Two weird and wonderful conferences have come through my inbox in the past few weeks. I thought some of my gentle readers might be interested. There is a face-to-face conference on the f word in France, and an online conference on the medieval world in computer games in Vienna. Linguists are where historians are going (nobody but other linguists knows what they do) but they have fun! These involve Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary and Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and James Baillie the British specialist in medieval Georgia.
In July and August I was working on a life of my father Kelly Bert Manning who died in 2020. His sickness and death affected many people. Some other things reminded me of how other people’s lives have been derailed by the death of someone close to them.
My interest in linen armour lead me to texts from around the year 1000. Chrétien de Troyes died leaving one of his works incomplete, and sometime around 1190 to 1210, someone wrote the first surviving attempt to fill in the missing attempts. In one of these passages, an Arthurian hero is arming. The narrator mentions an unusual way of helping a woman in labour deliver:
Then they girdled a sword Such that in all the world there was no woman in labour, Who when struck on the head With the flat of that naked sword (1048) Would not immediately give birth, As she hung between death and life.
My translation. Text after William Roach and R.H. Ivy, eds., The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes. Volume II. The First Continuation: Redaction of MSS EMQU. Romance Languages and Literatures, Extra Series, No. 10. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Romance Languages, 1950), 32-33, 485-486, 548-549. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000883809 There are complete translations of the continuation in Ross G. Arthur, tr., Three Arthurian Romances: Poems from Medieval France (London: Dent, 1996) and Nigel Bryant, tr., Chrétien de Troyes, The Complete Story of the Grail: Chrétien de Troyes‘ Perceval and its Continuations. Arthurian Studies 82 (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), 87; my translation is influenced by this one, especially in the last five lines.
This terracotta statuette from Babylon is one of very few images of a woman in the ‘Elamite robe’ or Faltengewand from the Achaemenid period. Photo of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum, object VA Bab 00405 by Olaf M. Teßmer CC BY-SA 4.0 https://id.smb.museum/object/2060160/bekleidete-frau-auf-einem-postament-stehend
To establish the ownership history of a manuscript, you need to do archival research in auction catalogues and library catalogues and lists of bookplates and stamps. This history will usually have gaps, because ownership is not a physical property of an object which leaves indelible traces, but a social agreement. People steal books and manuscripts, people sell books and manuscripts which don’t belong to them, people forge evidence that a book or manuscript belonged to someone famous, and people burn the records of grandpa’s used books business to tidy up after his death. Its hard to track the ownership of Greek manuscripts during the fifteenth century for the same reason its hard to track the ownership of antiquities during the 1940s. And if you are using a manuscript to understand the ancient world, the ownership history is not really important. Let me explain.
Over on another site, Anoneuoid asked how to track down the past owners of a manuscript of a classical text such as the “A” manuscript of Herodotus in Florence (manuscript Laurentianus 70.3).
The first place to start when tracking down the manuscripts of a classical text is a critical edition (that is, an edition in the original language with notes in the margins about how the manuscripts are different from each other and the printed text). I have the Clarendon edition by Karl Hude which was last updated in 1927 but still seems to be the standard edition of Herodotus (the 2015 edition by N.G. Wilson has some updates). Hude discusses the manuscripts in Latin because until recently that was the best way to give a classicist in Egypt and a classicist in Norway equal access to his thoughts. He does not say much on the history of the manuscripts because he is more interested in which are most useful for reconstructing what Herodotus actually wrote.
You can find a much more detailed discussion of the manuscripts of another ancient text and their owners in Philip Rance, “Aineias Tacticus in Byzantine Military Literature,” in Nick Barley and Maria Pretzler, eds., Brill’s Companion to Aineias Tacticus. Brill’s Companions in classical studies (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017).
