22 Friday Jun 2018
Tags
Tobias Capwell, the armour scholar who jousts, has a book out on his favourite sport. I wish there were people with a similar combination of skills writing about ancient armour!
Tobias Capwell, Arms and Armour of the Joust. Arms and Armour Series. Royal Armouries, Leeds, 2018. 96 pages, ISBN-13 978-0948092831. You can find a copy on Bookfinder (it is too new to be on Biblio).
Edit 2018-06-23: Fixed broken link.
08 Friday Jun 2018
Tags
Oxbow Books, fine publisher and bookseller, has a book sale on. I flipped through their leaflet and picked out some things which my readers might be interested in.
Anastasius Antonaras, Fire and Sand (Yale University Press, 2013) {509 glass objects from Preislamic times in an American collection}
Beltrame (ed.), Sveti Pavao Shipwreck: a 16th Century Venetian Merchantman from Mijet, Croatia. GBP 8 {shipwreck with bronze artillery and ceramics}
Paul R. Sealey, EAA 118: A Late Iron Age Warrior Burial from Kelvedon, Essex. GBP 5 {rich grave roughly contemporary with Caesar’s landing in Britain}
There are many other East-Anglian Archaeology volume, but mostly medieval and not so exciting sounding.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber, The Dancing Godess: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origin of European Dance (W.W. Norton, 2014)
John Peter Wild, Textiles in Archaeology.
Glen Foard, The Archaeology of British Battlefields. Council for British Archaeology, 2012.
Melanie Giles, A Forged Glamour: Landscape, Identity, and Material Culture in the Iron Age.
Suzane Moeller-Wiering, War and Worship; Textiles from 4th to 3rd century AD Weapon Deposits in Denmark and Northern Germany. Oxbow, 2011 {Thorsberg, Nydam, Vimose, Illerup Adal)
Andre J. Veldmeijer, Tutankhamun’s Footwear. Sidestone, 2012. GPB 15. {walk like a pharaoh!}
R.A. Hall, Egyptian Textiles, GBP 3. {booklet on ancient textiles from Egypt}
Edward Bleiberg, The Official Gift in Ancient Egypt. Oklahoma University Press, 1996. GPB 9. {gold of valour!}
Maria C. Shaw and Anne P. Chopin (eds.), Woven Threads. Oxbow Books, 2015. {On Mycenean and Minoan patterned textiles}
Mary Harlow and Marie-Louis Nosch (eds.), Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress {on fragments}
James Romm, Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great. Random House, 2012.
John Boardman, Greek Gems and Finger Rings. Thames and Hudson, 2000.
Boris Rankov (ed.), Trireme Olympias: Final Report. Oxbow Books, 2012. GBP 17.
Howe/Garvin/Wrightson (eds.), Greece, Macedonia, and Persia. Oxbow 2015. {edited collection on warfare}
Waldemar Heckel, The Conquests of Alexander the Great. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Simon James, Rome and the Sword. Thames & Hudson, 2011. GPB 8.
Alan Wilkins, Roman Artillery. {twang-thunk!}
Ellen Swift, Roman Dress Accesssories. Shire Publications, 2003. {booklet on ordinary people’s accessories} GBP 3
Sim and Kaminisky, Roman Imperial Armour {not great but worth reading once}
Harlow and Nosch (eds.), Greek and Roman Textiles and Dress. {edited collection on textile fragments as evidence}
David Karunanithy, Macedonian War Machine (Pen and Sword, 2013) {a good book … I would say that even if it did not cite me}
Mark Claire, Medieval Painters and Their Techniques: The Montpellier ‘liber diversarum arcium’ (Archetype, 2011) GBP 20 {translation of the liber diversarum artium, a book similar to Cennino Cennini‘s but probably older and from north of the Alps}
Painton Cowen, English Stained Glass {1100-1530, photos of 100 windows, they have another which is just 12th century glass from Canterbury Cathedral} GPB 8.
Nathaniel E. Dubin (tr.) The Fabliaux: A New Verse Translation GPB 8 hardcover {naughty Old French poems}
Laura F. Hodges, Chaucer and Array. GPB 13.
Maria Hayward, The 1542 Inventory of Whitehall {palace inventory}
Robert Douglas Smith and Kelly DeVries, Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy. GBP 13. {BOOM – CRASH!}
Dirk Meier, Seafarers, Merchants and Pirates in the Middle Ages. GBP 8 {arr!}
Jeff Sypeck, Becoming Charlemagne (Harper Collins, 2006). GBP 5.
