Medieval Studies Course union: Florilegium

2011-10-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

Good morning, friends.

Anyone else like books? I like books. They are so easy to get your hands on today, but we Medieval nerds know that this wasn't always the case. Can you imagine having to build (yes, build) a book? Out of some poor, unsuspecting calf, too.

Skin pages, called vellum, last a lot longer than paper, but they also take a long time to prepare [Check out this video if you'd like to know more about the actual construction process of medieval books]. If you were super rich, you could afford the greatest vellum ever: uterine calf skin. Yeah, that's right: stillborn cows. But don't worry, if you'd like to make a nice scroll out of "vellum" nowadays, you can just use a cotton-based substitute. Phew.

EVENTS!

If anyone would like join us on Thursday, the Medieval Languages Study Group will be meeting in library study room A107. I'm there for the Latin and Old Norse, but we are also looking at Norman French and ye olde English among others. So come on down!

Take some time out of your busy academic calendar and come to our fantastic pumpkin carving bonanza on October 26th, 4:30pm, CLE D132.

Rambunctious

2011-10-05T20:25:00.001-07:00

What’s up Medievalists? Bestiary time!

I have a great prof for my Medieval Europe class this semester: he links us to pictures and interactive websites and asks us to write about them, which is fantastic homework. Anyway, I tell you this because I found a bunch of stuff on one of the websites.

This little cutie pie is a ram. He’s from the late thirteenth, early fourteenth century (“confirmed by thermoluminescence analysis,” which is can only be some kind of glow-in-the-dark magic). I am disappointed to read that he’s a ram because I thought he was a cow. Mainly because his mouth is making a “moo” shape. Apparently he used to have horns, though, so he probably

looked more ram-like before he ended up underground. It’s pretty incredible, I guess, that this piece of pottery survived all this time, still glazed, in part. But I think we should reserve judgement on the species. Mouth shape is a good identifier, yeah.

I wonder what people put in it? What does it look like to you guys?

Rams are sacrificial animals, they're always popping up in religious texts and dying. Is that all there is to it? They die, like Baldr? NO, they also get drilled. I’m going to drop a knowledge bomb here... Pliny the Elder said: “the wildness of rams can be curbed by drilling a hole in the horn near the ear”. Wait. What? I think a lot of behaviours can be cured by drilling a hole in something’s head. Who worked this out? Maybe it was an accident the first time and the ram "fell" on a branch or very sharp rock and insta-lobotomized himself. And some shepherd just happened to be there. Or maybe humpty dumpty was pushed.

The rambunctious nature of rams means that they are associated with toughness and virility. Sheep, on the other hand, are obedient and meek. And stupid. [Apparently not, click here] Interesting gender divide there, with sheep/ram as symbols or behaviour guides. And by interesting I mean it totally fits in with almost everything we've ever read about gender dichotomy in Europe past and present.

Medieval bestiaries are good sources of fun, nerd style. This image is from "Book of the Properties of Things" by Bartholomew. What kind of a title is that? It's the title of a damned encyclopedia, that's what! Thanks to Arabic knowledge and their awesome preservation of ancient texts, Europe was down with science by 1416, when this manuscript was completed.

Zoology! A bunch of animals with four legs. It's a pretty picture and it's dense with symbolism. Animal allegory, if you will. Each animal embodying a moral code or personality type. If you take a gander at it, you'll see a greyhound in the middle, (our friend) the ram, an elephant, a lion ... and a unicorn! To be fair, an elephant was no different than a unicorn as far as Bartholomew was concerned: he'd never seen either of them. And a bunch of travel accounts made sure that it became common knowledge that unicorns were for real. Dude I don't know why there is a mermaid at the bottom, don't even ask. THAT'S FOR ANOTHER POST.

End.

Introductions

2011-09-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

Good afternoon, kids.

I am Sadie, the new blog queen for the Medieval Studies Course Union. Contain your excitement!

Well, since I'm new here, I figured I'd post a horrific article from a less than reputable source. Exciting! Trustworthy(?)! Archaeologists in Italy have found a "witches graveyard" on consecrated, Churchly land. The women were buried without a coffin or shroud. Grave goods included dice and nails - in one woman's jaw. Ouch. They are yet to determine the cause of death, so let's just hope that the ... piercings ... were post-mortem. There were other nails and seventeen (unlucky for some) dice littered around her corpse.

Check it out: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2041671/800-year-old-remains-witch-discovered-graveyard-Tuscany-Italy.html#ixzz1Z4SA3rwl

---

The Medieval Studies Course Union will be hosting various activities over the school year, including PUMPKIN CARVINGS and movie nights. Furthermore, we will soon have t-shirts for you to wear with jubilant pride. Come out on October 4th at 7pm in ECS 125. We will be watching "How to Train Your Dragon" and pizza and beverages will be provided!

Check out our Facebook page for events! If you know of something that's going on around town that is relevant to our interests, let me know. I will also attempt to keep you up to date on any new courses offered by the Medieval Studies department and all that academic stuff.

Let's get to it! This week:

The Medieval Club here on campus is having a FREE Coptic Book Binding bonanza tomorrow (Wednesday 28th) at 6pm; Cornett B107.

You are asked to provide your own materials, if you can:

-ten or so sheets of blank paper
-pair of scissors
-embroidery floss or similar string you want to use as binding
-yarn or embroidery needle
-old binder with cardboard covers that you don't want any more
-x-acto knife
-pretty paper or fabric to make covers out of. 6" x 16" would be about the right amount.
-glue stick

Peace!

Movie Night: The Secret of Kells

2011-03-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

The MSCU will be having a movie night this week to watch the animated film "The Secret of Kells."

Join us Wednesday, March 16th!
6:00 PM
Clearihue A311

Pizza and beverages will be provided.

In honour of that, here are some brief facts about the real Book of Kells. It is an illuminated manuscript in Latin and contains the four Gospels of the New Testament with other various religious texts included. It was created circa 800 CE or earlier by Celtic monks and resided at the Abbey of Kells in Ireland which is where it got its name from. It is highly decorated and ornate with Christian symbols and images mixed with Celtic knots and interlace which displays the merging of the two cultures.

This image opens the Book of John:

We hope to see you all on Wednesday evening!

The MSCU Blog has returned!

2011-02-07T23:42:00.000-08:00

Dear MSCU members and blog readers,

The Medieval Studies Course Union Executive for 2011 will be taking turns posting on our lovely blog. Today, I wish to share with you a couple pictures of the Medieval castles I visited while in Denmark in the fall of 2010.

Also, it is my duty to inform you of the MSCU's first Discussion/Games night of the year, which will take place this Wednesday, February 9th at 6pm in CLE A311. The topic of discussion will be Medieval Pilgrimages, but we will expand on this topic as we see fit and according to how the discussion flows etc. After our discussion we will play games, yay! If you have a chess set or backgammon, please do bring them, or any other board game you would fancy to play. There will be lots of snacks and friendly people to converse with, so come on out on Wednesday!
The picture above is of Fredericksborg Slot in Hillerød, a lovely area just outside of Copenhagen in Denmark. Technically this is a Renaissance castle, as it was built in the early seventeenth century; however, this castle was originally a hunting-lodge (which is situated right on the lake in Hillerød) which was bought by King Frederick II in the sixteenth century. His son, Christian IV, the most well-known king of Denmark, decided to re-build the lodge and make what you see now- a magnificent royal residence. Although used as a summer residence, I found that it was quite enjoyable in the winter, with skating and tobogganing around the lake. (Yes, despite having an extremely flat landscape, the Danish do toboggan!)

Ever wanted to see the castle where Shakespeare's Hamlet took place? Look, now you have! Shakespeare's Hamlet was allegedly partly-based upon Amleth, a figure from Danish folklore. Shakespeare, hearing of Kronborg Castle from abroad, which yes, often is covered in misty fog from the ocean, decided to use this castle as his inspiration. Kronborg Slot was used as a defensive fortress, as it is located directly on the Sound between Denmark and Sweden. Sweden is so close that you can see quite clearly the downtown buildings of Helsingborg, which is directly across from the castle.

Til next post

CB

Bards Are Sexy

2010-01-31T23:01:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader(s),

I have found a group of bards that I quite enjoy. I wish for you to know of them. Here goes:

And everyone loves madrigals. Dirty, dirty madrigals from the 1500's. Dirty, dirty, dirty:

And this is simply far too amusing to not mention it here. The actor Christopher Lee (Count Dooku/Saruman) is making a heavy/symphonic metal tribute to his ancestor, the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne!

Well dear Reader(s), that's all folks.

DISCUSSION NIGHT!

2010-01-25T08:52:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader(s),

I know you're busy. You have lots to do - I get this. I get that. I get it. Got it. But really, you want to learn, right? Expand your horizons. Have a good time. Learn while having fun. These are good things, yes?

WELL THEN!

Come on out to the first MSCU discussion night of this semester: Misnomers of the Middle Ages! Clearihue D126, Tuesday the 26th, 7pm! It'll be AWESOME. We'll be discussing things such as peaceful Vikings, modern views of the medieval period, medieval health and medicine (or lack thereof if you so desire), was it really a "dark age," etc. Or anything else that you want to bring up! We're flexible.

You should totally come out. Gimme a visit. Go find one of my posters and I'll sign it for you. Might be worth something some day (or not).

Or the other hand, to tie you over while I finish researching my awesome article I'm writing (to be poster later today, I think!), here's a joke!

"Marrying a woman from Canada

The first man married a woman from Houston ,Texas. He told her that she was to do the dishes and house cleaning... It took a couple of days, but on the third day, he came home to see a clean house and dishes washed and put away.

The second man married a woman from South Carolina. He gave his wife orders that she was to do all the cleaning, dishes and the cooking. The first day he didn't see any results, but the next day he saw it was better. By the third day, he saw his house was clean, the dishes were done and there was a huge dinner on the table.

The third man married a girl from CANADA. He ordered her to keep the house cleaned, dishes washed, lawn mowed, laundry washed, and hot meals on the table for every meal. He said the first day he didn't see anything, the second day he didn't see anything but by the third day, some of the swelling had gone down and he could see a little out of his left eye, and his arm was healed enough that he could fix himself a sandwich and load the dishwasher. He still has some difficulty when he pees."

HARDY HARHAR! Y'arrrrr.

I'll do the whole "today in the past" thing later when I post my AWESOME article. I'm so hyped.

P.S. IAN MCDOUGALL/ALISTAIR KAY QUINTET AT HERMANN'S ON WEDNESDAY. 7:30. GO SEE IT. IT WILL BE AWESOME. Al designed my trombone. :)

I see you.

2010-01-12T21:03:00.000-08:00

Peek-a-boo! Wait, did I get the order of the title and opening line mixed up? Maybe? Anyway, "I see you" is a phrase from my favourite movie of the month: Avatar. If you haven't seen it, go see it. Now. If you have seen it, go see it again. Now. Speaking of Avatar (Avatara in Sanskrit), I have found a pretty nifty article on the topic at the International Society For Krishna Conciousness website - you can view it here.

The movie was simply stunning - beauty without compare, especially in the 3D part. I have heard a lot of complaints about a lack of character development, but c'mon, it's a sci-fi/action/fantasy movie - is there even supposed to be character development? Also, it takes place over a three month period, and people don't change THAT much over that length of time. Do they? I don't. Do you? I hope you don't. I like you just the way you are, Reader(s). (Though you should comment more often! Show me some love, c'mon!)

My argument is that en lieu of character development Cameron has given us an entire ECO SYSTEM, constructed to the minute detail. Also, the social commentary/moral of the film is as subtle as a taser to the nipple. What do you mean I can't say that on the internet? Says who?!

Yes, I said taser. And there's nothing you can do about it.

"Don't tase me, bro!"

(^ Brownie points to anyone who knows this reference. ^)

I propose a challenge to you, dear Reader(s)! I'm thinking of matching up various characters from Avatar with Medieval/Antiquity figures. I think it should be amusing. Feel free to e-mail your ideas at evangelion_sword@hotmail.com. Yeah, yeah, odd address.

On the topic of music, Alistair Kay and Ian McDougall, two of Canada's best trombonists, both of which have been lead trombone for the Boss Brass, will be playing at Hermann's Jazz Club on the 27th. It'll be AMAZING. Now, if they could get Hugh Fraser on stage as well things would be ebulliently splendiferous. Or splendiferously ebullient? Who wants to go with me? Anyone?

Now, what happened today in the past? Oh, I know! This did:

Events:

475 - Basilicus becomes Byzantine Emperor, with the coronation ceremony held in the Hebdomon palace in Constantinople.

1539 - Treaty of Toledo is signed by King Francis I of France, and the lovely Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

1908 - A long distance radio message is sent off of the Eiffel Tower for the first time.

1915 - The United States House of Representatives rejects a proposal to give women the right to vote. How daring!

2010 - Haiti has a 7.0 Richter earthquake.

Births:

1576 - Petrus Scriverius, a Dutch writer. (I just liked his name.)

1737 - John Hancock, an American statesman.

1930 - TIM HORTON, a Canadian hockey player.

1944 - Vlastimil Hort, a Czechoslovakian chess player. Yes, chess player. Professional.

1948 - Slash Gordon, *Ahem*, Gordon Campbell, our lovely leader in the legislature.

1965 - Rob Zombie.

Deaths:

1519 - Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.

2005 - Allessia di Matteo, first person to survive eight transplants in one surgery. Born 2003.

And that's that! I hope you enjoyed today's posting, dear Reader(s).

Sincerely, your Minister of Propaganda.

Aloha.

2010-01-04T13:08:00.001-08:00

Dear Reader(s),

Well, another year is over, another year has started. Another semester begins, new classes start, and I'm back. I'm like Arnie! Or the cat in Harry S. Miller's song! Well, I know not whether to be excited for this semester or to dread it, but none-the-less I am filled with a sense of excited trepidation.

Topic change! I am filled with sorrow that one of the university's most notable Medievalists will no longer be with us come September. Dr. Kwakkel, a man of no small skill, has not had his contract renewed by the university, and this summer will be returning to Holland/Netherlands/where Dutch people live to lead a research group concentrating on Medieval manuscripts, or so I understand. I am certain this must be a dream come true for him, and I wish him the best of luck and success, but it is a major loss to the university, especially for the History and Medieval Studies departments. Especially for us medievalists. Cheers, sir.

