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.

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.