Category Archives: Medieval

Posts on events in the late first and early second millenia CE

Cross-Post: Subscriptions to Robin Netherton’s Festschrift

22 Saturday Jun 2019

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Until 1 August 2019, Boydell and Brewer are accepting subscriptions for a Festschrift to textile historian Robin Netherton. Subscribers can buy the volume for 40 GBP/70 USD rather than the 70 GBP/135 USD retail price, and will get their name in the book. Chapters will include:

  • Introduction
  • Robin Netherton: A Life
  • Precious Offerings: Dressing Devotional Statues in Medieval England
  • Dressing the Earth: an Eleventh-century Garb in the Exultet Roll of Bari
  • Dress, Disguise, and Shape-Shifting in Nibelungenlied and Volsunga Saga
  • Survival, Recovery, Restoration, Re-creation: the Long Life of Medieval Garments
  • Coping with Connoisseurship: Issues in Attribution and Purpose raised by an Indo-Portuguese “Vestment” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Refashioning St. Edward: Clothing and Textiles
  • “Dressed to Kill:” The Clothing of Christ’s Tormentors in an Illustrated Polish Devotional Manuscript
  • Semper Ubi Sub Ubi: What Braies Cover and Reveal
  • Treason and Clothing in Sixteenth-Century England: The Case of Gregory “Sweetlips” Botolf
  • The Lexicon of Apparel in the Pastourelle Corpus: Refashioning Shepherdesses
  • The Real Unreal: Chrétien de Troyes’s Fashioning of Erec and Enide
  • Regulating and Refashioning Dress: Sumptuary Legislation and its Enforcement in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century Lucca
  • Nuns’ Clothing and Ornaments in English and Northern French Ecclesiastical Regulations
  • Clothing Dependents: Dress of Children and Servants in the Petre Household, 1586-1587

To subscribe, download the order form at https://boydellandbrewer.com/refashioning-medieval-and-early-modern-dress-hb.html

Datini’s Wares in GURPS

08 Saturday Jun 2019

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Two soldier crush silverware for easier packing as a comrade throws more loot out a window

Want to know whether helmets of scales like Mr. Red wears were just artists’ fantasies? Check out Medieval Warfare VIII.1. British Library, MS. Royal 20 C VII (painted in Paris between 1380 and 1400)

Last spring I published a two-page article in Medieval Warfare VIII.1 talking about the kinds of concealed armour which were for sale in the Avignon of the Babylonian Captivity. As far as I know nobody else has talked about these sources in any language except Italian, so I hope translating them was helpful! Now, I am interested in the real things and how they were made … if I ever have money I might commission a few reproductions. But what if your interest is in gaming? How might you represent this armour, say in GURPS?

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Oh, The Scholar and the Swordsman Should Be Friends

06 Saturday Apr 2019

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Two books with a wooden rondel dagger in a leather scabbard with a brass chape between them, laying on top of a hand-sewn linen shirt

Three historical fencing projects: a review of Jeffrey Forgeng’s “The Medieval Art of Swordsmanship” (2018) and a review of Guy Windsor’s “The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts” (2018)

The historical fencing world had 20 glorious years. Between 1992 and 2012, people around the world came together, pooled their different skills and interests, and turned a jungle of confusing manuals and manuscripts into working martial arts. At first, everyone was so excited to find someone else interested in swords that they were willing to overlook some other differences and tolerate each other’s flamboyant eccentricity. In the twilight of this period, Tom Leoni wrote that “I look forward to the fruits of the next generation of researchers- of both the swordsman-historian and historian-swordsman types.” But as it got harder and harder to fit everyone in a single gymnasium, and as it became less necessary to learn things from books by academics rather than buddies in the salle, cracks emerged. The jocks stopped being polite to the nerds, the people whose passion was for medieval dagger fighting stopped attending workshops on 18th century smallsword play, and the people who thought a background in say Japanese sword arts was essential stopped having any time for the people who thought it was corrupting. This week, I would like to talk about three projects which show the state of the movement in 2019, as best as I can see it from the outside.*
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Folk Wrestling in Poland

02 Saturday Mar 2019

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The field behind the Zentrum für alte Kulturen, Langer Weg, Innsbruck, on 31 January 2019

Over on Patreon, Maciej Talaga talks about the folk sports which Polish peasants used to play in the slack times of the agricultural year. As he says, outside of the harvest season peasant societies tend to have more workers than useful things for them to do, so people on the land have to find ways to amuse themselves.

Biady, that is wrestling, was one of the most popular. It was played mostly by older boys and unmarried men, but there were exceptions. Participants would establish a specific hold – you can see it demonstrated on the video – and try to throw each other down without breaking it. Such matches could last anything from a few seconds to up to half an hour (with a single successful throw!). They involved no judges or coaches, as none of the participants would receive any formal training.