Ah, I forgot! Silly, wicked, forgetful Zoot! I mean, me! Dear Reader(s), Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! And Cheery Festivus! All a little belated, I'm sure. I hope all your various celebrations this past month have been wondrous and wonderful and wild. Party on, rockstar(s).

I think that's about enough of that for now, time for our feature presentation:

Events:

46BC - Julius Caesar (our beloved Roman) defeats Tiberius Labienus in the Battle of Ruspina.

871CE - The Battle of Reading - Ethereld of Wessex fights, and is promptly defeated, by a Danish army invasion.

1490 - Anna of Brittany announces that all who ally themselves with the king of France will be considered guilty of an offence against the dignity of the reigning sovereign of the state, ie. her.

1493 - Christopher Columbus leaves the New World, ending his first journey.

1642 - King Charles I of England commences the slide into civil war by sending soldiers to arrest Parliament. Silly man.

1865 - The New York Stock Exchange opens its first permanent headquarters.

2010 - The Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, opens today!

Births:

1643 - Isaac Newton. Exciting.

1923 - Don Butterfield, an American jazz and classical tuba player.

1963 - Till Lindemann of Rammstein.

Deaths:

1903 - Topsy the elephant. Sad case, that.

And today is also the Eleventh Day of Christmas in Western Christianity. That's neat.

So, I hereby bid you adieu, dear Reader(s). I wish you well, and I shall babble (like a brook, see?) to you later.

P.S. Go watch Avatar.

So, I don't have a story for you tonight, so here's some pictures of stormtroopers to carry you over for the moment. Enjoy.

2009-11-29T00:47:00.001-08:00

Spiderman Stormtrooper.

Samurai Stormtrooper.

French Stormtrooper.

Three Musketeer Stormtroopers.

Elvis Stormtrooper.

Stormtrooper a la Braveheart.

...No they aren't.

A little political joke.

2009-11-24T23:54:00.001-08:00

The Pope and Gordon Campbell are on the same stage in front of a huge crowd.

The Pope leans towards Mr. Campbell and said, "Do you know that with one little movement of my hand I can make every person in this crowd go wild with joy? This joy will not be a momentary display, like those believers in your 2010 Olympics, but go deep into their hearts and they'll forever speak of this day and rejoice!"

Campbell replied, "I seriously doubt that. With one little wave of your hand? Show me"

So the Pope backhanded him.

Pictures and a posting (see post below for more info).

2009-11-24T21:06:00.000-08:00

Armenian in pink.

Blue Armenians and some policia.

You go granny! And the black guy is coming in for the take down...

TAKE DOWN FOR MASSIVE DAMAGE! (At least 1d10+4 to those of you who know what I'm talking about.)

Don't fight with monks.

Poking dude: "Does it hurt when I poke it here?"

Hurt dude: "YES. STOP IT."

Black haired due: "Hmmm, interesting."

Old guy: "Poke him again. That was funny."

You can find some more info and a video here. <-- I just learned how to do hyperlinking!!

Also, movie night tomorrow. I have posters around. Go find them. If you find one and come to the movie night I'll have a prize for you.

When: 7pm, November 25th

Where: Clearihue A303

What: Robin Hood: Men In Tights

Here's a preview:

I think that's pretty funny.

Happy (Belayed) Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Monk Day!

2009-11-18T12:32:00.001-08:00

Well, now that I'm no longer sick and stressed I think I'll post again. Oh, wait, I'm already doing that. Aren't I funny?

So now that I'm well let's be at it!

Anywho, where was I? Ah, yes, reportage. A story for you. I have one. Or more. You shall read it. Or them.

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Monk Day.

Jesus is said to have told his followers to "turn the other cheek" when provoked, but it would seem that on November 9th last year this was tested - and found that it applied very well to brawls. (You just have to hit back - that's allowed, right?)

On the ninth of November, 2008, there was a massive brawl in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and man it was a gooder! In the Black Corner we have the defenders, the Greek Orthodox! Aaaaaand in the Blue Corner we find the challengers, theeeeee Armeniaaaaaans!

So, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the most important places in Christianity, if not the most spiritually important, as it is the place of Jesus of Nazareth's crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. This church is home to six different sects of monks and priests, two of which are the Greeks and Armenians. These sects often have small squabbles over who gets to do what duties and when, and who gets to officiate and when.

Here's how it went down:

The Armenians were going to celebrate the annual Feast of the Cross which the Armenians always celebrate. This is a celebration of the fourth century discovery of a cross that is believed to be that which Christ made his sacrifice upon. So, dressed in their bright blue habits they proceeded with their procession until they came across a roadblock - one made of large, black garbed Greeks.

The Greeks wanted to place a monk inside the Edicule, a structure built on top of what is thought to be Jesus' tomb, and blocked the Armenian procession as they view this as their divinely delegated task. Well, no surprise, but the Armenian's said "gettaouttahere!" This did not bode well with the Greeks. The Greeks made a churchblock and things just went from there...

It ended with dozens of Israeli riot police forced to come in force, fully armed no less, to break up the fight. An Armenian monk and a Greek (blooding from a nasty gash on his face, no less) were arrested.

Oh, let's not forget about the scuffle between the police and an Armenian altar boy. (The altar boy won, no less!)

Other debates going on in the Holy Sepulchre at the moment:

-The Israeli government wants to build a fire exit, but the monks have been squabbling for over ten years as to where it would be placed.

-A rooftop monastery is in desperate need of renovations as it is about to collapse, but the Coptic Christians and Ethiopians are in a dispute over who the monastery belongs to so no repairs can get under way, even though a few monks have been seriously injured in a few minor collapses.

-And my personal favourite: a ladder has been in the doorway of the church since the 19th century, and it remains there to this day as the sects keep squabbling over who has the authority to move it. *Pushes ladder over.*

Another highly amusing event happened on Palm Sunday. Dozens of Greek and Armenian monks (Them again? Those scrappers!) and worshippers got into a brawl and when the police came to break up the riot everyone turned on the police and started beating them with palm fronds. If anyone has found any photos/video of this event can you please send me a link - I would love to see it!

Now, what happened today in the past? THIS DID:

Events:

-1429 - Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieges La Charite. (Go Frenchies!)

-1859 - Charles Darwin publishes On The Origin Of Species.

-1971 - D.B. Cooper jumps off a plane with 200k$ in ransom money and is never seen or heard from again.

-1974 - Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover a 40% complete skeleton of an Australopithecus Afarensis which is later named "Lucy" after The Beatle's tune "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds."

-2004 - Last male black-faced honeycreeper dies of Avian malaria in the Maui Bird Conservation Centre. The species is now extinct.

Births:

-Nobody interesting was born today. I mean it.

Deaths:

-1991 - Eric Carr (former drummer of Kiss) and the Zanzibar-born singer of Queen, Freddie Mercury, both died. I do not know you first dude, but Freddie you were sweeeeeeeeeet.

And it's Teacher's Day in Turkey and International Evolution Day.

October Events! They Happen! Really!

2009-10-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader(s), just to let you know we, the MSCU, have a few events planned for this month! I'll probably post reminders when we get closer to the event, but I'll list them all here right now. Isn't that nice of me? I think its pretty nice. I'm a nice guy.

Anyway, here we go:

MSCU MOVIE NIGHT! WOOHOO!

*Ahem.*

This is going to be on the 21st, 7:00, Clearihue A307.

We are watching: King. Arthur. I made posters. They're around somewhere. Look for 'em.

MSCU/GRSCU PUMPKIN CARVING!

October 22nd, 7:00, Clearihue D130.

We are joining up with our Greek and Roman Studies Course Union buddies, slaughter some innocent pumpkins like the tyrannical warriors that we are, and maybe send them to some oh-so-fortunate profs (you get to pick the prof!). C'mon out!

We also have some joint events with other course unions:

Costume party:

Friday the 23rd, 7-9ish, lots of treats (SUGAR DEAR READER(S), SUGAR!), fun games, costume contest, etc.

Its Classically themed, so throw on a toga or something at the very least. Or not. But that's lame. Like, a blind leprous anchorite penitent monk kind of lame. And that's really, really lame.

There is also a writing contest! http://library.uvic.ca/site/writingcontest/

You can read the link yourself. It's pretty straight forward.

Now, time for that awesome thing that everyone seemed to like so much...What Happened Today In The Past?!? (I need a better name for this...)

1066 - the Battle of Hastings/Norman Conquest: William the Conqueror defeats the English army and kills Harold II.

1322 - Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeats Kind Edward II at Byland and forces Edward to accept Scotland's independence.

1582 - once again, because of the Gregorian calendar's implementation, this day does not exist in Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain.

1894 - ee Cummings is born. (Not medieval, but still important. To me.)

Lots of stuff happened on the 14th of October: lots of births, lots of events, lots of deaths. Few are Medieval. Checkit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_14

Farewell dear Reader(s),

Your Minister of Propaganda.

A picture, some news, and more updates to come!

2009-10-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

Well, that's certainly one way of being saved from the jaws of death...

And in more exciting news:

So, on September twenty-fifth (yes, last month) an amateur treasure hunter (what this constitutes I do not know - maybe an old guy with a metal detector and a shovel like you find on the beach?) discovered an absolutely enormous horde of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver artefacts as he was rummaging through a farmer's field (doubtful the farmer gave him permission). This discovery has sent archaeologists, historians, curators and Medievalists alike abuzz the world over. Amongst the treasures found we have: a really pretty helmet crest with a frieze of wild animals running along the side; enamel studded sword fittings; a checkerboard piece with gold and garnet inlays (I wouldn't mind having a set of those!); and a gold band with a Latin biblical inscription that calls on God to drive away the bearer's enemies. Nifty! This cash of lovely artefacts was discovered in what was Mercia, one of the five major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and are thought to date between 675 and 725.

The fellow who found the cache says that it was "more fun that winning the lottery." Oh, I bet it was! "I was going to bed and in my sleep I was seeing gold items," he said after notifying the authorities after five days of searching this farmer's field.

Over eleven pounds of gold was found, which included weaponry, crosses, and a giant cross that may have been carried into battle, five long golden snakes, and a strip of gold with a crudely written and horribly misspelled Latin Biblical inscription ("Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face" - Book of Numbers).

The treasure hunter and his farmer "friend" are up for seven figures of cash once the artefacts are sold to museums, apparently. Not bad as there could be as many as 1,500 items in the treasure horde.

One expert has gone so far as to liken this discovery to the discovery of King Tut's tomb. Interestingly enough, the giant processional/battle cross was folded before being buried.

In case you don't know (!!!) who the Anglo-Saxons were, they were a group of Germanic tribes who invaded England when the Romans left it, they made really, really pretty gold ornaments, and their language, Old English, is the great-great-great grandfather (or some such thing) of our beloved Modern English.

I hope you enjoyed this late update!

Sincerely,

Your Minister of Propaganda*

*How's this name? I like it. Do you like it? I like it.

Also, here's the link for the story on this update: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/09/25/treasure-trove.html

Oh hi, I almost didn't see you there.

2009-10-04T23:42:00.000-07:00

As-Salamu Alaykum! Ave! Guten Tag! Greetings! Etc.!

Welcome dear Reader(s) to another eventful year with the MSCU (Medieval Studies Course Union for those of you who don't know that yet). This year we find ourselves with a whole new executive committee and, you may have guessed it by now, a new blogger here on Florilegium. This is the first blog I've ever had so please, bear with me as I try and figure out what I'm doing. (Man, what have I signed up for?!)

I would like to extend my thanks to our previous blogger who is heading off to York University (yeah, the English one) for the awesome work that he's done with this thing. I have some pretty big shoes to fill it would seem.

So, I did some research about bloggers the other day, and this is what I found out:

"Bloggers were invented ca. 300AD, and were originally called 'monks.' Like their distant descendents, monks had shitty haircuts, and never got laid."

OIVÉ!

Man, now I'm really sewered! My hair's not THAT bad, is it? Okay, maybe it's pretty bad.

So, October fifth, some pretty exciting stuff have happened on the fifths of October in medieval history! Check this stuff out:

-610: Coronation of Byzantin Emperor Heraclius

-869: The Fourth Council of Constantinople is convened.

-1143: King Alfonso VII of Leon recognizes Portugal as a Kingdom.

-1582: because of the Gregorian calendar...this day doesn't exist in Italy, Poland, Portugal, or Spain!

Okay, that last one is pretty awesome.

Well, I've got a few ideas set up for this blog for this year, but I want you, dear Reader(s), to tell me what you would like to see more of on this blog. Y'know, just post a comment on here or something. That'd be sweet.

Well, it's off to the land of sweet slumber for I, so I wish you, dear Reader(s), the best of sleep and some really interesting dreams of lions, witches, and bears, oh no!

Sincerely,

The New MSCU Florilegium Blogger Guy*

*Yeah, I'll think up a better name later. C'mon, cut me some slack! It's my first post ever!

Angels and Demons

2009-05-03T10:52:00.001-07:00

The Passion of the Chelios?

2009-04-25T13:35:00.000-07:00

For those who have not seen either Crank or Crank: High Voltage, these films tell the story of Chev Chelios, a hitman who, for various reasons, must take rather extreme actions to stay alive.

While these films could be written off as bread and circuses for an increasingly desensitized mass audience, they seem to contain hidden depths. Without spoiling the ending for Crank: High Voltage, in the end of the film our hero finds himself in a situation which mirrors the passion of Christ. After being whipped by his prosecutor Chelios ascends a wooden power-line and cruxifies himself between the wires. Chelios, however, does not die. He comes back down to earth bathed in light (albeit light provided from his own burning flesh) and returns to one of his allies, a female prostitute.

Now, I don't mean to imply that the writer of Crank: High Voltage is in any way attempting to convey a spiritual (or even intellectual) message to his audience. The realization that Chelios is a parallel for Christ made the ending to this movie even more amusing. And if you're going to make a sequal to a movie in which the main character falls from an airplane onto cement and lives, how else are you going to top youself?

This does raise an extremely important question, however, how is Crank 3 ever going to top this?

Fistula in Anno

2009-04-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

Late New Year's Resolutions

2009-04-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

Any of the people who still visit this blog will have noticed a distinct lack of updates in the past few months. Today, however, is the dawn of a new day.

