Book and Sword
Cross-Post: Chris Dobson’s “Beaten Black and Blue”
Armour scholar Chris Dobson has released a new book: Beaten Black and Blue: The Myth of the Medieval Knight in Shining Armour. This will be a limited edition like an academic monograph to make sure its available for armour scholars centuries to come. I have ordered a copy.
- A4 Format printed hardback, 322 pages,
- 376 illustrations, almost all colour.
- £79.95 GBP plus shipping.
- Website https://renaissancedissident.com/medieval-armour-colour-finishes.html
- Information booklet https://renaissancedissident.com/pdfs/Beaten%20Black%20and%20Blue%20Leaflet.pdf
W.G. Lambert on Theological Imperialism
More Power of Fiction
In the past I have talked about how civilians in Syria see themselves as peasants in Game of Thrones, and soldiers in Ukraine want to be as excellent as characters in first-person shooter Call of Duty. This year I want to record that college-edited commentators like Max Boot are comparing the assassination of condottiere Yevgeniy Prigozhin to their favourite scenes from crime dramas in formal published prose:
Read moreThe most fitting epitaph for Wagner Group founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin was delivered by the shotgun-wielding hit man Omar Little on “The Wire”: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” There’s still much we don’t know for certain (and might never know), but that pearl of wisdom was confirmed by Prigozhin’s apparent death Wednesday after a private plane he was on reportedly crashed north of Moscow.
Max Boot, “Opinion: Prigozhin appears to be dead — and Putin’s grip on power is stronger than ever,” The Washington Post, 23 August 2023 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/23/prigozhin-death-plane-putin-russia-ukraine/
Nazis and Radios
In July an online talk by Philip Blood (probably this guy) and a pass through Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy made me think of the old debate about the effectiveness of the American, British, and Commonwealth armies in the Second World War. I had not known that Six Armies in Normandy was just Keegan’s second book from 1982, and that my 1994 Penguin edition was a reprint (A.J.P. Taylor wrote a blurb!)
Keegan’s book shows his strengths and weaknesses as a historian: it is beautifully written, expresses his unique view of the world, but rarely acknowledges doubt or explains where his facts and interpretations come from. Keegan gives himself authority by dropping in French and German phrases and alluding to prestigious novelists and playwrights, but not by showing that he understands a mass of evidence and arguments and can argue why his interpretation is best. The maps are inadequate, the photos numerous but ornamental. Because Six Armies in Normandy rarely cites sources, and because I’m not a specialist in WW II, I will not try to review it. But I will use some quotes to show places where I might have been wrong or where I don’t know how to balance two ways of thinking.
Read moreHow Heavy Was the Shield from the Fayum?
In May a well-known ancient historian told the Internet that the style of shield from Harit in the Fayum in Egypt weighed 10 kg. He probably got this from Mike Bishop and John Coulston’s classic handbook Roman Military Equipment (second edition p. 62) which cites reconstructions by Peter Connolly and Marcus Junkelmann. He was writing a general lecture so could not spend too much time questioning his sources. But I think this estimate is too high for four reasons.
Read moreDenial of Judgment and Responsibility
Since 2020 I am trying not to talk about corporate social media but I want to record this thought. Authors are seeing books appearing on amazon.com with their name and titles but a text generated by chatbot. Scammers hope that people will buy these books thinking they are the real thing. People who buy consumer goods on Amazon are seeing a lot of knockoffs with random strings of letters for a brand name; the people who sell these goods focus on search-engine optimization, buying positive reviews and suppressing negative ones, and other marketing tricks rather than on making good products. And of course sites like Facebook gladly sell ads promoting hate, and suggest genocidal propaganda in users’ feeds, while claiming that they are not responsible for what users post and that they carefully vet ads before accepting them.
Read moreNotice to Followers on RSS
John of Garland on Satraps and Satrapies
I got a blog post (and a sentence in a scholarly encyclopedia) out of what Niccolo Machiavelli thought about the fall of the Persian empire. I found another comment by the medieval scholar John of Garland who was active from c. 1220 to 1252.
Read moreLinguistics B(h)at Signal: Phylogenetics and PIE Again
Martin Rundkvist has told me that Russell Gray is writing about Proto-Indo-European using phylogenetics again (basically, trying to figure out when languages diverged from one another by seeing how many words they have in common). The last paper in Science on this topic using these methods was so poor from a linguistic point of view that a whole monograph from Cambridge University Press was needed to explain the problems. Like the last paper, this one is in Science, which is a good journal for some things but not competent to review papers on linguistics. I’m a philologist but not a linguist or a specialist in PIE. Can any of my gentle readers point me to where linguists are discussing it? I am sending out the <*bhat> signal.
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