The first part of my three-part series on medieval linen armour has appeared in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 18. Whereas in some periods linen armour is commonly showed in paintings and sculptures, there are very few pictures of fabric armour from western Europe between 500 and 1250 CE. No quilted garment survives from Europe in this period either. So I discuss about thirty texts from this period. I work with texts in Greek, Latin, Old French, Ibero-Romance, Irish, Middle High German, Old Norse, and Arabic, and provide my own translations of the Greek, Latin, Romance languages, and Middle High German. Whereas most books summarize and allude to a few of these texts, I put them in context and give both the original language and a translation.
The building one street up, at Government and Fort, reminds me of architecture from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire!
Cotton is an old word, but people west of India and north of Sudan often call cotton “tree wool.”
iṣe naš šipati “the tree which bears wool” (inscription of Sennacherib of Assyria describing plants in his garden, 705-681 BCE) Chicago Assyrian Dictionary volume “I” p. 217
“This breastplate had been stolen by the Samians in the year before they took the bowl; it was of linen, decked with gold and tree-wool (εἰρίοισι ἀπὸ ξύλου), and embroidered with many figures” Herodotus 3.47.2 (c. 430-420 BCE) tr. A.D. Godley slightly adapted, cp. 3.106.3, 7.65 on tree-wool in India and Theophrastus, On Plants IV. 7, 8 on cotton grown on the island of Bahrain (Akkadian and Sumerian Dilmun, Greek Tylos)
Middle and Modern German Baumwolle “tree wool, cotton” (already appears in Erec by Hartmann von Aue around the year 1185 per https://www.koeblergerhard.de/mhd/mhd_b.html “boumwolle”, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm do not have much to say. The line about a saddle cushion soft as a cotton (ein Paumwol) is line 7703 of the Ambraser Heldenbuch so there is Innsbruck content!)
Do my gentle readers know this calque in other languages?
Novelist, reenactor, Plataia 2024 organizer, and veteran Christian Cameron has launched a patreon https://www.patreon.com/CameronAuthor I am told that one of the corporate social media services he uses is stopping him from reaching followers just like corporate social media services do whenever they want more money. The Oatmeal has a comic about this.
A little bowl like this was all my budget could afford, but its still handy for holding my sewing things!
One weekend in May 2023 I did two things on a weekend which involved spending several hours away from home doing things with people I did not know in 2013 other than the day job (!). When I was passing through downtown Victoria I stopped at a stall run by Journey House Actions, a Rwandan charity. They sell bowls, baskets, and jars of coiled grass ropes laced with dyed sisal fibres. As I worked my way through them, I was struck how much they were like the Turkish shields in Schloss Ambras.
To be honest, though, I’m sometimes embarrassed by where I have been forced to find my statistics, but beggars can’t be choosers. Very few historians have the cold, calculating, body-count mentality that I do. They prefer describing the quality of suffering rather than the quantity of it. Often, the only place to find numbers is in a newspaper article, almanac, chronicle or encyclopedia which needs to summarize major events into a few short sentences or into one scary number, and occasionally I get the feeling that some writers use numbers as pure rhetorical flourishes. To them, “over a million” does not mean “>106“; it’s just synonymous with “a lot”.
Matthew White’s Great Big Book of Horrible Things (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011) lists 100 tragedies, but the 101st tragedy is the book itself. White worked very hard to find numbers for various atrocities, and noticed that often he could find no source for the number in the glossy magazine or the airport book. He noticed that some of the numbers seemed to be just made up, he noticed that some didn’t seem to be meant to be taken literally, and he noticed that often the new book or article relies on the old book or article without correcting its mistakes or asking whether we have learned anything since. When I look at the website which became the book, I see how he came close to agreeing with me that almost all of these numbers before the 19th century say more about other modern numbers than about the past. He could have written a good book about how we just don’t know how many people were killed by Tamurlane, or the An Lushan Rebellion, or the Crusades. But instead he wrote yet another book full of made-up numbers backed with footnotes, and he gave old nonsense a whole new audience when a very famous Canadian psychologist took his numbers and ran with them.
