Books to be written, books to be destroyed - Medieval News Roundup

Our collection of interesting news, videos and tweets about the Middle Ages.

Finally, check out this image of the November issue of Vogue Paris, where Adriana Lima shows off some 'neo-armor' from Dolce & Gabbana.

Sea Monsters, Bones, and Textbooks: Medieval News Roundup

The Bones of Charlemagne

Swiss researchers believe they have confirmed that the 94 bones and bone fragments kept at Aachen Cathedral belong to the first Holy Roman Emperor. Professor Frank Rühli of the University of Zurich explains, "Thanks to the results from 1988 up until today, we can say with great likelihood that we are dealing with the skeleton of Charlemagne."

The remains of Charlemagne were taken out of his grave in the 12th century and put into various reliquaries. The researchers took various measurements of the remaining bones, and conclude that he was about six feet tall and thinly built.

You can read more details from Medieval Histories

Medieval Sea Monsters

The Public Domain Review website has a posted an article about the drawings of the sea creatures made by the 16th century writer Olaus Magnus and his influence on sea lore. They note:

The northern seas of the marine and terrestrial map teem with fantastic sea monsters either drawn or approved by Olaus. The most dramatic of those, off the busy coast of Norway, below the dreaded Maelström, is the great serpent, coiling around a ship’s mast and lunging with bared teeth at a sailor on the deck.

You can see more images and the full article from the Public Domain Review

What's wrong with History Textbooks

David Cutler, writing in The Atlantic, is finding that high-school history textbooks in the U.S. are not very useful for teaching history. His reasons for this include:

1. Textbooks present history as unchanging, but as time passes, our understanding and interpretation of the past constantly evolves. 
2. Textbooks are one-sided, offering a top-down, often white-male-centric view of history. 
3.  Without a thesis or any semblance or argument, textbooks don’t accurately reflect how most scholars (at least good ones) write and present history. Teachers should assign readings that model effective historical writing. 
4. Most importantly—and this merits repeating—textbooks are boring and intimidating. 
5. Textbooks can serve as a crutch for teachers who don’t know history or the historian’s craft.

While this article is aimed at teaching American history in High School, some of the observations might also be apt for the use of textbooks in college or first year university history courses too.

Click here to read this article from The Atlantic

Gutenberg, Executions, Medicis, Vikings, Hobbits and more - medieval news roundup

A medieval news roundup for the weekend...

If you are a fan of Marshall McLuhan or have an interest in the history of printing, this interview from the Columbia Journalism Review might interest you. In this post, entitled The future is medieval, they talk with Thomas Pettitt and Lars Ole Sauerberg from the University of Southern Denmark about their “Gutenberg Parenthesis” idea. It deals with how digital media will be tipping the scales between oral and print communication, the first change we have seen since Gutenberg started his printing machine. It includes some talk about the medieval period, such as:

The Middle Ages was not strong on membership of communities. They were not obsessive about inside versus outside. They didn’t emphasize, “I’m a denizen of this town, I’m a citizen of this country, I belong in this nation, behind these frontiers.” They saw themselves rather like Hobbits (Tolkien was a medievalist). Hobbits knew their relatives to the seventh degree: second cousins three times removed, and so on. In the Middle Ages people saw themselves as part of a network of connections. They knew their family trees. They knew with whom they were related. They identified themselves as a node in a network and they saw pathways, connections to other people in their extended family. They also saw themselves in terms depending on their profession. If they were in the Church, they saw themselves in the Church hierarchy as being a priest here, subject to the archdeacon here, subject to the bishop there, and the archbishop and the pope. You could have status by being the servant to a servant to someone important.

You can also listen to this talk they were part of from MIT:

Slate magazine offers this fascinating excerpt from The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, by Joel F. Harrington. It details how 16th century executioners performed their task. For example:

During his own 45-year career and 187 recorded executions with the sword, Meister Frantz required a second stroke only four times (an impressive success rate of 98 percent), yet he dutifully acknowledges each mistake in his journal with the simple annotation botched. 

The New York Times has a short article about how nine children from the wealthy and poweful Medici family have been found to have rickets, a disease caused by a lack of Vitamin D and usually associated with the poor. In this case, "the researchers said the children were probably deprived of sunlight, which spurs the body to make vitamin D. Wealthy children of that time were often tightly swaddled and kept inside, with suntans discouraged as signs of low standing."