The latter was also the very reason why documenting “biady” required a specific research strategy. Since this martial game had no technolect or jargon, practitioners had no consistent way to talk about it. They couldn’t discuss given techniques, as we are used to do in HEMA, since there were no names for wrestling actions involved. Even less so in regard to tactics and theoretical concepts. In effect, my Grandpa also had hard times answering my inquisitive questions which I started bombarding him with after I discovered he has a vivid memory of this fascinating tradition. Being a simple man, he not only was surprised that anyone found it interesting, but also lacked words to explain martial matters in a structured way.

Having realised these difficulties, I called for help: I have a pleasure to run a little youth club teaching HEMA to some fantastic boys and girls. Three of them, Krzysztof Markowski, Marcel Kwapisz and Bruno Biernacki, enthusiastically agreed to assist me in a research trip. We went by bus to Wizna, a town located some 30 km away from my grandparents’ house in Łomża, and took a walk to visit the only Polish folk wrestler we knew about. And this time we were prepared much better – instead of asking questions, we started “biadying” in front of my Grandpa in the hopes that it would be easier for him to comment on our performance than talk about “biady” from a scratch on his own. And it worked!

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Cross-Post: Books Before Print

10 Sunday Feb 2019

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Erik Kwakkel, Books Before Print (Amsterdam University Press/ARC Humanities Press, 2018) EUR 34 (paperback), 105 (hardcover), 105 (ebook) (available on Biblio)

Erik Kwakkel, excellent book historian and blogger, has a new book out on the medieval manuscript as a well-engineered tool shaped by readers’ habits and desires.

This beautifully illustrated book provides an accessible introduction to the medieval manuscript and what it can tell us about the world in which it was made and used. Captured in the materiality of manuscripts are the data enabling us to make sense of the preferences and habits of the individuals who made up medieval society. With short chapters grouped under thematic headings, Books Before Print shows how we may tap into the evidence and explores how manuscripts can act as a vibrant and versatile tool to understand the deep historical roots of human interaction with written information. It highlights extraordinary continuities between medieval book culture and modern-world communication, as witnessed in medieval pop-up books, posters, speech bubbles, book advertisements,and even sticky notes.

If you are a little bit interested in the middle ages, most of the illuminated manuscripts you have seen are from the 15th and early 16th century … they are roughly contemporary with the first printed books in Europe. Fifteenth-century Europe was richer than Europe a century or two earlier, it had more rich people who could pay for lapis-lazuli blue and gold dust and silver leaf, and the styles of art are closer to our taste. Early printed books imitated manuscripts like ebooks and websites imitated hardcovers and magazines. But medieval book culture was also different than ours: big margins were fashionable, and books were meant to be memorized not read once and passed on. Specialists called codicologists and art historians know many things which sometimes get brushed over in books aimed at a larger audience.

If you work with medieval books, but didn’t get to take university courses on the subject, reading this and a few of the books in the bibliography would be an excellent idea. You can find the affordable paperback edition on Biblio.

Full Disclosure: I know the author

Cross-Post: Doug Strong’s Armour Book in Preorder

22 Thursday Nov 2018

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The cover of a book with the title, a frontal photo of a bascinet with Klappvisier, and a side sketch of the same bascinet

Douglas W. Strong, Surviving Examples of Early Plate Armour (1300 – 1430) Volume I: Bascinets (Freelance Academy Press, 2018) 332 pages, hardcover with B&W illustrations ISBN-13 978-1-937439-12-5 (available from the publisher)

Doug “Talbot” Strong, the author of An Analysis of 1300 Effigies Dated Between 1300 and 1450 has finally been able to publish his book on surviving medieval European plate armour. This will be a four-volume set costing about 150 USD a volume but there is a discount for earlier orders. Each volume contains written descriptions, line drawings, and some colour photos of all surviving examples he could find in more than a decade of searching and making friends with collectors and curators.

The first volume, on bascinets, is now available for preorder and should hopefully arrive in time for Christmas.

Full Disclosure: I know the author and the publishers

Two Kingdoms, Both Alike in Dignity

17 Saturday Nov 2018

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A collection of Roman potsherds in front of a painting of a kitchen at Pompeii by Peter Connolly

Rimini is another part of the ancient world whose history may be more complicated than the stories about Greek colonies and Roman cities in the historians, but that is a story for another day. The City Museum, Rimini, October 2018.

