?

Even if you take away Agincourt, the English will always have an abiding love of insulting the French to unite them.

Questions about Minstrels, Troubadours, Jongleurs, and Trouveres? We've Got Answers!

Today I received the following e-mail, from a student who was no doubt looking for Professor Awesome, PhD (expert on everything), and not the lowly Nokes (expert on a tiny number of obscure things). Identifying details have been redacted:

My name is [Whoever] and I am a senior [in high school]. In our English class we are required to write a twelfth-year research paper. I have chosen the topic of comparing and contrasting the work and lifestyles of medieval minstrels, troubadors, jongleurs, and trouveres. Besides the usual paper/Internet sources of information, we are required to interview an expert for our papers.

Well, I'm generally an expert on medieval lit, but not a specialist on troubadours ... but I know there are lots of Wordhoarders out there who know more on this topic than you can imagine. So, I call on the collective Vahalla of medievalists to respond to this young woman's six questions:

1. How did poems and styles of stories differ between medieval entertainers?
2. Where would minstrels and troubadors perform their lyric poems?
3. Were minstrels literate? Could they read and write music? Explain.
4. How were troubadors trained? By their own families? Were they apprenticed to masters? Were they trained in guilds?
5. What was the level of education of jongleurs? Were they often self-taught?
6. What other important ideas about my topic can you tell me that I have failed to ask you for?

Reasons to Date a Medievalist

Over on Facebook, a discussion recently erupted about reasons to date geeks. Through a link someone posted, I saw that articles and posts on this subject abound, but they're typically about computer geeks specifically. What the world needs is an apologia for dating medievalists. Here are just a few reasons:

Romance -- medieval troubadours invented romance. Want a woman who knows how to be the coquette damsel? A medievalist is for you. Want a man who will literally fight in your name in shining armor? Again, you're looking for a medievalist. Medievalists understand the deep symbolic resonance of a rose, and they're not afraid to use it.

Brains -- Let's face it, as a class medievalists are just plain smarter than other people. Academic medievalists can often read more dead languages than most people can read living languages. We know what happened between the fall of Rome and the discovery of the New World. We know art, philosophy, you name it. You'll never find conversation with a medievalist dull.

Crafts -- Popular medievalists hold the hands-on knowledge. They do their own leatherworking, smith their own armor and inscribe their own manuscripts. These are women who can start with an unsheered sheep and end with a beautiful, ornate article of clothing. These are men who look at plywood and see the start of a shield. If you're dating a medievalist, you'll find lots of repairs around the house or alterations to your clothing just get done.

Costumes -- For a medievalist, Halloween means standing in front of your closet changing garb from one period or region to another. Plus, your costume is likely to be tailor-made.

Sex -- Medievalists have know the Art of Courtly Love, and can probably discuss sexuality through Augustine and Jerome. If your name is John and you want to be called Eleanor, a medievalist understands why. We're the ones who can really get medieval on your ass -- but we know the limits, thanks to Abelard & Heloise. Plus the costume thing, if that's your scene.

Religion -- We'll go to church with you, and when's the last time you had a lover who did that? Plus, we'll actually enjoy the liturgy.

Apocalypse -- If civilization collapses, who would you rather be with: the National Guard, or the Society for Creative Anachronism? I'd go with the SCA, because as soon as the gasoline and ammo run out, you'll need guys who can fletch their own arrows and pierce a zombie's eye at 50 yards. Never again have a date go bad because of unexpected apocalypse.


These are just a few reasons, but I'm sure you Wordhoarders can come up with more. So, medievalists and those who love us, tell us your own reasons in the comments.

Review: Dante's Inferno Boardgame

If you think Dante's Inferno might be a difficult text to turn into a game, well, you're right. The Dante's Inferno boardgame makes a bold try, but the very nature of the subject matter means that the metaphor of the game becomes confused in order to make it playable.

When I played this game with a small group of folks, we found the board itself rather interesting. The game doesn't exactly have a board; rather, it's like a puzzle that you set up. Unlike some other moving-clicklets-around-a-table style games, in this game, you assemble the puzzle as you go. Placing more pieces allows access inward (toward the center of Hell), but in our game we never reached a point where all the pieces were placed, replicating the broken bridges you find in Dante's work.

The goal of the game is to manuever one of your men (we called them pilgrims in my group, but the game just calls them "player figures") down to the center of Hell to defeat Satan. In order to do so, players have to avoid the occasional wandering demon and the sabotage of competing players. To progress, players acquire four different resources that they can spend to do various things -- place a tile, pick of a tile, put an additional player figure into play, or descend to a lower circle of Hell.

In terms of play, our first game didn't go well, but I think the consensus was that it wasn't the fault of the game, it was simply that we didn't understand it well enough to place pilgrims and player resources strategically at the beginning. The first few circles of Hell were a grind, but eventually we started acquiring resources to progress, and the game picked up steam. I would suggest to anyone buying this game to expect the first session to be less than fun, rather tedious, though I think subsequent game sessions would be much more fun as players figure out strategy.

The metaphor of the game is a bit messed up. For example, the four resources players collect are each sins (lust, violence, gluttony, and hypocrisy). This led to some bizarre statements, such as, "I can't get anywhere without more hypocrisy" or "I'll trade anyone some of my lust for some gluttony" (thus was prostitution born, I would guess). This all made sense in game play, but why would it be useful to collect sin as a resource in Hell? Wouldn't that be a bad thing? If you're a pilgrim, you don't want sin to keep you there, and if you're one of the damned, you don't want to end up in an inner-more circle, do you?