Sticking with the Medici's, Three Pipe Problem (a great blog) has an interview with Edward Goldberg, who does extensive research on that family and on the Jewish community in Renaissance Italy.

ScienceNordic reports that a 1200 year old Carolingian coin has been discovered in Norway. Jon Anders Risvaag, from NTNU University Museum, explains “Two factors make this find stand out. Firstly, this coin is older than the Carolingian coinage reform, and so far the oldest coin from Charlemagne’s reign found in Norway. Secondly, this coin was not found in a grave, in contrast to almost all other coins from Charlemagne and his successors that have been found in Norway.”

If you are interested in the Vikings, go over to Medieval Histories, where Karen Schousboe has written several posts about the Norsemen, including an indepth review of an exhibition Vikings 2013 at the National Museum in Copenhagen.

Finally, the CBC (our public broadcaster here in Canada), has this article Film, TV tourism spikes with Game of Thrones, The Hobbit. Fans seem to be heading to Northern Ireland, Dubrovnik and New Zealand to check out the beautiful backdrops to their favourite shows/movies. New Zealand tourism is cashing on in the Hobbit (like they did with Lord of the Rings movies) with their "100% Middle-earth, 100% Pure New Zealand" campaign.

Reading, Insulting, Taxing, Finding and Stealing - medieval news roundup

What did people read in the Middle Ages?

A new book is looking at how people in late-medieval London read. Arthur Bahr, a professor of literature at MIT, found that many people maintained eclectic reading habits.

In his latest work, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations in Medieval London, shows the ways people in the Middle Ages would create books that included a wide variety of different texts, including chronicles, letters, literature and religious texts. For example, Andrew Horn, the chamberlain for the city of London in the 1320s, bound together various texts, including legal treatises, French-language poetry, and descriptions of London.

Arthur Bahr comments, “Horn actually uses the construction of his books to create literary puzzles for his reader. One poem just doesn’t make sense, but if you read the poem in juxtaposition with the legal treatise that comes after, then the two pieces make sense. He’s suggesting that the law and literature are sort of the yin and the yang, you need both. And that is kind of amazing, really.”

Click here to read more from MIT News.

Top Five Insults from Medieval Flanders

Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, who did research on Flemish rebels in the later Middle Ages, found that these men could hurl insults with the best of them. The top five were:

1.  ‘A bad chicken was brooding’ 
2.  ‘Son of a bitch’ 
3.  ‘I shit on you’ 
4.  ‘Liver eater’ 
5.  ‘Kill! Kill!’

Some of these insults are rather obvious, others take a bit of understanding. Check out the article The five most common insults and slogans of medieval rebels from Oxford University Press to learn more.

Taxes between Wales and England

Nia M.W. Powell of Bangor University writes about at taxation records from England and Wales between the 13th and 17th centuries. While it seems in the Middle Ages it could be quite difficult for the crown to get consent for tax subsidies from the commons, efforts were made to make a more uniform tax regime during the 16th century.

Powell adds, "Early modern Wales has been presented so frequently as “poor little Wales”, a land of backward impoverishment lagging behind its prosperous and “progressive” English counterpart, a country lacking towns and even rejecting urban civility, a country struggling against the odds.

"This is not the picture drawn by early modern taxation records, particularly with regard to urban life. Port towns in north and south Wales reveal an enviable prosperity among its inhabitants that equalled and surpassed most urban centres in south-west England."

You can read Powell's article Welsh History Month: Tax records throw light on the story of Wales from Wales Online.

Other news bits:

Archaeologists in Estonia have discovered the skeletal remains of a man in Tartu Catherdral. Martin Malve, of the University of Tartu, says, “We can currently say that the skeleton originates from the 13-15th century, when tombs were actively used for burials. The skeleton belonged to a man aged 40-50. Initial examination shows that the teeth were relatively unworn; there were a few teeth missing from when he was alive, as well as plaque and dental cavities. The right elbow [...] had a healed bone fracture that could have resulted from trying to stop a fall,” Read more from Estonia Public Broadcasting

Archaeologist with the Gwynedd Archaeological Trust have discovered a Roman construction camp and early medieval cemetery in Wales. Check out this article from the BBC or read the full archaeological report.