There are also several books in castle studies, although I do not know if they are the meaty everyday-life-and-warfare kind or the philosophical kind which spends a lot of words to say “sometimes people just want to feel like they live in a fortress.” If that lists sounds like you could put together an order with cheap shipping, check them out!
26 Saturday May 2018
Tags
The first Rustkammer at Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck. Photo by Sean Manning, May 2018.
In an earlier post, I talked about videos on making armour. But what if you prefer books? Whereas 20 years ago very little was available, today there are quite a few things to read and look at.
There is one textbook on making European plate armour: Brian R. Price, Techniques of Medieval Armour Reproduction: The 14th Century (Paladin Press: Boulder Colorado, 2000). The book is a reasonable introduction by a mid-level armourer with a troubling history. Brian R. Price (now an Associate Professor at Hawai’i Pacific University) once ran a small press (Chivalry Bookshelf) until it emerged that he had not been paying the agreed royalties, had not obtained rights to all the illustrations, and had not registered their works with the appropriate authorities. Many of his other business (Revival Enterprises) and martial-arts (Schola Saint George) associates had similar stories, and in the end a coalition of authors sued him and regained control of their works in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement.* While Techniques of Medieval Armour Reproduction was published by Paladin Press, an independent business, many people are uncomfortable with supporting the author. (Also, this book is specifically on late medieval European armour … if you are interested in ancient kinds or kinds outside of Catholic Europe you will need other resources).
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07 Saturday Apr 2018
Posted in Medieval
Tags
Are scale caps and aventails just a fantasy of the artist who painted these ruffians looting a house? Check out Medieval Warfare VIII-1 and find out! Photo courtesy of the British Library.
Another of my writing projects brings us to the 14th century AD, and the burning question “what kind of concealed armour could you buy in the Avignon of the Babylonian Captivity?” If you think that concealed armour is just for Assassin’s Creed and 16th century bravos, you might want to check out Medieval Warfare VIII-1!
But what if you want the original source? Medieval Warfare does not have room for sources in the original, so this week, I have pasted them from my rough draft of the article:
28 Sunday Jan 2018
Posted in Medieval
The Geschichtspark Bärnau-Tachov from the air, courtesy of http://www.geschichtspark.de/
Roland Warzecha will be teaching workshops on the Viking shield, high medieval shields, and the buckler at the Geschichtspark Bärnau-Tachow on the Czech border. The Geschichtspark is a unique location, with replicas of an 8th century Slavic settlement, a 10th century motte and church, and a 13th century village embedded in farmland on the edge of a small Bavarian town.
These are the dates for 2018:
June 9/10: Viking shield
September 1/2: Kite & large heater shields
September 8/9: Buckler and smaller late medieval shields. Watch a video of fights with triangular shields here.
For more information, check out his Patreon.
20 Saturday Jan 2018
As I have been working on my thesis, I found a reference which I was looking for but could not find back when I was writing my Master’s thesis. It described one of Edward I’s wars in Scotland where over the course of a few months, half of his infantry threw down their issued crossbows and headed home. The story comes from Michael Prestwitch, “Edward I’s armies,” Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011) pp. 233-244:
The logic of the way the infantry were organised, and the quality of the officers, was not, however, sufficient. Desertion was a major problem, and it did not prove possible for Edward I to keep large numbers of men in the field for any considerable length of time. For example, there were almost 3,500 Yorkshire infantry in the army when it mustered at the end of June 1300. A month later the number was down to 1,483. Edward was understandably furious, and wrote to the keeper of the wardrobe. ‘We are sending you under our seal the names of the footmen from the county of York who have left our service and our host without our leave. These people have maliciously deceived us and have traitorously failed us in our business.’ In 1301 he complained to the officials of the exchequer that as he had no money, he could not prevent his troops from leaving.
Now, a medievalist like Prestwitch can explain the customs of warfare around the year 1300 which made invading a distant country unbearably expensive better than I can (There is a handy article on the situation in Geoff Mortimer ed., Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)). But this is relevant to a point which I make in the Doktorarbeit.