Finally, the object of the game was odd: To get to the center of Hell and defeat Lucifer. Defeat Lucifer? He's already frozen at the center of Hell -- what more exactly could you do to him? At first I thought the object was to be some sort of Messiah figure and lead four kinds of sinners out of Hell past Lucifer, but that's not the way the game works.

So, Dante's Inferno boardgame -- fun once you figure out the strategy, a little iffy on translating the book to game medium.

Michael Drout Is Hot

One unintended(?) side effect of Michael Drout's appearance on the History Channel's Clash of the Gods series is that at least one of my undergrads has developed a crush on him and thinks he's hot.

Of course he's hot. Aren't all medievalists?

The Wordhoard LIVES!

In my efforts to upgrade the Wordhoard with the latest techno-stuff, I kinda crashed the site with nasty java scripting (whatever that is. I'm just a parrot repeating what I'm told). After a few days my minion Nina was able to bring the Wordhoard back from the dead ... she's a sort of cyber-necromancer.

Here's the upshot for the time being:
1.) No #medieval Twitter feed. Messing around with that was where I did bad stuff.
2.) Comments will still not appear on the front page. Methinks Nina's still working on that one. To me, that's the more important of the two -- the kind of detail that made the Wordhoard a public space rather than just my own innane natterings.

Anyway, three cheers to Nina (and her husband Michael) for all their technohelp over the last few days. Oh, yeah, Michael helped me pick out a netbook! For those of you who are more comfortable with medieval manuscripts, think of a desktop computer as a folio, a laptop as a quarto, and a netbook as an octavo. I've got a new electronic octavo.

Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa

Here's a brand-new blog: Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa. The inaugural post is on Old English metathesis.

The Free Market Economy Insults Me

I've got a colleague who's always checking to see if his books are being sold used online, and what the going rate is. Out of curiosity (and to avoid looking at midterms), I checked out my own Global Perspectives on Medieval English Literature, Language, and Culture.

ABEBooks lists four copies right now -- priced at $28.00, $30.00, $30.50, and $87.98.

Wait ... $87.98? The book is still in print, and sells for $45 from MIP! Someone out there is hoping to get double that? What is it, a gold-plated edition?

But wait -- there's an insult lurking elsewhere in those results. The $28.oo description runs like this: "Hardcover with DJ. Unread, as new."

Unread?! UNREAD?! You couldn't even be bothered to break the binding? So basically, you took one look at this book and said to yourself, "This looks so bad that not only will I never read it, but I'll sell it at half its value in the hope that someone will use it as toilet paper!"

So, to whomever sold my book unread, I say this: Therein were the secrets of the universe. And now you'll never know them. So there.

RIP: Peter Foote

Old Norse News discusses the career of Peter Foote.

Morning Medieval Miscellany

Let's see how much I can get done before the supplicants come regarding their midterms:

• The medieval word(s) of the day are parchment and vellum.
• October 14th is Norman Conquest day! To celebrate, I plan to shoot an Englishman in the eye.
• I was disappointed that this story about ritual pits discovered in Bulgaria wasn't about anything gruesome.
• The MLA is doing a survey for the 2nd edition of Approaches to Teaching Beowulf.
• Drout talks about his own participation in Clash of the Gods: The Lord of the Rings. Though he's a little bit grumpy about it, it seems to me that the errors were small, and mostly those of emphasis rather than fact. Considering that it could have been a more along the lines of Monster Hunters, etc., I was pleased with it.
• A Stitch in Time is working with gold thread. Beautiful!
• Steven Till writes about A Feast for Crows.
• Karma talks about "angel knights" in Chretien de Troyes.
• The Swain discusses whether or not Kalamazoo has grown looney. If the midterms that come in later today don't wipe me out mentally, I may weigh in.
• News for Medievalists has over a dozen new articles. Don't miss it.
• Here's Kunera, a website with thousands of medieval badges and ampullae. h/t Medieval Silkwork.
• Muhlberger points us to a new translation of the Menagier of Paris, and discusses the prowess of the small of stature.
• Medieval Material Culture Blog has about a dozen new exhibits.
• Magistra et Mater discusses Louis the Pious.
• The Lost Fort has images of medieval Brunswick.
• The folks at In the Middle take offense to Chivas Regal's "Live with Chivalry" ads.
• I want to have a book launch with swordfighting too!
• The Dark Ages Recreation Company tells us how to sign up.
• If you ever want to assault a castle, all you need is a bowling ball and a bicycle wheel.
• The Heroic Age has over a dozen new posts.
• Got Medieval has your October Saints Calendar.
• Dame Eleanor Hull talks about visual memory and manuscript pages. Back in the day when I worked more regularly with manuscripts, I was deeply impressed (and envious) of scholars who could recall with accuracy the most minute details of a leaf. As for me, the other day I forgot the shelfmark of one of the two manuscripts I wrote my dissertation about!
• Archaeology in Europe has a few new medieval items.

Hooray! With only two interruptions, I finished it!

Morning Medieval Miscellany

Now that I'm back from Cub Scout camp, it's time for a Miscellany!

• Ozark Medieval Fortress has a new website.
• Archaeology in Europe has a couple dozen new posts.
• The Bitter Scroll tells us of the etymology of the word empty.
• A Commonplace Book has a poem suggesting one scenario as to how the Staffordshire Hoard got there.
• A Corner of Tenth Century Medieval Europe discusses The Long Morning of Medieval Europe again, a reports on the sessions at the Rosamund McKitterick birthday conference.
• Dante blogging continues with Canto XX.
• Dame Eleanor Hull explains why being a medievalist is like going back to kindergarten.

And that's it for now. I started putting this together four hours ago, and a string of students seeking advice on their midterms has prevented me from looking at more than the above. Enjoy! I hope to catch up later.