Dear reader(s), you are about to witness the revival of this blog. For too long we have existed under a dark cloud of infrequent updates. For too long savage doldrums have gripped this blog with crippling apathy.

Today, dear reader(s), the clouds of this dark age part and signal the dawning of a new age of enlightenment. You are now witness to a blogging renaissance!

Ridley Scott presents "Robin Hood"

2009-04-25T13:20:00.000-07:00

"He doesn't have the old Robin Hood tights," says producer Brian Grazer. "He's got armor. He's very medieval. He looks, if anything, more like he did in Gladiator than anything we're used to seeing with Robin Hood."

From: USA Today.com

'Negative' attitude to Robin Hood

2009-03-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

A Scottish expert has uncovered a medieval document suggesting negative attitudes towards Robin Hood.

The story of how Robin and his men stole from the rich to give to the poor has long been part of English folklore.

However, Julian Luxford of St Andrews University found a dissenting voice in a Latin inscription from about 1460 in a manuscript owned by Eton College.

The previously unknown chronicle entry says Robin "infested" parts of England with "continuous robberies".

Dr Luxford, an expert in medieval manuscript studies, said: "Rather than depicting the traditionally well-liked hero, the article suggests that Robin Hood and his merry men may not actually have been 'loved by the good'.

"The new find contains a uniquely negative assessment of the outlaw, and provides rare evidence for monastic attitudes towards him."

The pre-Reformation article is the only English chronicle entry to have been discovered which mentions Robin Hood.

Three Scottish medieval authors are also thought to have set Robin in a chronological context.
Partners-in crime

Dr Luxford said: "The new find places Robin Hood in Edward I's reign, thus supporting the belief that his legend is of 13th Century origin."

A translation of the short inscription, which contains only 23 words in Latin, reads: "Around this time, according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood, with his accomplices, infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies."

Dr Luxford said, "While Little John is not mentioned here, Robin is assigned partners-in crime.

"And the inscription's author does at least acknowledge that these men were active elsewhere in England.

"By mentioning Sherwood it buttresses the hitherto rather thin evidence for a medieval connection between Robin and the Nottinghamshire forest with which he has become so closely associated."

An article on the discovery will be published later this month in the Journal of Medieval History.

From: BBC News.co.uk

Today in the Middle Ages

2009-02-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

21 February, 1173 -- Thomas Becket is canonized...

... see, it isn't hard to get ahead (*rimshot*)

It's reading break! Hurray!

2009-02-14T23:31:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone!

We don't know about you, but we're pumped to have some time off! By that we mean, of course, we're excited to pour over our notes, scrutinize the CMD and write prolific essays! However, should you speedily finish all of your work, or are looking for a short escape, why not consider some of these fine activities?

1. Viking Worlds -- the Maritime Museum of Victoria has a viking exhibit on display now. Come to the Maritime Museum on Sunday February 15th as veteran undersea archaeologist Rob Rondeau uncovers the story of the Vikings, some of the finest mariners and explorers of any era.
Over the past 20 years Rondeau has dived to many shipwrecks all over the world . His review of Viking seafaring is based on research gathered from the Old and New worlds, including recent projects in the coastal waters off Norway. Rondeau, who has been profiled in many magazines and on television will speak at 2 p.m. The cost is $8 for students.
If you are interested in attending this event there will likely be several MSCU members there to take in the experience. For more information or directions please visit the following website: http://mmbc.bc.ca/.

2. Commune with Nature -- Each reading break the MSCU likes to organize a event in the great outdoors. On Wednesday February 18th the MSCU is taking a trip to French Beach in Sooke. This will be a great chance to get outside and enjoy some fresh air and beautiful scenery. If you would like a ride please RSVP by the evening of Monday Feb. 16th at the latest, space is limited. We will meet in front of the computer labs in Clearihue at 9:50 am and departing at 10:00, arriving at French Beach around 11:30. Please pack a lunch. Dress for the weather because Frisbee may be involved.

Also, remember that the week after reading break is the 1st Annual Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Conference (February 27-28). This conference will showcase the work of your fellow peers on the Mediterranean region, so be sure to come out and support them! There is a Facebook group for the conference as well, so be sure to check it out! Since it will help our ability to organize could you send a quick RSVP if you intend to come.

Thanks and we hope to see you soon!

Cheers,
MSCU

Today in the Middle Ages

2009-02-14T13:18:00.001-08:00

14th February, 1076 -- Pope Gregory VII excommunicates King Henry IV

And thus one of history's most epic bromance is born...

St Valentine

2009-02-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

The first thing you need to know about the real St. Valentine is that not much is known about him. Including whether there was one, two or three St. Valentines, or one guy with more than one name, or whether he existed at all.

Even the Vatican can't make up its mind on that one.

But other than that, there are lots of good stories that play nicely into our modern sense of what Feb. 14 is about. Which, for scholar Giulio Silano, is all the more reason to be skeptical.

"As far as I can tell, the stories have nothing to do with the saint," says Silano, a professor of medieval studies at the University of Toronto's St. Michael's College.

Silano is convinced that St. Valentine is largely a medieval invention. In fact, you can pretty much blame poet Geoffrey Chaucer for the whole thing.

"There's no evidence of Valentine before Chaucer," Silano says.

In 1381, Chaucer composed The Parliament of Fowls to honour the engagement of teenaged King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia. Silano says it was customary at the time to associate such occasions with a saint's feast day, but there were fewer saints to choose from in the 14th century.

So Chaucer picked Valentine.

"For this was on St. Valentine's Day," Chaucer wrote, "when every fowl cometh there to choose his mate."

Coincidentally, Richard is believed to have died on Feb. 14, 1400, in the Tower of London.
To modern Canadian sensibilities, the idea of picking mates and declaring young love on a spring-like day in February seems odd, at best, but made some sense in the 14th century, Silano says.

England is a more temperate place, for one thing, and the weather on Feb. 14 in Chaucer's time was more like today's late February or early March. The calendar was changed in the 16th century.

Spring, says Silano, is a poetically perfect time to declare young love. Flowers bloom in spring, but it's impossible to tell which ones will make it to summer. The same, he says, can be said of a new love.

"The love you declare in spring is different from the one you declare in summer. It's more fragile, more uncertain of how well it will survive."

Which makes it all the more romantic, he says.

As well, for centuries a pagan festival had been held in mid-February called Lupercalia that, among other things, celebrated fertility. Silano agrees with other scholars that, like other Christian holidays, St. Valentine's Day came to supplant earlier pagan traditions.

At any rate, Silano says, Chaucer had a rich tradition to draw on when he began to write about love and Valentine in the middle of February. There are, after all, three who share Feb. 14 as their feast day: St. Valentine of Rome, St. Valentine of Terni and a saint who was martyred in Africa.

Some scholars have argued that Rome's and Terni's were the same man. All that is known about the third is where he died: somewhere in Africa.

The Valentine of Rome is believed to have been a priest during the reign of Claudius II. The emperor, worried that young men with families would not want to leave Rome for extended periods to fight his wars, banned marriage.

Valentine responded by marrying couples in secret. Very romantic, but it got him arrested.
One legend says that, while awaiting his execution, Valentine restored the sight of his jailer's blind daughter, with whom he had fallen in love.

Another legend has it that on the eve of his execution, he penned a farewell note to the daughter, signing it, "From your Valentine."

Making it, of course, the first Valentine.

This Valentine was martyred around 269 (1,100 years before Chaucer wrote about him) in Rome and was buried on the Flaminian Way, just outside the city.

Valentine of Terni was a bishop and also lived during the reign of Claudius II. This, and the fact that he was also buried on the Flaminian Way after his martyrdom, have led to speculation that he and the Roman Valentine might be the same man.

The Terni Valentine is linked to love because he is believed to have performed the first marriage between a pagan and a Christian.

Before the name Valentine was removed from the official list of saints' feast days in 1969 (for lack of evidence he ever existed), he was the patron saint of engaged couples, bee keepers, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, travellers and young people and was also invoked to help with epilepsy, fainting and plague.

In the middle of a discussion about whether Valentine existed, or did any of the things associated with him, Silano pulls out a heavy volume from a top shelf behind his desk and starts leafing though it.

It's the 1962 edition of the Catholic Missal, outlining the prayers to be used during Mass, and, he says, it shows what the church thought of Valentine.

"There is no mention of love here. He was a saint who saved us from evil. It's a very generic prayer to be made on the feast of the saint."

Today, Valentine's Day has largely lost its religious significance and, in many ways, has morphed into a children's holiday filled with school-made hearts for mom and dad, and Disney-themed cards for classmates.

"That's probably fine," Silano says.

"It was never a real holiday, anyway."

From: TheStar.com

I'm trying to think of a good Dante reference, but I can't

2009-02-14T13:02:00.000-08:00

From: Penny Arcarde.com

The Hour of the Pig (1993)

2009-02-08T20:18:00.001-08:00

Part 1 of 10

Obscure Latin Word of the Week

2009-02-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

This week's word: grunnio (grundio), -ire

def. to grunt (or squeal) like a pig

How to use this word in everyday speech:

1. As a command: "Grunni like a pig, boy!"

2. As an intimidation: "If you grunnatis to the cops, you'll sleep with the fishes."

3. As part of a song: "And the pigs on the farm go grunnio, grunnio, grunnio."

James Purefoy goes medieval

2009-02-07T12:32:00.000-08:00

He’ll star in action thriller Ironclad

Now that film has found its financing James Purefoy can star in 13th century-set thriller Ironclad.

He’ll play a Knight Templar who, along with his heroic band of seven warriors, defends Rochester Castle against the tyrannical King John. Paul Giamatti has signed on to play the king, and the cast now includes Bob Hoskins, Richard Attenborough, Pete Postlethwaite, Colm Meany, Angus McFadyen and Narnia’s William Moseley. The film had been gearing up to shoot late last year when the money to make it fell through.

But now, with rights company ContentFilm International pushing at the Berlinale market, the movie is back on track for a summer start. Our concern is that the frenzy for swords ‘n’ sandals action epics has been past for a while – even Ridley Scott couldn't make Kingdom Of Heaven (above) win at the box office.

Can Ironclad succeed?

From: Total Film.com

The Medieval Studies Workshop

2009-02-07T00:23:00.001-08:00

Hey everyone!

Today's the day! Make sure you come out for all or part of the Medieval Studies Workshop: The Medieval Mediterranean! It's sure to be a blast! The fun begins at 9 and lasts until 4 in the new Earth and Ocean Sciences Building (Bob Wright Centre). Hope to see you all there!

Cheers,
MSCU

**************************************************************************************

Program

9:00-9:10 Welcome and Opening Remarks

9:10-9:30 Dr Iain Higgins, UVic, Introduction: The Medieval Mediterranean

9:30-10:00 Dr Marcus Milwright, UVic: From Cullet to Ginger: International Trade in the Medieval Mediterranean

10:00-10:15 Questions/Discussion

10:15-10:45 Refreshment Break

10:45-11:30 Dr Alain Touwaide, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute: Plants and Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean

11:30-11:45 Questions/Discussion

11:45-1:15 Lunch on your own, and film presentation: "Pilgrims in Arms" by Terry Jones (from The Crusades and Monty Python!)

1:15-1:45 Dr Lloyd Howard, UVic: Dante's Mediterranean World: Exodus Home and Away from Italy's Shores

1:45-2:30 Dr Karla Mallette, Miami University: The Literatures of Medieval Sicily: Greek, Latin, Arabic and Italian

2:30-2:45 Questions/Discussion

2:45-3:15 Refreshment Break

3:15-3:45 Dr Eva Baboula (Bampoula), UVic: The Holy City of Jerusalem and Constantinople in the Medieval Imagination

3:45-4:00 Questions/Discussion

4:00 Closing Remarks

More Medieval Mayhem!!

2009-02-03T21:22:00.000-08:00

Greetings fellow medievalists!

February is turning out to be busier than expected! Dr Eva Baboula has invited all interested medieval studies students to join her Medi 305 Workshop class for an informal lecture given by Dr Karla Mallette this Thursday, February 5 from 2:30-3:30 in CLE A206. She will discuss the research and challenges of being a literary historian of the Mediterranean. Dr Mallette's work has focused on the multilingual environment of Norman Sicily, but she has also written on issues such as Mediterranean Orientalism, Islam and Dante.

It's sure to be a great lecture and we'd love to see you there!

Cheers,
MSCU

A Medieval February

2009-02-02T23:24:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

February is shaping up to be a very eventful - and medieval - month! Here's a list of must-attend activities for you to enjoy!

1. As mentioned below, the MSCU will be holding another movie night on Feb. 4 at 7:00 PM in CLE A303. Bring along some friends to enjoy a night of laughter with Heath in "A Knight's Tale."

2. On Thursday, February 5, 2009, DSB C126, 7:30 PM, Dr Karla Mallette will be giving a lecture on "Poetry on Paper in Medieval Italy." She is one of the guest lecturers at this weekend's workshop, so be sure to come on out!

3. Speaking of Workshop, the 22nd Annual Medieval Studies Workshop is this Saturday, February 7, 2009. The program starts at 9:00 AM and will run until 4:00 PM. Be sure to stop by the Medieval Studies office to pick up your registration form (CLE D264)! The theme of the workshop this year is the Medieval Mediterranean (Be sure to join the Facebook page for this event!!)

4. Also in February is the 1st Annual Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Conference (February 27-28). This conference will showcase the work of your fellow peers on the Mediterranean region, so be sure to come out and support them! There is a Facebook group for the conference as well, so be sure to check it out! A program for the conference will be posted on the shortly.

5. Have you ever wanted to be more involved with the MSCU? If you answered 'yes' then have we got a proposition for you! We are currently looking for students who are interested in helping run the MSCU. Involvement is a great way to make friends and get to know your professors. On top of all that, extra circular activities look excellent on scholarship and grad school applications. If interested, come and see us after the movie on Wednesday night. If you're interested but cannot make it, please send us a quick email.

6. Very soon, the reading room will be staffed one hour each weekday by a member of the MSCU. We'll be your "peer tutors" should you need to bounce ideas off of us or have someone read over your paper. Come by and say hi! Our schedule will be up soon.

