Category Archives: Modern

Posts on events in the last few hundred years

The Rise of Europe or the Age of Imperialism?

12 Sunday Jan 2020

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At some point in the 19th century, eight states controlled the vast majority of the earth’s surface and population (over the course of the century they lost ground in Central and South America but gained it in Asia, Africa, and North America). The eight consisted of four kingdoms and republics in the former Western Roman Empire (France, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom), two kingdoms which saw themselves as successors to the East Roman Empire (Russia and the Ottoman empire), one genocidal settler republic (USA), and the Middle Kingdom (Qinq China).

Academics in the USA spend a lot of time and paper marvelling about this fact and trying to explain why it occurred. They don’t talk a lot about the decolonization of Central and South America in the 19th century because what happened afterwards does not suit the triumphant story they want to tell.

At a random year in the 16th and 17th century, six dynasties controlled most of the population of the world and a large fraction of its territory: Ming/Qing in the Middle Kingdom, Mughal in South Asia and Afghanistan, Safavid in Iran, Ottoman, Rurik/Romanov in Russia, and Hapsburg in Europe and the New World.

Of the six, the first-rank powers were China, the Mughals, and the Ottomans, and the other three did their best to live in between while committing a little piracy here and delivering silver to the big boys there. Only one of the six was based in the former Western Roman Empire.

You can tell the story of the past 500 years in terms of the Rise of Atlantic Europe (and its genocidal settler states). But you can also tell it as an age of imperialism. And if you are ever, ever tempted to tell stories about how Your People were Special and Destined for Greatness from the Beginning, whether those stories are about Catholic marriage laws or made-up GDP statistics or “Freeedooom!!!” ask yourself if you would tell the same story in Delhi, Istanbul, or Beijing in 1600.

The Decade Still Has a Year Left

31 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by in Modern, Not an expert

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Friends! Netizens! Countrymen! The Dionysian era and the Common Era have no year 0 (because 0 did not exist in Europe when the Venerable Bede popularized numbering years by “the year of our lord”) so in those systems a decade runs from year 1 to year 10 and a century runs from year 1 to year 100. The 20th century runs from 1 January 1901 to 31 December 2000, and the 2010s run from 1 January 2011 to 31 December.

Unless you are an astronomer working in Julian days with a year 0 (= 1 BCE in the Common Era) the decade still has a year and a day left. If it were the other way round, then the first decade would only have 9 years (1 CE to 9 CE) and the first century would only have 99 years (1 CE to 99 CE) and all the others would have 10 or 100.

{this is a message from your local tablet scribe- if its really important, ask an expert in the scribal art}

{computer scientists- warning you against off-by-one errors since ENIAC}

2019 Year-Ender

28 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Not an expert

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A crowd gathered in a rainy street in the medieval centre of Innsbruck

A rainy Christmas Eve concert in Innsbruck, 2019

Books are precious things, and Doctor Manning finally has time to read them for fun again (and to really read them, not just skim them looking for facts or quotes). At the end of this year and the start of another, as I sit in rainy Innsbruck, I would like to tell my gentle readers about some of the ones I read in 2019.

I read Victoria Corva’s very relatable young adult fantasy Books and Bone (self-published, 2019) about a town cartographer trying to follow a vocation which she can’t prove is more than a myth.
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Dis Manibus Steven Johansson (20 September 2019)

20 Friday Dec 2019

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Issue 269 of Knights of the Table magazine with an all-black cover except for the title and company logo

Some time in the late 1990s “Guys! The first time one of us dies, we have to give them an all-black cover on the magazine.” “I see what you are doing, you just want a promise before you step in front of a bus and get the coveted cover spot. Munchkin! Look, this Knights of the Dinner Table thing will be gone before any of us …”

Steven Konrad Johansson of Kenzer and Company, an Illinois comic book, board game, and roleplaying game company, died in his sleep on 20 September 2019. Major projects include editing, layout, and art design for Knights of the Dinner Table magazine (currently on its 269th monthly issue!), two editions of the Hackmaster RPG (especially the ten-volume Hacklopedia of Beasts), elements of the Kingdom of Kalamar RPG setting (hobgoblins, the Old Man, topography), the Western RPG Aces and Eights (also in two editions), and a career as an infantry officer in the United States Army Reserve (he retired as Major). Trying to stay in business in the RPG industry makes trying to launch an academic career look like selling water at Burning Man.

I have never met anyone in the Kenzerco family, but reading KotDT gave a younger me a glimpse of an exotic Midwestern world which made the ex-SCAdians I later met feel familiar. And I think the world needs more stories from that small-town, little-bit-of-college, some-kind-of-a-job place and about friendships between the broken, human people who live in it and the amazing things they do with their passion. You can find a full obituary at Colonial Funeral.