People often describe Achaemenid infantry as “reluctant levies” and explain that the kings did not trust their subjects in the provinces and preferred to rely on Persian cavalry and foreign mercenaries rather than train and equip the peasants. Eduard Meyer was trying to decide what he thought of this idea a hundred years ago (Geschiche des Altertums, Band 4, S. 63 if you read German). But in every single society with conscription which I have looked at, I find that there was a great deal of reluctance amongst the future draftees to spend years in a distant land. Kings and republics were often much more eager to recruit soldiers than to feed and pay them, provide medical care when they were wounded, and support their children if they were killed. So in every society which I have looked at, conscription for a distant war at least provokes grumbling, and usually efforts to avoid going, whether those involve legal loopholes and convenient ailments, hiding from the census-taker, or getting together to murder the conscription officer on some lonely road and hide his body. The more ambitious the rulers, the more intense the resistance. Nathan Rosenstein noticed that after Gaius Gracchus offered free land to citizens, the next census registered 25% more cives, which suggests that at least a quarter of the eligible population had avoided being registered on the list which was used to recruit soldiers. Some armies turn reluctant draftees into an effective fighting force, and others do not. So whether or not Babylonian levies were “reluctant” is about as relevant to the question of their effectiveness as the shape of their skull.
09 Saturday Dec 2017
Peter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565: now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession number 19.164). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Some people on the Internet are curious about how much a shirt cost in the middle ages. Now you could try to answer that question by trying to calculate how long it would take to spin and weave the linen and sew the shirt, combining your guesses in an elaborate chain of assumptions using your big modern educated brain. A certain Eve Fisher imagined and calculated and came up with the figures $3500 or $4200 for a shirt like those depicted by painters like Peter Brueghel the Elder. This has been re-posted by a number of popular websites, and several weavers and spinners have dropped by her website to comment that they are not so sure about some of her assumptions. But did you know that we can skip all of these guesses and calculations, and the questions which they pose about whether we spin and weave as fast as people in the past, and just ask medieval people how much they paid for a shirt?
20 Monday Nov 2017
Posted in Medieval
The St. George from Großlobming, Styria, in the Belvedere, Wien.
If you make your way to the Belvedere in Vienna, grumble at the steep price for tickets and gawk at the splendid, arrogant promenade sloping down towards the city centre and the lower pavilion, you will find yourself in the marble lobby of the Upper Belvedere. On the upper floors they have the Napoleon Crossing the Alps by David, some colourful paintings by Gustav Klimt, and a lot of softcore nudes for lonely Victorian gentlemen, but the most magnificent work is in a little suite of rooms on the ground floor opposite the gift shop and the cafe: a collection of statues from a little village church in the hills of Styria. I could talk about each of them, but because this blog is what it is, I will focus on the St. George.
Take a few moments to take him in: the expressive arms, the long slender profile with a high narrow waist and a deep rounded chest, the ethereal, emotionless face as he places his lance just right … some of the best things about Latin Christian art at the end of the 14th century in one statue. The little church does not have records of when it was redecorated, so when he was made can only be guessed at: probably sometime within 20 years of 1380.
30 Saturday Sep 2017
Posted in Medieval, Modern, Not an expert
Some happy warriors after a historical fencing event in the Midwestern USA.
Quite a few people seem to be finding their way to my post about why I drifted away from the historical fencing movement. While I think it needed to be said, it might leave someone wondering what I found attractive about that world in the first place. Some of the reasons seemed obvious: the historical fencing movement gives people the chance to learn horse archery in Vancouver and a reason to get happy and sweaty with a group of friends (sometimes leading to to other more private happy-sweaty times). Those are wonderful things! And while I am not sure how much we can know about how ancient Greeks or Viking Age Norwegians used their shields, I think that someone who wants to know would be wise to get one and spend time moving it (because Thucydides and Snorri Stirluson wrote for an audience who had all used spear and shield). So this week, I would like to talk about some good things which the community does in 2017.
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09 Saturday Sep 2017
Tags
ancient, demographics, genetics, medieval, methodology, modern
In the first two weeks of August there was a great kerfuffle about a BBC educational cartoon which showed a couple in Roman Britain who would be called multiracial in Late Capitalist Britain. Angry essays were typed, tweets flew with the wrath of the Stymphalian Birds, and many people hurried to let the Internet know which faction they aligned with. Neville Morley did a good job of summarizing how most ancient historians think about the problem in his blog post Diversitas et Multicultaralismus (no, a dark-skinned official and his light-skinned wife would not have been unheard of at Bath or Hadrian’s Wall; genetic data is exciting but just one of many kinds of evidence which historians draw upon to understand the past; genes are only loosely connected to identity). The Romans could be horrible snobs and bigots, but most of their stereotypes and slurs were directed at people from other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean … they do not seem to have been very interested in whether people had dark skin and kinky hair. In this post, I would like to talk about one of the methodological questions I have after reading the Wellcome Trust paper from 2015 by Leslie et al. which some people have been citing as evidence that negligible numbers of people from Africa had children in Britain before the 20th century (doi:10.1038/nature14230).