7. If you would like more information about any of the medieval events happening on campus, send us an email at uvicmscu@gmail.com, or join our Facebook group (UVic Medieval Studies Course Union). We hope to see you out at all of these fun events!

Cheers,
MSCU

P.S. If someone lost a Russian language textbook at our last movie night, we have found it.

Medieval Movie Night: A Knight's Tale

2009-02-02T23:16:00.000-08:00

Join us on February 4th for a showing of the 2001 film A Knight's Tale. The film will start at 7:00 PM in Clearihue A303, but feel free to come later if it suits you better! As always, light refreshments will be provided, along with healthy doses of anachronism. We encourage you to bring friends, family, loved ones etc, because the more, the merrier.

The Medieval Mediterranean

2009-01-12T01:39:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

Have you signed up for Medi 305: The Medieval Mediterranean yet? No? Then you must! This class is taught by Dr Eva Baboula (ebaboula@finearts.uvic.ca) and runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 2:30-3:30. There is plenty of room left in the course and we'd love to see some new faces among us!

The class is based around a series of projects which focus on a medieval Mediterranean city. These projects will coincide with the annual Medieval Studies workshop which will be held on February 7, 2009. The theme of the workshop this year is the Medieval Mediterranean, as is the 1st Annual Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Conference (February 27-28). Be sure to sign up to come to the workshop and the Conference!

If you've always wanted to take a class on the "heart" of the medieval world, or if you're simply wanting to bone up on the Mediterranean before our workshop and conference, sign up and stop on by this Tuesday! Over the next four months, the class will be discussing how the sea shaped the cultures surrounding it and how the sea helped spread Islam, Christianity and Judaism. We will also discuss the plausibility of a "medieval Mediterranean identity." This class is truly interdisciplinary and will cover many topics, which means there will never be a dull moment!

If you'd like further information, you can either email Dr Baboula, Stephanie (sjury@uvic.ca), or the MSCU (uvicmscu@gmail.com). The timetable information for the class is as follows: Medi 305 (TT 23659) A01. Hope to see you Tuesday!

Cheers,
MSCU

MSCU Movie Night: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

2009-01-10T21:23:00.001-08:00

Details to be announced shortly.

Medieval prince overtakes Stalin as greatest Russian

2009-01-04T10:37:00.001-08:00

The medieval prince Alexander Nevsky has been named the Greatest Russian of all times in a nationwide poll, leaving behind early 20th century reformer Pyotr Stolipin and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Prince Nevsky, canonised by the Orthodox Church as saint in 1574, had a winning score of 524,575 votes, overtaking the early 20th century reformer Imperial Premier Pyotr Stolipin with 523,766 nominations trailed by Stalin with 519,071 votes.

The voters had more than six months to choose from among 500 names before the winner was announced last night.

The voting in the poll was suspended in August after Stalin clearly had a majority of the ballots cast the previous month.

The organisers 'zeroed' in the vote, claiming that spammers had attacked the site in order to give Stalin the victory.

This time viewers had a choice of voting method. They could use the phone, text message or the internet. Technically, however, each voter was not limited to one vote casting doubt on the fairness of the poll, conducted for the first time in the history of the country.

The organiser of the Greatest Ever Russian contest, Alexander Lyubimov, said Nevsky's victory in the poll "demonstrates that Russians are dedicated to their ancient history, starting 1,000 years ago."

A Russian prince from Novgorod, Alexander got the nickname "Nevsky" after his victory over an army of Swedes in a battle near the Neva river (in present day St Petersburg) in 1240.

One of the arguments for voting Nevsky was that he took the help of the Golden Horde to fight the West making Russia's choice for a Eurasian identity for the ages to come.

Organiser Alexander Lyubimov said there was awareness in modern Russia that the nation's ancestors "created a multi-ethnic community within the Russian State."

From: The Hindu News Update Service.com

Happy New Year

2008-12-31T22:01:00.001-08:00

Whether it's 1066 or 2009, all the best for the New Year.

Jokus Maximus

2008-12-29T19:53:00.000-08:00

The Latin professor's class was conjugating verbs and it got to be Julius's turn. He had not been paying close attention. He turned to the student beside him and asked, "What's the verb?"

She replied, "Damn if I know."

So our hero sat up and conjugated:

Damifino, damifinas, damifinat.

Damifinamus, damifinatis, damifinant.

Merry Christmas from the MSCU

2008-12-24T21:35:00.001-08:00

Today in the Middle Ages

2008-12-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

22nd December, 1216: Dominican order formally sanctioned...

... and for the next 792 years they fought vampires, demons and the forces of darkness.

MSCU Best Medieval Movies of 2008 -- In Bruges

2008-12-22T10:10:00.000-08:00

Ken: Coming up?

Ray: What's up there?

Ken: The view.

Ray: The view of what? The view of down here? I can see that down here.

Ken: Ray, you are about the worst tourist in the whole world.

Ray: Ken, I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn't, so it doesn't.

-- In Bruges

Dante's Inferno -- the Game

2008-12-22T10:04:00.001-08:00

Wye Valley Brewery launches new beers for 2009

2008-12-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

Herefordshire’s Wye Valley Brewery has designed a range of new beers for every month of 2009.

Some of the beers are brewed with local ingredients such as Herefordshire honey and Herefordshire nettles.

Others are named after local icons. These include a beer to celebrate the Hereford Mappa Mundi, the largest surviving medieval map in the world and a beer to celebrate the centenary year of the local Morgan Motor company.

Lizzie Thomas, marketing executive at Wye Valley, said: “Pubs are always looking for new beers. It’s exciting for customers to see something different behind the pump every month. They enjoy trying beers with different ABV’s and different tastes.”

She added: “Many of the Wye Valley beers this year will have a local theme. Herefordshire is a great county for hops and we wanted to celebrate that."

From: The Publican.com

Treasure hunter finds ancient coins

2008-11-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

A hoard of medieval silver coins has been found buried in ground at Wellow, it was revealed this week.

The 16 silver pennies were found by an amateur treasure- hunter, using a metal detector, and are being examined by experts at the British Museum.

They have been pronounced treasure-trove, and are in the process of being acquired by the Roman Baths Museum.

They could later be mounted in a display at Radstock Museum.

Roman Baths and Pump Room manager Stephen Clews said that they dated from the 13th century.

They are Short Cross English coins with the exception of one Scottish coin.

Mr Clews said: "They were found with a metal detector used with the authority of the landowner, and were buried in the ground.

"They have been through the treasure-trove process, with expert opinion from the British Museum: the process is that the British Museum takes it if it wishes to, or offers it to an appropriate local museum.

"It will go to the Roman Baths Museum with a display mounted there.

"We are also talking to Radstock Museum about the prospect of putting on a display."

The coins' face falue was 12-and-a-half old pennies each, and the modern equivalent would be between £10 and £20 each.

"But they are an interesting find," said Mr Clews.

The exact location of the find is not being revealed.

From: This Is Bath.co.uk

V&A to begin work on £30m medieval and Renaissance galleries project

2008-11-12T10:43:00.000-08:00

The Victoria and Albert Museum is to put its entire collection of medieval and Renaissance art into one continuous display for the first time, thanks to a £30 million project to improve its galleries.

One of the 10 new galleries will feature translucent onyx window screens, so the light falling on the religious artefacts shown will be just like that in medieval churches.

The galleries project is the biggest at the museum since 2001, when it launched a £31 million initiative to transform the British Galleries.

Over the next 12 months builders will get to work putting the plans by architects MUMA into practice.

The idea has been to utilise dead space on the South Kensington site and illuminate the vast collection with natural light where possible.

More than 1,800 objects, covering the period from 300 to 1,600, will be re-displayed.

Highlights from across the ages will include the Symmachi Panel, described by the V&A as "one of the finest surviving ivories from the Late Antique Period in Rome" dating from around 400AD; to "the largest and most splendid of the enamel caskets dedicated to St Thomas Becket", dating from about 1180; to the Boar and Bear Hunt tapestry, one of the only "great hunting tapestries to have survived from the 15th century."

There will also be an entire gallery dedicated to the work of the 15th century Italian sculptor, Donatello.

The Heritage Lottery Fund provided £9.75 million funding, while private donors funded much of the remainder.

Mark Jones, director of the V&A, said: "We hope that the new displays, featuring some of the most beautiful and historic objects from our collections, will inspire all our visitors."

From: Telegraph.co.uk

The Life and Death of a Pumpkin

2008-10-23T21:35:00.001-07:00

In honour of today's MSCU event.

Ruins of St Mary’s Abbey in York turned into a digital canvas

2008-10-23T21:25:00.000-07:00

The ruins of St Mary’s Abbey are to be lit up with giant medieval faces and echo with music and sound effects as the highlight of York digital arts festival.

Ross Ashton, whose light installation Accendo will also be projected on to the Yorkshire Museum, said that he was exploring “the relationship between science and religion, both of which try to make sense of the world. I took my inspiration from the parallels between York’s iconic buildings and the historic principles of science and religion.”

Ashton has previously projected his light installations on to Buckingham Palace.

The festival, which begins today, showcases several artists and hopes to encourage people to look at the city at night in a different way.

From: TimesOnline.co.uk

Today in the Middle Ages

2008-10-14T22:02:00.001-07:00

14 October, 1066 - Norman Conquest: Battle of Hastings

Pumpkin Carving Event

2008-10-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

It's the Great Pumpkin Charlemagne!

The Medieval Studies Corpse Union is holding a very spooky events this October.

Since many of us live away from home we miss many of the holiday rituals. To celebrate the scariest time of year, the MSCU will be holding a third annual Pumpkin Carving Day!

Come along and bring your fiends ... er friends (living or dead) and carve a pumpkin for your favourite professor. We'll provide everything you need to make a fearsome jack-o-lantern - pumpkins, cutting tools, clean-up supplies, candy, bags to dispose of the remains.

We're holding this event on Thursday, October 23th starting at 4:00 pm in the courtyard of Clearihue. Dress warmly - you wouldn't want to catch your death of cold. If the weather does not cooperate, we'll move to Clearihue D130.

To make this event even more exciting, we're teaming up with the Greek and Roman Studies Course Union. This group of boys and gouls also enjoy carving the cold flesh of pumpkins.

You know what they say: the more, the scarier...

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) Trailer

2008-10-14T21:53:00.001-07:00

Movie Night! Come join us Friday October 17, 2008 in Cle A 206. We'll be watching "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" starting at 7:30, but feel free to come late! There will be munchies!

MSCU Event Update

2008-10-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

Here are some things to keep in mind for this October!

1. The reading room (Clearihue D265) is open Mondays until 6pm. Come visit your friendly MSCU execs!

2. Movie Night! Come join us Friday October 17, 2008 in Cle A 206. We'll be watching "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" starting at 7:30, but feel free to come late! There will be munchies!

3. Pumpkin Carving. TBA, but as it sits right now, we'll be having this annual event on Thursday October 23 @ 4pm. Come make a pumpkin for your favorite prof!

4. Novermber Event! Just to jump a head a little here. Tentatively, on Monday Nov. 10 we'll be doing our annual "Commune with Nature." We go up to Goldstream park and watch the salmon "hump" and then try to climb the moutain! 'Tis good fun! Picnic lunch at the top!!

If you want to be completely up to date, please join our Facebook group "UVic Medieval Studies Course Union."

Hope to see you all out at these fun events!!

Rule: All Webcomics will Eventually Feature the Middle Ages

2008-09-27T10:28:00.001-07:00

From: Creased Comics.com

MSCU General Meeting

2008-09-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

On Thursday October 2nd starting at 4:00 pm in Clearihue A304 the MSCU will be holding its first general meeting of the year.

Q. What is a general meeting?

A. General meetings are open to all students who are interested in the MSCU. At this meeting the MSCU Executive will present their activity plans for the year. But the best part of this meeting is your participation.

The MSCU Executive is here to serve the students of UVic. While we like hearing the sounds of our own voices, we really want to hear from you. What kinds of activities do you want to see? Do you want academic activities, social activities or a mixture of both? We encourage students to bring their ideas and suggestions to this meeting. You can shape the direction of the MSCU.

If you are interested in making your voice heard or meeting the members of the MSCU, we encourage you to come to the General Meeting. If you have ideas but cannot come to the meeting, please send us and email.

Reminds me of a certain professor

2008-09-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

From: Married to the Sea.com

Historic, Medieval Castle's Date With Auctioneer Approaches

2008-09-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

The last act in a family’s long-running ownership dispute over a magnificent, 800-year-old Belgian castle will play out in an auctioneer’s house in Brussels on September 22, 2008. On that date, the third and final session for the public sale of the historic castle, Corroy-le-Château, will occur.

The castle, situated just south of Brussels, is surrounded by a moat and borders a 12-hectare, protected park. With walls and seven massive original towers dating to the 13th century, the property’s pristine condition makes it one of Europe’s only remaining perfectly-preserved castles.

Inhabited today by the same family descended from the original owners, the castle has undergone continuous transformation over the centuries and has been maintained in immaculate condition, preserving both its mythical quality and modern comfort throughout its 5,000 square meters of habitable space.

The castle’s status as a historic landmark provides the additional benefit of eligibility for government subsidies for any major work. Its majestically decorated parlors, beautiful corridors, bright interiors and sweeping staircases continue to attract touring groups and cultural performers, offering the possibility of dual use as both a residence and commercial endeavor.

A family dispute between the existing owners over the use of the castle culminated in a court decision which led eventually to the castle’s sale by public auction. The first two rounds of bidding yielded a current offer of €2.1 million ($3.1 million), an astonishingly low price in view of current European real estate values (see August 28 International Herald Tribune article, “In Brussels, French elite find favorable real estate values”

From: 1888 Press Release.com

Today in the Mid...GLORIOUS ROMAN PAST

2008-09-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

21st September 19 BC - The Roman poet Virgil dies

21st September AD 1947 - The American author Stephen King is born

Is Stephen King the reincarnation of Virgil? Spoooooooooky...

Obscure Latin Word of the Week

2008-09-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

This week's word: vagio, -ire

to whimper as a child.

How to use this word in daily life:

1. After a test - "Man, that test made me vagio - I should have studied more."

2. At the end of Moulin Rouge - "I can't finish that movie without vagio-ing. The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to lo... *sob* *sob*."