Comparing Lists of Works Cited with Regular Expressions

14 Saturday Dec 2019

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XKCD 208: a programmer swings in on a rope to save the day with regular expressions

Obligatory XKCD (#208, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License)

As part of a recent project, I had to compare my list and a co-author’s list of works cited in a chapter. Since we started five and a half years ago, one co-author dropped out and versions of the files got confused between different people in the project, some forthcoming publications had appeared or changed venues, and the first entries were written long before we had a style guide. It was very important to make sure that every work cited appeared in the bibliography, and to reduce the length of the chapter as much as possible by removing references to works which are not cited. Since the lists of works cited contained 150 and 180 entries, many of which fill several lines in print, comparing the two lists was going to be a tedious task. And so I turned to the powerful arts of a dead tongue which I had not invoked since I learned it from German and Indian adepts in a distant land: the language of shell scripting and regular expressions.

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What Reproductions Can and Can’t Teach You

30 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in Modern

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A hand gripping a dagger with a wooden hilt

The classic ‘icepick’ grip, by far the most common in late medieval paintings of assaults and fencing manuals

In the past year I succumbed to the allure of two of Leo “Tod” Todeschini’s products: a table knife and a baselard. In the late middle ages baselards were big knives with H-shaped hilt hung from the belt between the legs (in barbarous northern countries) or at the right hip (by polite and civilized Italians who had other ways to show they had something long and hard between their legs). He offers two standard models, one which was popular in the Alps and another which was more common in northern Italy and England.

Tod is a brilliant cutler. He captures the essence of knives as objects of lust which you buy and carry against your better judgement. (People in the fourteenth and fifteenth century were not idiots, their coroner’s reports and city statutes show that they knew that when young men start carrying big knives some of them will stab each other with them- and Chaucer always tells you what kinds of knives people are wearing, and whether they are mounted with silver or brass). Tod includes scabbards and suspensions which let you understand knives as accessories not just as something to hang on your wall or leave in your kitchen or your travel chest. The scabbards are painted in a single colour like many originals and lightly tooled like finds from the Thames and the Low Countries. The brass chape is brazed so well that it is hard to see the join (whereas most of the originals Mark Shier has handled are just overlapped or stapled closed). The baselard is beautifully finished, with the nails evenly peened and the wood smoothly set onto the iron core, and has a pleasant substance in the hand thanks to the thick, heavy forte of the blade. The 44 cm length of this baselard is pretty typical (there were a few smaller examples, and many the size of a sword). (Parenthically, his working, table, and kitchen knives would make excellent gifts for a chef or camper in your life). But there is one thing about this knife which is not ideal for me.

Six chapes of folded copper-alloy sheet

Some typical late medieval or early modern knife chapes of folded copperalloy sheet in the Gaukler collection. 10487 in the upper right is most typical of the ones he has handled.

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I Don’t Understand Martin Gurri

23 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in Modern, Not an expert

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A park in autumn with fallen yellow leaves, trees, and a sign on a lamp post telling dog owners to clean up their pet's poop

Living together always creates some tensions, like this passive-aggressive but very Austrian message to dog owners in Innsbruck: SEI NICHT GRAUSLIG! Hundekot gehört ins Sackerl und dann in den Mistkübel! DANKE! (“DON’T BE GROSS! Dog waste belongs in a bag and then in the wastebin! THANKS!”)

A few people have recommended Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (second edition 2018, available on Bookfinder) but I don’t understand the author’s ideas as they are presented on his blog and in interviews. Granted that he writes his blog in a poetic style, where key concepts are never defined because you are supposed to roll them around and absorb the general meaning in terms that make sense to you.  I suspect that some times he says something he knows is not quite right because it will provoke readers or catch their attention. I would like to see how his book defines elite and why (to me, it seems like the period since 1990 has been hard for journalists and experts in bureaucracies, but great for the rich and academics). In 2017 he paraphrased José Ortega y Gasset that “The quality that sets elites apart – that imparts authority to their actions and expressions – isn’t power, or wealth, or education, or even persuasiveness. It’s integrity in life and work” but he also said that elites are those who “run the great institutions of the industrial age,” and I can’t reach from one definition to the other with a barge-pole made up of recycled Margaret Wente columns, Theranos stock certificates, and prospectuses for investors in Dalian, China.