We do not talk about the Red Sea much, except for news stories about the Saudi intervention in Yemen or conscripts in Eritrea forced to spend 20 years teaching school for a token wage. But every thousand years or so it becomes one of the key chokepoints for world trade. The sea is shallow, dotted with reefs and islands and prone to dangerous storms, but still a cheaper way to move goods from the Indian Ocean to the Nile than camel trains or railway cars. One of these periods of trade began at the end of the second century BCE when the secret of the monsoons escaped the Arabs and reached Egypt, where the Ptolemies were looking for new sources of revenue and exotic goods to balance the decline of their empire overseas and the wonderful things which were filtering into Syria over the Silk Road around the Tarim Basin. Rather than dredge out Darius’ old canal, they built harbours at Myos Hormos and Berenike and Arsinoe and set up guard posts along the sun-baked paths from the Nile to the Red Sea like Hatshepshut. But the straits at the mouth of the Red Sea are dangerous, and the best ship for following the monsoons back and forth across the Indian Ocean is not the best for navigating the narrows and small harbours from the Gulf of Suez to the Gulf of Aden. So two kingdoms emerged to control the havens at the narrows, Ḥimyar on the Arabian shore and Axum on the African.
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Cross-Post: Medieval Dress and Textile Society CFP

21 Sunday Oct 2018

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A narrow footpath through a forest of deciduous trees turning yellow

Fall is almost coming in Tirol … time for some nice cozy wool lined with silk cloth?

The Medieval Dress and Textile Society is organizing a conference in London on the theme “Wool: Cloth, Clothing, and Culture” in Europe c. 500-1600 CE. They want the usual 20 minute paper with a title and 200-word abstract. Themes might include:

  • Production
  • Techniques
  • Trade and transport
  • Fashion in wool fabrics and garments
  • Wool textile art
  • Utilitarian and recycled wool cloth

Deadline for Proposals: 30 October 2018 (early proposals gratefully accepted!)
Date of Conference: 6 April 2019
Send Proposals To: gale DOT owencrocker AT ntlworld DOT com

The original CfP seems to be only available as a photo on Twitter (!?!) https://twitter.com/dresshistorians/status/1015128338522877952 Edit 2018-10-23: They have a website with a page for the conference at http://medats.org.uk/events/wool-cloth-clothing-and-culture/

Sallets in 1406

13 Saturday Oct 2018

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Side views of two infantry helmets (one tall and open, one short with a projecting tail and low visor) with a manuscript illustration of the Canaanites smiting the Jews in between

How did we get there from here? A late-15th-century barbuta (left: Metropolitan Museum of Art 04.3.232), a late 15th century sallet (right: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 04.3.227), and a page from the Paduan Bible Picture Book (British Library Additional 15277) painted seventy years before they were forged.

Most people interested in medieval armour think that the word sallet is first attested in the inventory of the Gonzaga family armoury after the death of Francesco I Gonzaga in 1407:

#23: Vna cellata coperta velluto carmesi pilloso cum certis dindinellis racamatis viridis “One sallet covered with plush crimson velvet with certain green embroidered fringes”
#25: Quadraginta tres cellate ferri “43 sallets of iron”
#124: Triginta stufe a celata “30 coverings for sallets”

That is the oldest reference in Claude Blair, and his book in 1958 was the last book on European armour by someone who spent a lot of time reading medieval documents in the original. In fact, there are another group of references from this time which have not yet been brought into the debate. These are in the Archivio Datini di Prato in Tuscany and were published by Luciana Frangioni in her article “Bacinetti e altre difese della testa nella documentazione di un’azienda mercantile, 1366-1410.” She copied and printed all of the references to armour for the head in this archive, and now I have copied them for you.
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Cross-Post: Roland Warzecha Workshops September 2018

01 Wednesday Aug 2018

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Dear sword & shield enthusiast,

you are receiving this message because you have either registered for a class in the History Park in September or in the past, or have expressed your general interest at some point.
Unfortunately, neither the class on September 1/2 nor the one on the following weekend of September 8/9 has met the required minimum number of participants.
I have therefore decided to offer a combined class focusing on mutual principles for your shield of choice, be it kite, heater or buckler.
We would cover the following topics:

Lying on top, lying beneath: Learn how to gain a superior shield bind, or how to respond with weakness if you are inferior in order to regain the upper.
Let the sword do the job: Learn how to deliver a sturzhau/plungeing blow either on the right or on the left to circumvent a shield and striking hard, yet without effort.
Commence calmly, conclude quickly: Learn how to use „tempo“, to most efficiently time your actions in relation to those of your opponent.
The geometry of victory: Learn how to be stronger by positioning your weapons instead of using muscle strength.

Please let me know within the next seven days if you are interested in such a weekend class, and pick your preferred weekend … Please also let me know your choice of shield.

I will either confirm or cancel classes within a week’s time.
You are welcome to pass this message and info on to any interested party. …

All the best,
Roland