3. During karaoke - "It's hard to un-derstand/ how the tooouch of your hand/ has got me vagio-ing, vagio-ing, vagio-ing/ ooover you."

Exactly What We're Not

2008-09-14T23:13:00.001-07:00

When a Medievalist Interprets a Song ...

2008-09-14T23:09:00.001-07:00

MSCU Movie Night

2008-09-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

On Friday September 12th starting at 7:00 pm in Clearihue A206 we will be hosting our first movie night of the year.

We will be showing the classic 1987 film The Princess Bride. Come and eat, drink and be merry with us! Food and refreshment will be provided free of change.

As an added bonus, students who are in their first, second or third year who come to our first two movie nights of the year will be entered in a draw to win a prize! What is this mysterious prize?

Well it's a... wait, let's not spoil the surprise.

Welcome to the Medieval Studies Course Union

2008-09-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

Here are a few frequently asked questions about the MSCU:

1. What is it? The Medieval Studies Course Union serves to connect students with an interest in the middle ages. UVic can be a big and often intimidating place, finding peers with similar interests can be difficult. Students involved in the MSCU have a wide variety of interests. We hold both academic meetings (i.e. Latin study groups, discussion nights, undergraduate conferences, etc.) and social activities (i.e. skating nights, parties, movie nights, etc.).

2. Why should I be involved? Simply put - the more you put into your experience at UVic, the more you get out of it. Students in the MSCU have made lasting friendships and have shared experiences which have enriched their time here immeasurably. As an added bonus, involvement in academic course unions can be used when applying for graduate studies. MSCU members have received scholarships based, in part, on their involvement with the course union.

3. Can I be involved? Any student with an interest in the Middle Ages can be involved with the MSCU. There is no need for you to be a Medieval Studies Major, Minor or even to be registered in a Medieval Studies course.

Coming Out Soon

2008-09-09T11:09:00.001-07:00

"Satan's Alley"

Obscure Latin Word of the Week

2008-09-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

This week's word: palmifer - fera, -ferum

abounding in palm trees.

How to use this word in daily life:

1. As a compliment - "My what a palmifer garden you have! I've never seen so many palms in one place."

2. As a pick-up line - "Baby, if your love is a palm tree and my heart is a garden, then I would have one palmifer garden."

3. In a noir detective novel - "And then she walked in. That dame had more trouble in her than palms in an oasis: a palmifer oasis..."

Medieval manuscript stays in UK

2008-09-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

An 13th Century manuscript, thought to be the earliest surviving English roll of arms, is to stay in the UK.

The British Library paid £194,184 for the Dering Roll, which depicts the coats of arms of medieval knights from Kent and Sussex.

It was auctioned in December 2007 but culture Minister Margaret Hodge placed an export bar on the item.

The British Library said the document was a vital record for the study of knighthood in medieval England.

The painted roll of arms, which is about 2.6m (8.7ft) long, is thought to have been produced in Dover in the last quarter of the 13th Century. '

It contains 324 coats-of-arms beginning with two of King John's illegitimate children, Richard Fitz Roy and William de Say.

Above each shield is written the knight's name.

The 17th Century politician and Lieutenant of Dover Castle, Sir Edward Dering, erased a coat-of-arms on the roll and replaced it with one that bore the name of a fictional ancestor, Richard fitz Dering, in an attempt to forge his family history.

Claire Breay, of British Library, said: "The Dering Roll was identified as a priority acquisition for the British Library, and we are very pleased that we were able to secure the funding required to purchase the Roll and keep it in the UK.

"The acquisition of the Dering Roll provides an extremely rare chance to add a manuscript of enormous local and national significance which will greatly strengthen and complement its existing collection."

'Appealing work'

The British Library received a £100,000 National Heritage Memorial Fund grant, £40,000 from The Art Fund and £10,000 each from the Friends of the National Libraries and Friends of the British Library to help buy the item.

David Barrie, director of The Art Fund, said: "This is the oldest English heraldic manuscript known, and offers a fascinating insight into courtly life in the reign of Edward I.

"It is also a very appealing work of art which probably arose from one man's attempt to prove the noble ancestry of his own family."

The manuscript is currently on display in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library.

From: BBC News.co.uk

Welcome back

2008-09-02T18:48:00.000-07:00

Back to school. Are you excited?

Coming soon

2008-09-01T16:51:00.001-07:00

Knights Templar heirs in legal battle with the Pope

2008-08-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

The heirs of the Knights Templar have launched a legal battle in Spain to force the Pope to restore the reputation of the disgraced order which was accused of heresy and dissolved seven centuries ago.

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, whose members claim to be descended from the legendary crusaders, have filed a lawsuit against Benedict XVI calling for him to recognise the seizure of assets worth 100 billion euros (£79 billion).

They claim that when the order was dissolved by his predecessor Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties as well as countless pastures, mills and other commercial ventures belonging to the knights were appropriated by the church.

But their motive is not to reclaim damages only to restore the "good name" of the Knights Templar.

"We are not trying to cause the economic collapse of the Roman Catholic Church, but to illustrate to the court the magnitude of the plot against our Order," said a statement issued by the self-proclaimed modern day knights.

The Templars was a powerful secretive group of warrior monks founded by French knight Hugues de Payens after the First Crusade of 1099 to protect pilgrims en route to Jerusalem.

They amassed enormous wealth and helped to finance wars waged by European monarchs, but spectacularly fell from grace after the Muslims reconquered the Holy Land in 1244 and rumours surfaced of their heretic practices.

The Knights were accused of denying Jesus, worshipping icons of the devil in secret initiation ceremonies, and practising sodomy.

Many Templars confessed to their crimes under torture and some, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake.

The legal move by the Spanish group comes follows the unprecedented step by the Vatican towards the rehabilitation of the group when last October it released copies of parchments recording the trials of the Knights between 1307 and 1312.

The papers lay hidden for more than three centuries having been "misfiled" within papal archives until they were discovered by an academic in 2001.

The Chinon parchment revealed that, contrary to historic belief, Clement V had declared the Templars were not heretics but disbanded the order anyway to maintain peace with their accuser, King Philip IV of France.

Over the centuries, various groups have claimed to be descended from the Templars and legend abounds over hidden treasures, secret rituals, and their rumoured guardianship of the Holy Grail.

Most recently the knights have fascinated the modern generation after being featured in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code.

From: Telegraph.co.uk

Obscure Latin Word of the Week

2008-08-31T15:24:00.000-07:00

This week's word: hebdomas f. -adis

seventh day of a disease (supposedly critical)

How to use this word in daily life:

1. At work - "*cough**cough* I can't come into work day, my cold has progressed to the hebdomas, a critical day in my recovery."

2. At a drug store - "If the pus hasn't stopped by the hebdomas, take some penicillin."

3. As a pick-up line: "No way baby, I'm clean. It's been seven days and I haven't had a hebdomas yet."

Today in the Midd...GLORIOUS ROMAN PAST

2008-08-31T15:04:00.000-07:00

31st August A.D. 12 - Gaius Cailgula is born

31st August A.D. 161 - Commodus is born

Wow, don't trust anyone born today (I'm looking at you Richard Gere)

Outlander

2008-08-30T13:38:00.001-07:00

aka "Space Jesus and the Vikings versus the alien space dragon."

Solar-Powered Nanotech-Purified Air In Medieval Churches

2008-08-30T12:13:00.000-07:00

Tiny gold particles found in medieval gold paint reacted with sunlight to destroy air-borne pollutants, one researcher found

The glaziers who created gold-painted stained glass windows for medieval churches in Europe inadvertently developed a solar-powered nanotech air-purification system.

According to Zhu Huai Yong, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, the gold paint used in medieval-era stained glass windows purified the air when heated by sunlight.

"For centuries people appreciated only the beautiful works of art, and long life of the colors, but little did they realize that these works of art are also, in modern language, photocatalytic air purifier with nanostructured gold catalyst," said Zhu in a statement.

Zhu said that tiny gold particles found in medieval gold paint react with sunlight to destroy air-borne pollutants like volatile organic chemicals/compounds (VOCs), which are emitted from paints, lacquers, and glues, among other things.

"These VOCs create that 'new' smell as they are slowly released from walls and furniture, but they, along with methanol and carbon monoxide, are not good for your health, even in small amounts," Zhu said.

When interacting with gold particles, sunlight creates an electromagnetic field that reacts with the oscillating electrons in the gold. This field resonates and breaks apart pollutants in the air, according to Zhu. The byproduct is small amounts of carbon dioxide, which is better than carbon monoxide in terms of human health.

Zhou expects his research will help make the production of chemicals at room temperature more cost effective and environmentally friendly.

From: Informationweek.com

Obscure Latin Word of the Week

2008-08-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

This week's word: essedarius m -i

a fighter in a British or Gallic war-chariot.

How to use this word in daily life:

1. As a pick-up line - "Baby are you an essedarius? Because you just slayed my heart like a British or Gallic warrior."

2. At a sporting event - "Ah come on! A blind-folded essedarius could have made that play!"

3. At a job interview - "I'm a team player. It takes more than one essedarius to drive back a Roman legion."

We're still alive!

2008-08-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

Both the MSCU and this very blog have fallen dormant this summer. Now that September is nearly upon us, the mighty MSCU rises from it's slumber and begins to shake the dust from itself.

This is a quick announcement to let you know that the MSCU is back this September, and dare I say it, better than ever.

We have a slew of activities which we will begin unveiling in the first weeks of the coming month. Great things are also in store for this blog. I don't want to go into too great of detail yet, but let me say that changes are in the works.

In addition to the alluded changes, look for more original content, more news and more new features.

Today in the Middle Ages

2008-08-30T10:49:00.001-07:00

30th August, A.D. 526 - Theodoric the Great dies...

... and is buried in a sweet bathtub.

Ye Olde Webecomicse

2008-08-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

For more entertaining and tangentially medieval comics, visit The Perry Bible Fellowship

Medieval hall that spent 400 years as a barn brought back to life

2008-08-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

A medieval great hall that was used as a barn for more than 400 years has won a new restoration award after being converted into a family library.

Playwright Ian Curteis and his wife Lady Deirdre Curteis spent more than £100,000 turning the 13th century hall back into the heart of their moated Yorkshire home, Markenfield Hall. Their efforts have won them the £5,000 award, jointly run by the Historic Houses Association (HHA) and auction house Sotheby's.

Mr Curteis admitted part of the motivation was to house his collection. But he said the over-riding reason was to "breath life" back into the room for the first time since 1570.

That year Markenfield Hall was confiscated from Sir Thomas Markenfield, a Catholic, by Elizabeth I after he backed a revolt against the queen. Mr Curteis said: "He was forced into exile and died in poverty."

Elizabeth I handed the house to Sir Thomas Edgerton who turned it into a farm. Only now has it been returned to its former glory, thanks to Mr Curteis and his wife, who is descended from the Markenfield line.

Markenfield Hall beat some 40 contenders to win the competition. Three runners-up –Harewood House in Yorkshire, Paxton House in Scotland and Wilton House in Wiltshire – were also highly commended.

From: Telegraph.co.uk

Nine medieval ships found in Oslo mud

2008-08-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

The largest collection of antique shipwrecks ever found in Norway has been discovered under mud at the building site for a new highway tunnel in Oslo, the project's lead archaeologist said Friday.

The archaeologist, Jostein Gundersen, said at least nine wooden boats, the largest of them 17 meters, or 56 feet, long, were found well preserved nearly 400 years after they sank at Bjoervika, an Oslo inlet near the new national opera house.

"For us, this is a sensation," he said. "There has never been a find of so many boats and in such good condition at one site in Norway."

The wrecks were remarkably well preserved because they had been covered in mud and fresh water, where river waters reach the sea, he said.

"We have a fantastic opportunity to learn more about old shipbuilding techniques and the old harbors," said Gundersen of the Norwegian Maritime Museum in Oslo.

He said the wrecks were believed to have sunk sometime after a fire swept the wooden buildings of old Oslo in 1624. After that disaster, the Danish-Norwegian king, Kristian IV, ordered the city center moved before reconstruction started.

The discovered boats were moored at the old port, which became a remote area after the city was moved. He said the boats might have been 30 or 40 years old when they sank.

"There is nothing to indicate that the ships were deliberately scuttled," Gundersen said. "They could have sunk one by one, because of sloppy mooring or poor maintenance, or maybe sank in a storm."

He said the wreckage would be charted and removed as quickly as possible, so construction of the undersea tunnel could continue. It will then take years, he said, to examine all the ship's remnants back at the museum.

Gundersen said the find will help fill gaps in knowledge of vessels between Norwegian Viking ships of about 1,000 years ago and more modern vessels.

From: The International Herald Tribune.com

Monks' network of medieval canals discovered in aerial photos

2008-08-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

An extensive network of medieval canals which were used by monks in punts have been discovered in the Lincolnshire fens, researchers revealed.

Around 56 miles of waterways, which are now blocked by silt and hidden in the fen landscape, were found using aerial photographs, the Royal Geographical Society's annual conference was told.

It is thought the canals, which would have been 20ft to 40ft wide, were built by the monasteries in the area after 9th century raids by Vikings who destroyed many monastic sites.

Civil engineer and archaeologist Martin Redding said the schemes were unlikely to have been created for drainage alone because of the huge costs involved.

Instead they would have been used first to ferry locally-quarried stone to rebuild the monastic sites, which belonged to orders including the Benedictines and Cistercians.

They would then have been used to carry the rich resources of the fens to market in "fen lighters", which are shallow, flat-bottomed boats.

The cargo could have included cranberries, as research on a now extinct acidic peat bog in the Lincolnshire Fens has confirmed it would have been an ideal area for growing the fruit.

Mr Redding, a member of the Witham Valley Archaeology Research Committee, said it is likely each monastery had its own network of canals connecting parts of its estate including its farms.

Mr Redding said the canals showed "breathtaking engineering projects" were being undertaken in the fens 800 to 1,000 years ago.

He added the canals would have lasted until around the 14th century when rising sea levels would have made their operation increasingly difficult, while the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century probably finally ended the system.

From: Telegraph.co.uk

Lifting the lid on Roman secrets

2008-08-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have lifted the lid on a second coffin discovered at a dig site in Newcastle.

Two Roman stone sarcophagi were uncovered on land earmarked for development.