I am confused by his prescription in ‘Has Government Failed?’ because that sounds like the response of the officeholding class, bureaucracy, and old-media commentators to critics in Canada: “you ask us to stop doing some evil thing, and we understand your idealism but that is just not practical for reasons which we can’t quite explain.  Yes, we told you we would do it if you elected us, and its a matter of a few thousand words of legislation or a few phone calls to officials and police departments, but its much too difficult, maybe if you re-elect us we can make time for it then?”  Contrarians in the United States often present climate change as a sinister plot to engineer society by distant intellectuals, and Gurri places such a scheme in the mouth of his ‘elite’, but in Canada it is grasasroots environmental organizations, small parties, and First Nations who push action and large business owners, the Liberal and Conservative party machines, and Old Media commentators who try to diffuse and delay. 
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Some Thoughts on ‘Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day’

09 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in Ancient, Medieval, Modern

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Brian Hughes and Fergus Robson (eds.) Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) circa 80 Euros on Bookfinder

I borrowed this volume in hopes that it would have more clues as to the oldest source for Good King Robert’s Testament (it did not, although Alastair John MacDonald very kindly helped me with modern editions of the Scotichronicon). But I ended up reading about half of it (skipping the chapters on 20th century warfare such as Julia Welland on NATO’s unlucky intervention in Afghanistan and Raphäelle Branche on French Algeria).

The book is in reverse chronological order, but lets begin with Tim Piceu describing an outbreak of small war in Flanders as the Dutch Republic and Hapsburgs wrestled for control (p. 160, 164)

Freebooter raids generally started in a tavern in one of the above-mentioned frontier towns or in a town in the island of Walcheren (Zeeland). There a group of around a dozen men- no women are known to have been freebooters- discussed a tip received by a local informant who knew of booty. Although frebooter bands acted under the guidance of an experienced marauder, the conducteur, and some friends raided together, there seemed to be no regular composition of the crew. Everybody who had the courage could join in. If the value of the booty outweighed the risks, the group would decided to leave for enemy territory. They packed their weapons and victuals for some days, dressed themselves like peasants, and slipped past enemy posts to a hiding-place in enemy territory. The sources mention freebooters carrying a vaulting-pole to move across the many Flemish creeks, ditches, and tidal inlets. Travelling happened mostly at night and the band avoided major roads. … Most freebooters probably used their takings for living expenses, paying off debt or, to quote a Dutch civil servant, ‘to indulge for a little time in a bad and godforsaken life of drunkenness and whoring.’

You all meet in a tavern, forsooth! And every gamer agrees with that Dutch civil servant about the proper way to spend the spoils of an adventure, even if they have not read sources from the Wars of the Low Countries or the Yukon Gold Rush.
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I am Re-Reading

01 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by in Modern, Not an expert, Uncategorized

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Robin Reich, “Historians have too Many Learning Objectives”

(In the Anglo tradition) history as a field does not explicitly discuss our basic assumptions, methods, or theories and so what we as historians agree on we only pick up informally or through snippets and crumbs dropped by our advisers. In my undergrad curriculum at a small liberal arts college, which was exceptional in many ways, the only two required classes for history majors were a historiography colloquium to be taken Junior year, and a research seminar in preparation for writing a senior thesis. There was no introductory course that explained what history is or how it is practiced – in effect, the historiography colloquium was this introductory course, as well as an advanced seminar in field-specific methods. Other disciplines don’t do this, because they have a sense of what the basics are in their field. But historians can’t even agree on what makes us all part of the same field. So we relegate these kinds of lessons to survey courses, which are totally inappropriate to teaching these lessons because they are large and structured around taking on a lot of information at once. The result is overloaded, bloated syllabi and assignments. In large universities, this usually shakes out to one history class actually being two – there’s the survey lecture course that the professor teaches, and then there’s the intro seminar that the TA teaches in section, and they have completely different goals. How do TAs even know what to teach when we ourselves were educated in this way?

As I have said elsewhere, even the English word historiography covers far too much ground to be useful as an intellectual tool (it can mean writing about history, methods for understanding the past, or writing about how people have written about history).

Edwin Black, “IBM and ‘Death’s Calculator'” (based on his book IBM and the Holocaust)

I hope that since 2013, some executives at IT companies have re-read the story of the high-tech Dutch census of 1940.

Cross-Post: Thott Talhoffer MS Facsimile

24 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in Medieval, Modern

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Michael Chidester of Wiktenauer is crowdfunding to make a high-quality facsimile of a famous fencing manual from the second half of the 15th century, Hans Talhoffer’s MS. Thott 290 2º. Like many of the German manuscripts, it contains other secret lore including a copy of Konrad Keyser’s engineering manual Bellifortis and a treatise on astral science (but in newfangled languages like German and Hebrew not cuneiform, so reader beware!): unlike most, it is lavishly illuminated. The price of a copy will be around 150 USD. If you want to learn more, you can check out his IndieGoGo Manuscript Facsimile Project.

(warning! IndieGoGo is full of tracking scripts from Facebook and Google, and the page appears blank unless you enable half a dozen Javascript libraries!)