In Ireland thieves stole an entire window from a medieval church.

Finally, did you know that Byzantine art from 1174 influenced this year's fashion trends? No...neither did I. So says The Guardian in this article 12 great years for fashion.

Black Death, Northampton Castle find, and history-related crowd-funding projects

BoingBoing has just posted an article Shedding light on the Black Death, which offers a good overview of recent research on the plague that struck the medieval world in the 14th century. It includes an interview with Sharon DeWitte of the University of South Carolina, who is one of the leading researchers in the field. She raises some of the important questions still being asked about the Black Death, such as why it was destructive. “The Black Death killed between 30 and 50 percent of the affected population,” she notes. “Modern plague, at most, kills between 2 and 3 percent, and that’s even in areas without access to modern medicine.”

They also note that the recent find of a possible Black Death cemetery in London might be very helpful in this area of research.

The Northampton Chronicle and Echo reports that archaeologists have discovered one of the buildings that was part of Northampton Castle in the 12th century. One archaeologist comments that "we’ve had an awful lot of animal bones, including a dog’s jaw, which could have been a hunting dog from the castle, or maybe a domestic animal.”

Here is a video about the dig:


For those looking to donate some money to worthy history-related causes, please check out a couple of items on Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Tania Picard-Braun emailed us to let us know about her fundraising drive Help Me Go To Graduate School. She is hoping to raise $1000 to help her go to the University of Manchester where she will study for  a Master's degree in Medieval Studies. Tania wrote "I've known I've wanted to be a historian since I was a little kid and that the Middle Ages was my favorite historical period since I was in High School.  While still an Undergraduate, I presented my first academic paper at Plymouth St. University's Medieval and Renaissance Forum titled “The Middle Ages in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Images and Symbols".

Meanwhile, at Kickstarter you can find Ian Crowe looking to raise $9000 to create an art book featuring the 100+ stories of Ovid's masterpiece, Metamorphoses. He writes, "The fact is, despite being so pivotal, Metamorphoses is not as widely read as you'd think. Not anymore, anyway. Maybe it's the length of the book that turns people off. Maybe it's the lack of pretty pictures. Either way, I intend to do something about it."

Speaking of worthy causes, we could always use your support too! :)

New Books on the Middle Ages: March

Every month we will try to post a list of books about the Middle Ages that caught my eye in the bookstore.

The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century 

By Paul Collins
PublicAffairs
ISBN: 978-1610390132

The tenth-century tends to be a somewhat overlooked period in medieval history, so I am intrigued by this lengthy (496 pages) account of what was going on in continental Europe, which includes some of strangest popes in history and the emergence of states from the Carolingian Empire.

Click here to read an excerpt from the Publisher's site

Deadly Sisterhood

By Leonie Frieda
Non Basic Stock Line
ISBN: 978-0297852087

Covers some of the famous women of the Italian Renaissnace: Lucrezia Turnabuoni, Clarice Orsini, Beatrice d'Este, Caterina Sforza, Isabella d'Este, Giulia Farnese, Isabella d'Aragona and Lucrezia Borgia. It looks like the character list of the show Borgias.



Before Galileo: The Advancement of Modern Science in Medieval Europe

By John Freely
Overlook Press
ISBN: 978-1-59020-607-2

The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

By Lesley Hazelton
Riverhead
ISBN: 978-1594487286

From the publisher: Hazleton follows the arc of Muhammad’s rise from powerlessness to power, from anonymity to renown, from insignificance to lasting significance. How did a child shunted to the margins end up revolutionizing his world? How did a merchant come to challenge the established order with a new vision of social justice? How did the pariah hounded out of Mecca turn exile into a new and victorious beginning? How did the outsider become the ultimate insider?

Click here to visit the First Muslim website

See also this video:

The History, by Michael Attaleiates

Translated by Anthony Kaldellis and Dimitris Krallis
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press)
ISBN: 978-0-674-05799-9

I quite enjoy reading through primary sources - the stories written by the the eyewitnesses of the Middle Ages - so I picked up this edition and translation of a Byzantine chronicle that covers the years 1034 to 1079, including the Battle of Manzikert (1071).  I hope to post a review of the book on Medievalists.net in a few weeks.