The 1,800-year-old sandstone coffins are the first such find – and arguably the most impressive – in the area for more than 100 years.

They are thought to have been used to bury members of a rich and powerful family from the nearby fort of Pons Aelius.

One tomb contained the poorly-preserved skeleton of a child and the second sarcophagus held the remains of a female.

They have been removed from the site by experts from Durham University.

Other discoveries in Forth Street include cremation urns, a cobbled Roman road and a medieval well, the remains of the foundations of Roman shops and workers' homes, and the remains of flint tools from Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

All the finds from the site will eventually go to the new Great North Museum in Newcastle, where the sarcophagi will be preserved for the public to see.

From: Shieldsgazette.com

Church unveils icon

2008-08-09T15:33:00.000-07:00

A Herefordshire church has installed an icon of its namesake who became a saint.

The Rev Michael Cluett, of St Lawrence Church in Canon Pyon, commissioned the painting of St Lawrence, who was martyred in Rome in AD 258.

Mr Cluett said: “The church is dedicated to St Lawrence but we had nothing in the church of him.

“We thought it would be good to make an icon of him and after seeing the new icons of Ethelbert in Hereford Cathedral, we got in touch with the artist.”

Artist Peter Murphy used traditional medieval techniques and materials such as gold leaf to create the authentic icon.

The cost has been met through fundraising and, this weekend, the church is holding its annual flower festival, from 10am until 6pm.

From: Herefordtimes.com

A Dark Age for Medievalists

2008-08-08T23:25:00.000-07:00

From the Weekly Standard:

A Dark Age for Medievalists
At their annual congress in Kalamazoo, it's no longer your grandfather's Middle Ages.
by Charlotte Allen
06/02/2008, Volume 013, Issue 36

Kalamazoo
Standing before an audience of about 25 academics, all professors and graduate students specializing in the Middle Ages, in a chilly classroom on the vast campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Jeff Persels, a lanky associate professor of French and director of European studies at the University of South Carolina, was reading aloud a scholarly paper at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. The paper's title was "The Wine in the Urine: Managing Human Waste in French Farce." The paper was about, well, the wine in the urine, or perhaps the urine in the wine. Its topic is a 15th-century farce, or lowlife comic drama, about an adulterous wife who uses a wine bottle as an impromptu chamber pot, with predictably gross results involving her husband and her lover.

Persels's paper didn't discuss the play simply as an example of Rabelaisian-style scatology, however. The perspective he used was the postmodernist discipline of "cultural studies," which means pushing works of literature (or movies or television shows or ad campaigns or whatever) through a Marxist cheesegrater as examples of the way society conditions its members to accept the views of a dominant class. In Persels's view, the wine-bottle farce marked a stage in the development of what he called the "bourgeois fecal habitus." Translated out of postmodern-ese into plain English, that means the tendency of uptight middle-class people not to want to talk in public about matters pertaining to the bathroom and to assume that those who do are kind of crude. "The excretory experience became associated with the proletariat," Persels explained. Although he seemed eager to demonstrate that he personally didn't share those uptight middle-class views, at least one of the academics in his audience remained unconvinced that a secret bourgeois habitus didn't lurk underneath his antinomian veneer. "Excretory?" she whispered to a fellow medievalist sitting next to her. "Why doesn't he just say shit?"

And you thought that the Middle Ages was all about jousting knights and damsels in distress. That's because you have never attended the medievalists' congress, the annual first-weekend-in-May ritual at Western Michigan where Persels read his wine-bottle theorizing and where it is definitely not your grandfather's Middle Ages. Persels's paper was part of a Thursday morning panel titled "Waste Studies: Excrement in the Middle Ages" and devoting a full hour and a half to human effluvia. The other two scholars that morning read papers dealing with excrement in Icelandic sagas and the theology of latrines.

Waste studies is a brand new academic discipline invented by Susan Signe Morrison, a dark-haired, extroverted 49-year-old professor of English at Texas State University's San Marcos campus and mother of two (her husband is also an English professor) who organized the session and admitted with good-humored candor in an email that her new field's disgust-provoking subject matter might be a "challenge" to scholars thinking about specializing in it. Morrison's own specialty as a medievalist used to be women on pilgrimages, but then she got the idea for her latest book, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics, forthcoming this September. In her email she explained that the idea for the fecal book came to her partly because she noticed that dung and privies played a role in the works of Chaucer, Dante, and other medieval authors, and partly because her "son was potty-training." And so a new scholarly industry was born.

The guru of waste studies seems to be David Inglis, a sociologist at the University of Aberdeen who coined the phrase "fecal habitus" and whose 2001 book, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience, argued that avoiding scatological topics in polite conversation is a repressive Western bourgeois hang-up. Inglis's theories fit right in with other concepts dear to the postmodernist heart of academia--"discourse," the "Other," matters "transgressive," "bodies" (in the world of postmodernism there are hardly any people, just "bodies"), etc.--so professors of literature, religious studies, and other branches of the humanities eagerly expropriated Inglis's ideas and applied them in their own endeavors. As one of the panelists, University of Oregon English professor Martha Bayless, put it with the opacity that is de rigueur in postmodernist theory, "The body is not a neutral site."

The one thing in which waste-studies scholars seem not to be interested is medieval history. The idea isn't so much how people disposed of waste as what they thought about it--or if you're a cultural-studies type, what "society" thought about it. When an audience member at the session pointed out that fertilizer, whether its source was human or bovine, couldn't have been too despised by the medieval middle classes because it was a valuable commodity that generated lucrative bourgeois fortunes for the merchants who traded in the stuff, Morrison countered, "It was still considered lowly."

When the session was over, Morrison invited the attendees to a second hour and a half of waste studies. "We'll be dealing with sewage," she announced cheerfully. Alas, my own bourgeois habitus (I'm lace-curtain Irish) started to kick in, and I decided I needed a breath of fresh air, so to speak, so I opted for a different session among the 602 featured at this year's congress. Not that the postmodernist modus operandi was likely to be any different elsewhere. Down the hall from waste studies that morning was Session 5: "(Ab)normal Societies: Disability as a Socio-cultural Concept in Medieval Society." The parentheses bracketing the "Ab" are examples of a favorite postmodernist punctuation strategy, signaling to readers in the know that putatively neutral words such as "abnormal" actually convey oppressive, often sexist, hidden agendas. My own take-the-cake award for the po-mo parenthetical among the 1,500 papers presented this year went to this double-parentheses doozy, attached to a paper read in Session 251, a panel about animal symbolism in Old French literature: "Becoming (m)Others, Becoming (hu)Men: Engendering Hybrids and Monsters in Two Medieval Romances."

"Disability studies" is another hot new field in the humanities these days, and as with waste studies, it has little to do with historical or economic facts on the ground, such as, say, the manufacture of medieval crutches or how blind people eked out an existence in 13th-century Perugia. Instead, like waste studies, disability studies is all about presumed attitudes toward the disabled: how medieval folks, perhaps like folks of today, supposedly classified those who were different from them as disabled. One of the Session 5 papers was "Two Sides of the Same Coin: Defining the Mentally Ill in Plantagenet England," read by Gregory Carrier, a graduate student in history at the University of Alberta. Carrier's conclusion, after a great deal of postmodernist rambling: "The mentally ill were inherently indefinable."

The next three days featured more of the same: scholarly papers that alternated between the incomprehensible and the vaguely revolting. On Thursday afternoon I heard a paper delivered on "Menstruating Male Mystics and the Sin of Pride." Then I took myself to "Googling the Grail," at which Elizabeth Sklar, an English professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, announced that she had typed "Holy Grail" into Google and gotten nine million hits. From there it was off to "Saint Margaret: General Practitioner, not only an OB-GYN." Who knew that there were medical specialties in the Middle Ages?

A Friday morning session featured a paper titled "Alisoun's Aging Body: Gazing at the Wife of Bath in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Hmm, Chaucer, something solid and recognizable. The paper, however, read by Mikee Delony, an English professor at Abilene Christian University, turned out not to be about Chaucer at all but about a BBC television production a few years ago that turned the Wife of Bath into a modern-day plastic-surgery junkie. There turned out to be more papers at the congress about the forgettable 2001 movie A Knight's Tale (three) than about Chaucer's Knight's Tale (one). In one of those papers, delivered with much help from PowerPoint and titled "Knights, Dykes, Damsels and Fags: Gender Roles and Normative Pressures in Neomedieval Films," Wayne Elliott , a graduate student at Kent State University, argued that the film Knight's Tale had a homoerotic subtext because it starred Heath Ledger. Poor Ledger. He made the double career mistake of (a) playing a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain and (b) dying before he had a chance to live it down.

There were numerous other papers with either "normative" ("heteronormativity" is bad because it implies that heterosexuals are more normal than homosexuals) or "masculinity" (like femininity, a social construct, not an inherent characteristic) in their titles, and sometimes both, as in this bilingual tonguetwister: "Nach der Mannesnamen Site? Amazons and Their Challenge to Normative Masculinity in Medieval German Literature." Other buzzwords among the medievalists at Kalamazoo were "hybridity" (borrowed from "postcolonial" studies), "heterosyncrasies" (I never could figure out what that meant), and that hardy perennial "patriarchy."

Speaking of patriarchy, six female professors gathered on the first full day of the congress for a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. The topic was a book titled History Matters by Judith Bennett, a professor of medieval history at USC, whose theme, judging from the discussion, is that feminists ought to redouble their efforts to fight patriarchy. The discussion, however, soon turned into a lament by some of the feminist professors that they had trouble persuading students of either sex to sign up for their courses. "One young woman told me that she wasn't taking my course on gender and experience because, she said, 'I don't want to take another feminist class,' " explained Wendy Marie Hoofnagle, a professor of medieval studies at the University of Connecticut. This complaint was echoed the next day by Audrey DeLong, a literature professor at Long Island's Suffolk County Community College, at a session devoted to strategies for sneaking postmodernist theory into the heads of reluctant undergraduates who might rather be elsewhere. "In my students' demographic, they hear the word 'feminist' and they shut down," said DeLong.

The International Congress on Medieval Studies bills itself as the largest gathering of medieval specialists in the country--and it probably is. Because it is timed to coincide with the end of the school year on most college campuses, including Western Michigan's, some 3,000 professors, graduate students, and amateur and professional experts on any subject that can be loosely defined as medieval ("loosely" can and does include J.R.R. Tolkien, Harry Potter, Xena the warrior princess, and even The Da Vinci Code) fly or drive to Kalamazoo, often taking along sheaves of their students' papers to grade during spare moments.

There they spend up to four days delivering or listening to some of the 1,500 scholarly papers presented at the congress, roughly one paper for every two attendees, but mostly (because the 600-odd sessions featuring those papers are crammed into only 12 hour-and-a-half time slots, which means no single person can hear more than a handful of them) socializing, in relationships that range from the strictly professional to--or at least I am told--the uninhibitedly erotic. The high point of the congress is the Saturday night dance, a not-to-be-missed spectacle of more than a thousand medievalists cramming themselves into a ballroom in the Western Michigan student center, fueling themselves with rail booze, and dancing the way you might expect scholars of the Middle Ages to dance. It doesn't help that most of the Kalamazoo medievalists look and dress the way you might expect scholars of the Middle Ages to look and dress. Some, of course, present themselves as the professionals they are--suits and ties on men, pulled-together ensembles on women--but they are likely as not to belong to a contingent of visiting Romanians. The best way to describe the attire of many attendees, which runs heavily to ethnic textiles, unusual body ornaments, sweaters of indeterminate age, shoes resembling those favored by medieval peasants, and unintentionally amusing hats, is the reply I overheard one medievalist give to a query by a nonmedievalist sharing our airport limo as to whether congress attendees wore costumes: "A lot of them wear costumes, but they don't know it."

The overblown size of the event--who knew that there were even 3,000 medievalists in the entire world?--illustrates the law of diminishing returns. When 1,500 scholarly papers appear on a single agenda, it is reasonable to expect that a large number of them will not represent lasting contributions to the store of human knowledge. Persels's wine-bottle paper, although dealing with subject-matter you wouldn't want brought up at the dinner table, was actually one of the better, in terms of overall learning, of the two dozen or so papers I heard (and his French accent was excellent). But besides the law of diminishing returns, the congress also illustrates all too faithfully various aspects of the law of supply and demand, one of which is that the total number of medievalists probably exceeds the total number of college undergraduates these days who have the slightest interest in learning the smallest thing about the Middle Ages. That dismal fact lies at the core of all other observations to be made about the congress.

The International Congress on Medieval Studies is the affordable medieval conference, centrally located in the Midwest (despite its "international" moniker, most attendees hail from the United States and Canada), and because of its low cost appealing to even the most underpaid and underemployed of academics in the field. The congress seems to have been designed that way from the beginning. Western Michigan, occupying 1,200 hilly acres on the far western outskirts of Kalamazoo, is one of those state normal schools that during the mid-1950s decided to switch identities overnight from poky teachers' college to populous state research university via a massive building campaign entailing awe-inspiring quantities of cinderblock. Today the student population totals 26,000, and its enormous campus is dotted with midcentury structures of an architectural style that can be described as "non-descript but sturdy."

Engineering, science, and business are Western Michigan's strong suits, along with Division 1A football--not exactly promising soil for nurturing study of the Middle Ages. Still, the campus houses a Medieval Institute that sponsored the first congress in 1962 and continues to do so to this day, as well as an Institute of Cistercian Studies (complete with an impressive rare-books library) that started sponsoring theological sessions at the congress during the early 1970s. The congress, with its lingering overtones of 1960s hippie culture, was designed as a gathering of the tribes in all things medieval: history, literature, theology, philosophy, drama, art, and music. The idea was that Western Michigan's student dormitories, vacated for the summer, would house the participants, and the sessions would take place in the now-vacant classrooms. For its first two decades, the congress remained relatively small and collegial, featuring perhaps a hundred sessions. Then it began to balloon to its present size of more than 600.

And why not? After all, the law of supply and demand says that low prices mean more customers. The Western Michigan dorms still cost only $35 a night ($28 if you double up with a roommate), there's a free airport shuttle, you can eat cheap at the cafeteria (or for nothing if you crash the receptions that serve hors d'oeuvres), and anybody with a credential and entrepreneurial energy can organize a session or read a paper. If you don't mind sleeping on a thin mattress in a cinderblock-walled, linoleum-floored, underlit, and virtually unfurnished 1960s-era dorm room that looks like Cellblock No. 9 and features an erratic heating system that alternately broils and chills, sharing a bathroom with up to three strangers (fecopoetics alert: cinderblock transmits sound with startling efficiency), and eating Midwestern student-cafeteria versions of your favorite dishes (such as the "Mediterranean" salad consisting of skewers of coconut shrimp atop a plateau of limp lettuce) while sharing your board with still more strangers whose immersion in medieval arcana is likely to have impaired their table manners, the International Congress on Medieval Studies is the academic conference for you. Oh, and you must also enjoy trudging up and down hills to and from sessions widely scattered across the campus.

Should you wish to trek into downtown Kalamazoo for a change of scene or cuisine--forget it, unless you've got a lot of time on your hands for a lot of walking along traffic-clogged highways. Besides, there's not much to see or do in this onetime Midwestern industrial hub on the railroad line between Detroit and Chicago now noticeably deindustrialized and depopulated. Kalamazoo doesn't quite look like the famously rundown Flint, Michigan, of Michael Moore movies, but gentrification still has a way to go. A warning to juicers: The vast Western Michigan campus, where you will be more or less confined as if on the county honor farm if you are too poor to rent wheels, is entirely dry, unless you bring your own bottle (which many do) or frequent the cash bars briefly open at the receptions and the dance.

Not surprisingly, then, the congress is generally shunned by the superstars of medieval academia: the senior professors and well-known scholars who occupy endowed chairs or draw generous compensation packages from Ivy League and top state universities. Those fortunate scholars, whose trips to academic get-togethers are typically fueled by hefty travel allowances from their affluent home universities, tend to prefer the classy get-togethers of the Medieval Academy of America, founded in 1925 by the famous Harvard historian Charles Homer Haskins and usually holding its annual meetings each March at big-city hotels or on the campuses of prestigious colleges with plenty of nearby cultural and entertainment amenities. The Medieval Academy does sponsor sessions at Kalamazoo, and some big medieval names do show up--this year's congress featured a stellar plenary address on medieval bestiaries by Christopher de Hamel, manuscript librarian at Cambridge University's Corpus Christi College, as well as appearances by the veteran Chaucerian scholar Derek Pearsall of the University of York, well-known medieval historians Brenda Bolton and Barbara Hanawalt, and Seth Lerer, dean of postmodernist medievalism at Stanford.

But most of the worthies who come to Kalamazoo do so as "presiders" whose sole job is to lend the gravitas of their names to sessions and introduce the worker-bee scholars who will actually read papers, thus being spared the drudgery of either writing a paper or doing the organizing. (You won't find them sleeping in the dorms, either; most book accommodations well off campus, preferably at the Radisson Plaza, Kalamazoo's best hotel.) The pecking-order realities of academic life, even among otherworldly medievalists, leave a vast army of poorly paid, overworked lower-echelon professors at not-so-big-name universities and, of course, legions of strapped graduate students for whom a trip to Western Michigan and the dorms of "the Zoo," as they call it, may well be the high point of the academic year.

Many state schools and smaller colleges on tight budgets pay for at most one or two trips to academic conferences per professor per year, and often at the rate of just $500 or even $300 per conference--hardly enough to cover air fare--and usually only if the recipient delivers a paper. You scarcely need to put two and two together to figure out why this year's congress featured 1,500 papers and why so many of them, delivered by graduate students afraid to venture outside the postmodernist box in which their theory-laden seminars have confined them, or professors who seemed to have hastily thrown their notes together in order to qualify for a free plane trip, were, to put it kindly, not so hot.

There are oases of excellence in the po-mo desert at Kalamazoo. Many sessions, especially those dealing with medieval theology and philosophy, which are typically sponsored by specialty organizations such as the Cistercian Institute or the Aquinas Society, offered papers that were rigorously researched and argued. The congress also features first-rate performances of medieval drama and music as well as a giant book fair. Still, many scholars, especially historians, feeling choked by the miasma of mediocrity, have stopped coming to Kalamazoo. Thus the overwhelming majority of the sessions nowadays are in the field of literature, especially English literature, which is notorious for its vulnerability to theoretical hoo-hah and for the large numbers of bottom-feeding assistant professors and at-sea graduate students needed to staff the required freshman composition classes that are run out of many universities' English departments.

Another reality of academic life draws bodies to Kalamazoo: professional loneliness in remote settings where hardly anyone else on campus cares about the Middle Ages. Over lunch in the cafeteria, Ellen Friedrich, an associate professor of Romance languages at Valdosta State University in Georgia, explained the facts of life for her: teaching four different courses per semester (in the Ivy League the norm is two) mostly way outside of her specialty, which is medieval French romances (not high on the list of academic interests for Valdosta undergrads), leaving almost no time for scholarly research. For her as for many in her position, the congress and other academic conferences offer their only chance to visit with professional confreres. "We're Kalamazoo junkies," Friedrich explained.

The difficulties of being a medievalist in an era in which few universities require their undergraduates to learn anything about the Middle Ages (mandatory courses in the history of Western civilization being a thing of the past), and in which undergrads increasingly shun the humanities because they can't take all the theory, accounts for another odd aspect of the Kalamazoo congress: the ever-growing number of sessions that don't deal at all with matters medieval but rather with modern books, movies, television shows, magazine ads, and even video games featuring either medieval or pseudo-medieval themes. Tolkien, Harry Potter, and "Googling the Holy Grail" were only the tip of the iceberg. There were countless papers purporting to highlight medieval themes in D.C. comics, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the 1990s Xena: Warrior Princess television series. One session was entirely devoted to medieval blogs, including a paper comparing the works of Geoffrey Chaucer to the blog "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog." The blowout, or perhaps the reductio ad absurdum, of these scholarly endeavors was Session 531 on Sunday morning, "Medieval Masculinities on Film." That session featured four separate papers: yet another examination of A Knight's Tale, an effort to prove that the 1961 movie El Cid, starring Charlton Heston, was a piece of Franco-engineered propaganda, a cinematic look at the story of Tristan and Isolde, and "Medieval Masculinity as Modern Monstrosity," a postmodernist analysis of Hannibal Lecter.

Such presentations proved to be among the better attended, and at least some of the individual papers (although maybe not those read in Session 531) displayed more literary depth and passion than many of the papers dealing with "real" medieval literature run through the postmodernist meat-grinder. "Teaching Tolkien" drew more than 70 attendees. One of the Da Vinci Code panels featured a paper that got my personal vote for best in the entire weekend: "Queering the Code: Jesus and Mary or Jesus and John?" a deadpan spoof by Madeline Caviness, an art history professor at Tufts University, arguing that Dan Brown's potboiler about Jesus' supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene was actually part of a Vatican cover-up of the savior's gay relationship with one of his apostles. Caviness managed to drag out and send up every cliché in the postmodernist dictionary that had been invoked with deadly earnestness elsewhere at the congress: "essentializing discourse," "destabilize the heterosexual imperative," "the heteronormativity of Jesus."

It's pretty clear that in an era in which undergraduates at many colleges can as readily fulfill their humanities core requirements by selecting a course on The Lord of the Rings from the academic smorgasbord as, say, selecting a course on The Canterbury Tales, medievalists make themselves useful on campus (and fill their classrooms and make their department heads happy) by teaching the former. But there may be something else at work, too, in the obvious enthusiasm with which highly trained experts in arcane specialties devoured sessions devoted to Tolkien and J.K. Rowling: There they could drop their postmodernist cynicism about "society" and simply drink in the elaborate cosmology, spiritual depth, literary beauty, and shared meaning that used to be what scholars looked for in real medieval literature, before the cultural-studies people got hold of it. Larry Caldwell, an English professor at the University of Evansville whose specialty is Anglo-Saxon literature but who read a thoughtful paper titled "Stern Vision, Earnest Evasion: Neomedieval Catholicism, Peter Jackson, and the Limitations of Popular Cinema," wrote to me in an email about Jackson's blockbuster movies of the Tolkien trilogy: "[W]e are looking at . . . a sort of universally shared text that non-specialists embrace with as much enjoyment as do members of the emerging specialist community of formal Tolkien scholars." Quite a difference from the "bourgeois habitus."

But on to the dance! In medieval times every story had a moral. The moral of the Saturday night dance at the 43rd International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo is that no scholar of the Middle Ages is too old, too graceless, too bulging of derrière, too gray of beard or ponytail, or too tattooed to get up on that parquet floor and gyrate spasmodically to vintage Bon Jovi amplified to jet-engine decibels. I'm told that the dances of today are no match in noise and lasciviousness for those of the mid-1990s, when flocks of leather-clad gays took to the floor to celebrate their academic coming-out in a congress session on "Queer Iberia." Still, I spent two hours there nursing a beer and mesmerized by the bobbing fauxhawks, the shaking bare flesh (and plenty of it), the hip-hopper in the Blondie T-shirt, the fellow in the full kilt and sporran who had been wandering through the congress as though in search of the set for Brigadoon, the nose-rings, the Birkenstocks, the Pashtun caps, the bare feet of the learned professors of the Middle Ages and their grad-student acolytes. Maybe it's not a pretty sight, but as the swaying sardine-packed academics on the dance floor sang along in unison: "We've got to hold on to what we've got."

Charlotte Allen, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus website, is writing her doctoral dissertation in medieval and Byzantine studies.

£10,000 lead theft at church

2008-07-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

A churchwarden has hit out after lead was stripped from a roof.

Thieves stole lead worth between £5,000 and £10,000 from St John the Baptist Church in North Luffenham last Monday night. Lead was taken from 10 of the church's 26 bays along the north transept of the building. Church warden Janet Whittaker discovered the theft last Tuesday.

She said: "We are all frustrated and disappointed but it's a sign of the times we live in. It's just sad that someone feels they can do this to a medieval building with so much history."

Volunteers patched up the roof with tarpaulin last week to stop the rain getting into the church and workmen were called out to make it more secure, but the proper repairs might not be done until Christmas.

The church committee expect it to take that long to sort out the insurance and will be reviewing its security over the next few months.

From: Stamfordmercury.co.uk

Today in the Middle Ages

2008-07-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

19 July, 1374 - Francis Petrarch dies...

... and the world rejoiced.

Archaeologists find 600-year-old chess piece in northwest Russia

2008-07-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

Archaeologists in northwest Russia have discovered a chess piece dating back to the late 14th century, a spokesman for local archaeologists said on Friday.

"The king, around several centimeters tall, is made of solid wood, possibly of juniper," the spokesman said.

The excavations are being carried out at the site of the Palace of Facets, in the Novgorod Kremlin in Veliky Novgorod. The palace is believed to be the oldest in Russia.

According to the city chronicles, chess as a competitive game emerged in Veliky Novgorod, the foremost historic city in northwest Russia, in the 13th century, but was banned in 1286 by the church.

However, besides the king, archeologists in the region have found a total of 82 chess pieces dating back to at least the 14th century, showing that the game remained popular among the local population despite the church ban.

In late May, archaeologists in the ancient city uncovered a number of medieval baby bottles. Medieval Slavs made feeding bottles by attaching leather bags to the wider part of a cow's horn. The babies drank milk from holes made in the tip of the horns.

The first historical mention of Veliky Novgorod was in 859 AD. City chronicles say that by 862 AD it was already a stop on the trading route between the Baltics and Byzantium.
The city will celebrate its 1150th anniversary in 2009.

From: Russian News and Information Agency.ru

Medieval churches face threat of closure

2008-07-19T13:25:00.000-07:00

Several medieval churches in one of the most beautiful corners of Britain are under threat of closure due to a lack of funding for repairs.

Tucked in and around Snowdonia, in north-west Wales, the churches all commemorate significant points in Welsh history and culture, but need hundreds of thousands of pounds for restoration work.

The Venerable Wyn Rowlands, the archdeacon of Meirionnydd, said: "We just don't know what the future holds. It is very important to keep them open."

Around 8,000 people, including Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, have pledged support for The Sunday Telegraph's campaign aimed at keeping churches at the heart of community life.

Among the buildings under threat are: St Cadfarch, in Penegoes, home to a monument to the landscape artist Richard Wilson, one of the founders of the Royal Academy; St Tydecho, in Mallwyd, which dates back to the 14th century and houses a memorial to the renaissance scholar Dr John Davies, who was responsible for a 1620 revised translation of the Bible into Welsh; and St Ust & Dyfrig in Llanwrin, which has some of the best medieval stained glass from the late 15th century.

From: Telegraph.co.uk

A Diverting Image

2008-07-12T19:56:00.000-07:00

So diverting, it's distracting me from what I should be doing.

A castle in Ayr - with a house thrown in

2008-07-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

£2.5m gets you a medieval castle with a 'free' Regency house

This Scottish castle is set in a lush landscape of gently rolling hills with belts of sheltering trees. Yet despite the extensive views in every direction, Cassillis (pronounced “Cassles”) is virtually invisible, lost amid 235 acres of woods even though it is only seven miles from Ayr.

For £2.5 million you are effectively buying two castles. The first is a medieval tower house, five storeys high, with immensely thick walls and the Scottish corner turrets known as bartisans. The second adjoins the original fortress and is a comfortable Regency house in the castle style, built of warm brown stone. The architects are thought to have been William Burn and David Bryce, the most celebrated exponents of Scottish baronial style.

Splendid balustraded steps lead up to the front door; a further short flight links upper and lower halls, allowing you to stand grandly at the top as your guests arrive. This is the place for stout walking sticks and impressive rows of Wellington boots.

For two centuries Cassillis has served as a fishing lodge attached to the seat of the Marquesses of Ailsa at Culzean Castle. The main floor of Cassillis consists of three big rooms, beginning with an inner hall. On the right is a handsome 14ft-high drawing room, with two immense bay windows that are almost as tall as doorways.

The dining room on the other side of the hall is of equally grand proportions. Designed for large house parties, it calls for a stately sideboard and silver dishes of scrambled eggs, kidneys and sausages at breakfast time.

Behind is a butler's pantry with steps down to a large, but still feudal, kitchen realm with Victorian cooking range, servants' hall and housekeeper's room. The guest bedrooms at the top are cosy. The main bedrooms, with lofty four-posters, are in the medieval tower. This is approached by the castle's showpiece: a broad, 17th-century spiral staircase that ascends around a central hollow core, looking like a lighthouse, complete with windows.

Above the two main bedrooms stood the grand hall of the tower house. It is now divided into a ballroom decorated with Highland cutlasses, and a library where bookshelves have little leather pelmets to stop dust collecting on the books.

The River Doon flows through the grounds, providing two miles of salmon and sea-trout fishing. The stable block provides garaging; the adjoining coachhouse has four bedrooms, and the stable cottage two bedrooms.

Cassillis has been the property of the turbulent Kennedy family since the 13th century. Their history, wrote the castle historian Nigel Tranter, “was one long catalogue of violence, savagery and sudden death”.

Today Cassillis is a peaceful place where, the family land agent says, “all you hear is the sound of sand- pipers and chaffinches”. After the death of her husband in 1994, the Marchioness of Ailsa lived on at the castle until her own death at the age of 91 last year. By this time her siblings were well established in homes near by and none choose to live in the castle. Hence the rare opportunity to buy a true stately home from the family that has lived in it for seven centuries.

Fast facts

What you get: Category A listed castle, five reception rooms, 12 bedrooms, 295 acres of woods and parkland.

Where is it: Seven miles from Ayr, 42 from Glasgow and 93 from Edinburgh. Price: £2.5 million

From: Times Online.co.uk

Iconic she-wolf nurtures a Roman archaeological mystery

2008-07-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

Experts consider theory that statue long thought to be as ancient as city is centuries younger

She suckled Rome's legendary twin founders and fed Benito Mussolini's ambitious dreams of renewed imperial glory.

For centuries, Lupa – "She-wolf" in Latin and Italian – has been a powerful Roman symbol. But some now contend that Lupa, a supposedly Etruscan bronze, the star of a city museum on Capitoline Hill, might be centuries younger.

"It's decisively medieval," says Anna Maria Carruba, a researcher who first studied Lupa when she worked on its restoration a decade ago.

"As I went ahead with my research, I was ever more sure."

The Etruscan period ran from the 11th to 1st century BC; medieval times ran from AD 500 to 1500.

If Carruba is correct, the statue could be more than 1,000 years younger than previously thought. The Capitoline Museums' website says Lupa is from the 5th century BC and was Pope Sixtus IV's gift to the museum in 1471.

Added separately, in the early 1500s, were the bronze figures of Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome who legend says were abandoned on the bank of the Tiber River and survived only because a she-wolf nursed them.

The almost metre-tall bronze is the centerpiece of a museum room named for it. Postcards and T-shirts of Lupa are popular Roman souvenirs. Mussolini used the image in Fascist propaganda to push for a return to ancient Roman glory.

In a front-page La Repubblica article this week, Adriano La Regina, who for decades led the national archaeological office for Rome, suggested Capitoline Museums is reluctant to release test results indicating the bronze is medieval.

"The new information about the epoch of the Capitoline bronze has been held back for about a year now from the public and experts," La Regina wrote.

Claudio Parisi Presicce, director of the city-run museums, insisted his institution is not trying to hide data that could subtract centuries from the she-wolf's provenance.

Data "aren't definitive yet, and we hope we can succeed in giving a definitive date" to the statue through carbon dating later this year, Parisi Presicce told news agency ANSA.

Carruba said carbon dating of bits of dirt and clay indicate Lupa was cast in 7th or 8th century AD using techniques for casting bronze developed in medieval times.

But some experts are skeptical.

Alessandro Naso, an Etruscan expert at the University of Molise, said Carruba's conclusion "that it isn't ancient is based on indirect proof ... arguments for the medieval are weak."

Archaeologist Nicoletta Pagliardi said Lupa's origins "are really uncertain."

With the statue "manhandled'' over many centuries, she said, carbon dating might be testing substances that contaminated the bronze long after its creation.

Parisi Presicce, the Capitoline Museums ' director, said that in medieval times, Rome's symbol was considered to be a lion, weakening arguments that Lupa was made during that period.

Carruba said her theory that Lupa isn't Etruscan does not diminish its mystique.

"It's an amazing, fascinating, majestic sculpture."

From: The Star.com

Bloodline

2008-07-07T11:14:00.001-07:00

CIA... after me... Opus Dei... help... they going to kill m...............

Today in the Middle Ages

2008-07-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

6 June, 1348 - Papal bull of Pope Clement VI which protected Jews during the Black Death.

See, the Middle Ages weren't a backwards time of religious persecution...

Also on 6 June, 1415 - Jan Hus is burned at the stake.

Oh, well maybe there was a little religious persecution. Well one out of two ain't bad.

Thieves prise relics out of cathedral altar in Germany

2008-07-02T07:32:00.000-07:00

Thieves ignoring an age-old ban on sacrilege have stolen saintly relics in an ivory case from the altar of a German cathedral, police and Catholic officials said Monday.

Ulrich Lota, a spokesman for the diocese of Essen, said the theft must have happened between 8 pm, when the last Sunday mass finished, and 9 pm, when the caretaker locked the cathedral so he could watch Spain beat Germany 1-0 in the European football final.

By Catholic tradition, fragments of the bones of ancient holy people are cemented into the surface of altars to consecrate them.

Essen's relics came from the skeletons of Maternus, Liborius and Liudger, three early medieval bishops of the German dioceses of Cologne, Paderborn and Muenster.

The ivory box, set into a pit in the altar, had gold inlays and was studded with 50 jewels including topaz and amethysts.

Lota voiced outrage at the loss of a bond to the past, saying the box had been made 50 years ago, when the diocese of Essen was founded. The cathedral is its chief church. He estimated the cash value of the case at more than 10,000 euros (15,500 dollars).

From: Earthtimes.org

Happy Canada Day!

2008-07-01T21:17:00.001-07:00

Happy Canada Day!

2008-06-30T22:53:00.001-07:00

It's kinda like a maple tree, right?

Today in the Middle Ages

2008-06-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

29 June, A.D. 512 - A solar eclipse is recorded by a monastic chronicler in Ireland.

Between the abstinence and the isolation, the monks didn't have a lot to do.

Poisonous ink likely cause of Biblical text-writing monks deaths

2008-06-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

Monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials might have died out of exposure to toxic mercury, with which the red colour ink they used for scripting was made, according to a study.

Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a University of Southern Denmark scientist at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry, believes that the ink might have been the culprit.

He came to this conclusion after studying medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries.
The researcher says that his study also describes a previously undocumented disease called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions.

Besides that, about 79 per cent of the interred individuals with leprosy, and 35 per cent with syphilis, had received medicines containing mercury.

Lund Rasmussen has discovered that the monks buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey, though not having any of such diseases, had mercury in their bones.

It suggests that the monks might have been contaminated either while preparing and administering medicines or while writing the artistic letter of incunabula (pre-1500 A.D. books), says the researcher.

During the study, Lund Rasmussen and his team drilled bone samples from the buried individuals, some of which were also friars buried in the cloister walk of the Franciscan Friary in Svendborg.

The researchers found that the friars did not show any signs of mercury poisoning, unlike the monks.

The study also took into account the fact that some of the medieval individuals ate a mostly marine, fish-filled diet.

The researchers, however, say that modern seafood may contain high levels of mercury out of environmental pollution, but exposure from food would have been unlikely during the medieval period.

Lund Rasmussen says that mercury “was used (in the ink) in the first place because cinnabar (a type of mercury) has this bright red, beautiful colour.”

A separate study by Israeli scientists recently found cinnabar on four fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include passages from the Hebrew Bible.

(Even today) one should really not touch, or much less rub, the parchment pages of an incunabulum,” Discovery News quoted Lund Rasmussen as warning.

He also said that his co-author Jesper Lier Boldsen discovered the previously undocumented disease FOS while examining the skeletons.

“We do not know if FOS was fatal, but it certainly looks painful and just as severe as leprosy,” he Lund Rasmussen said.

The study will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. (ANI)

From: Thaindian.com

Medieval boat found on Suffolk coast

2008-06-29T13:41:00.000-07:00

The unearthing of a medieval boat on the north Suffolk coast is of “great national importance”, the archaeological team behind the discovery said last night.

As reported in yesterday's EADT the remains were found during excavations at Sizewell in advance of the onshore works for the Greater Gabbard Wind Farm. The vessel, which was probably a small inshore fishing boat, was broken up sometime between the 12th and 14th Centuries and parts of its hull were re-used to create a timber lining for a well.

Robert Atfield, Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service's project manager, said: “The waterlogged conditions have ensured that the timbers are very well preserved.

“It is very rare to find a timber boat like this preserved to such a great extent, this is very much a significant find and of great importance nationally.

“This kind of lucky find is something which does not happen very often, we will now be looking at trying to conserve the timbers. We might try and reconstruct and display the vessel in the future.”

The other finds include a wide range of pottery, part of a wooden platter, various personal items such as buckles and clothing fasteners, fishing hooks, and weights. All of the discoveries from the dig will now be cleaned, conserved and studied in further detail.

Mr Atfield added: “Where we found the boat was probably the inland edge of the settlement that was Sizewell. It would have been very much a thriving settlement based near to the beach, but large areas of land were eroded by the sea during the 12th Century and much of the settlement lost.”

The area around the dig site would have been part of the property of Leiston Abbey, it follows the edge of a low-lying channel, which would have formed a fresh water lagoon and would have been the focus for a variety of activities. There is evidence of timber buildings, hearths and wood-lined water pits clustered at the channel's edge.

Leiston Abbey, formerly known as St Mary's Abbey, was founded in 1182 near Minsmere by Ranulf de Glanville, Lord Chief Justice to King Henry II.

In 1363 the abbey was transferred to Leiston, and its patron Robert de Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, devoted his last years to the building.Peter Simoyi, project manager for South East Electricity Substantions Alliance - one of the partners jointly funding the dig, said: “It's nice to think that in the process of connecting a new energy source for Suffolk's future, we have been able to shed light on the county's past.”

From: Eadt.co.uk

For £500,000 a fortified manor in the Yorkshire Dales

2008-06-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

A modest up-front price gives you the chance to restore one of the finest fortified houses in England

Nappa Hall beckons you to change your life, to give up your day job and devote time and energy to restoring one of the finest fortified manor houses in England. The price makes it even more tempting: £500,000. Although one tower has not been occupied for 40 years, the other, with a gabled cottage beside it, was tenanted as recently as last month.

The setting of Nappa Hall, near Leyburn in North Yorkshire, is intoxicating. On a sunny summer day it is hard to imagine a grander view. The drive along Wensleydale takes you past mighty Bolton Castle, visible for miles around. Nappa, built in the 1450s, is Bolton's little brother, with twin towers and battlements and great hall between.

Like Bolton, it commands a breathtaking panorama along and across the dale, with stone-walled fields descending to the river and the noble outline of the fell rising on the far side. Better still, the passing road is out of sight and hearing. You enter through a carriage arch in a stable range into a courtyard open on the south. To the left is a four-storey tower with battlements, very much like the Pele towers in Northumberland, built as a protection against raiders from Scotland. The tower is built of rugged stone that can clearly endure for 1,000 years. The masonry detail is delicious, too, with medieval stone mullioned windows diminishing in size from floor to floor.

Beside the tower, the medieval great hall retains the original window tracery; the deep porch has a broad pointed archway. Beyond is a second battlemented tower, from which extends a cottage-like gabled wing with sash windows on the upper floor.

The white front door in the gabled wing is inset with diamond-shaped studs. It leads to a stone-flagged kitchen and ancient sculleries facing south, so there will always be a good view while washing up. The ceilings in this part on the house are low but on the first floor are handsomely panelled rooms, of early 18th-century date, with stone fireplaces. There is also a pretty Georgian cantilevered staircase rising in a graceful curve with stone steps projecting from the walls.

The challenge becomes apparent in the great hall, an impressive 29ft wide and 40ft long. Huge paving stones cover the floor but walls and ceilings are bare and stained with damp. The big question is whether a splendid medieval timber truss roof is waiting to be revealed above.

Ceilings and floors are rotten in the western tower, and I was not even allowed to ascend the stone spiral stair to the first floor. Yet the chance is here to create an impressively proportioned room on each level, with views growing ever more breathtaking, and this can be done while you live in the east wing. The thrill will be to work with the original, largely untouched medieval masonry.

Nappa was built by James Metcalfe, who fought at Agincourt. Interestingly, it has always passed by inheritance; William Metcalfe, whose family farms the surrounding land, is now selling the house, recognising that it needs major repairs. The house comes with just five acres but a further 90 acres are available by negotiation, including a recently restored laithe barn, field barns and an extensive river frontage. Winters will be cold but the snow-clad fells will be a majestic sight.

Fast facts

What you get: Grade I listed house with great hall, six bedrooms in five acres with stone outbuildings. In all, 8,000 sq ft. Where is it: Leyburn 12m; A1 at Bedale 25m. Trains to London from Darlington and Northallerton take from 2hrs 23min.

From: Timesonline.co.uk

Military Intelligence? There's an oxymoron...

2008-06-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

"This is not something that could be done in one, two or three years because we are talking about a country that is essentially medieval, that has very little in the way of infrastructure, very little in the way of human resource, that has an endemic culture of corruption...

"In terms of developing the country from an almost medieval status, that has to be an enterprise of decades."

- Air Chief Marshall Jock Stirrup

What can you expect from a guy named "jock?"

No wait, seriously, this guy's name is Jock Stirrup? Was he a male stripper before joining the army?

Ledbury dig uncovers piece of history

2008-06-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

An archaeological dig in Ledbury has uncovered a medieval wall.

An archaeological evaluation survey at the town’s Masters House has been completed as a precursor to the creation of a £2.9m library and community complex for the town.

The dig uncovered evidence of a medieval wall – a report detailing this and any other artefacts found during the survey will be produced by archaeologists within the next couple of weeks.

The archaeological survey was essential due to the historic nature of the site and its completion and the report paves the way for the design brief for the library to be finalised.

Work to dig a 20-metre trench began earlier this month. Herefordshire Council plans a new library with access for disabled people within the St Katherine’s area of the high street, together with a new information centre, a tourist information centre and visitor attraction.

From: Worcester News.co.uk