There is now a Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction (https://sfdictionary.com/) which got started with help from the Oxford English Dictionary. When I encounter a new historical dictionary or encyclopedia, the first thing I do is check some entries to see if they exist and how good they are.
H. Beam Piper’s Terro-Human Future History features two weapons, planet-busters and hellburners. Planet-busters are some especially powerful kind of atomic weapon, like a hydrogen bomb but even more destructive, while hellburners are atomic weapons which create some kind of self-sustaining incendiary reaction (Piper alluded to Hans Bethe’s solar phoenix reaction). Planet-busters go back to a popular article on the hydrogen bomb from 1950 and appear in many writers’ stories, but hellburners are rare outside Piper’s works. In a chat with Jesse Sheidlower, I realized where the name ‘hellburner’ may come from.
My posting is becoming irregular because, well, its 2022. I have heard of some talks which my gentle readers might be interested in. One is definitely online, one I am not sure about. Amanda Podany, “Ea-naṣir, Microhistory, and Popular Interest in Ancient Mesopotamia” Friday 14 October 11.00-13.00 New York time (I think I remember that... Continue reading: Two Upcoming Talks in New York
The war in Ukraine has changed since spring. I thought that some of my readers might be interested in the resources I am currently using to follow it. Since I don’t know Russian or Ukrainian, and since many people have agendas, sorting things out is tricky for me. People following the war like corporate social media with feeds, and on those sites quotes and images float around without attribution. People who like them imply that they hear all kinds of rumours. And because so much is at stake (the future of 200 million people, the energy supply to Europe and grain for the Mediterranean) many people slip into boosting their side rather than provide dispassionate analysis.
Now that Ukraine has much larger armies, and weapons to counter Russian artillery, I expect Ukraine to keep driving Russian forces back until at least spring 2023. The most likely things which could change the situation would be a complete collapse of Russian forces and Russian use of nuclear weapons (which would probably end very badly for Russia, but Putin keeps making stupid decisions and does not live in the same world we live in). Turning recruits into an army takes 3 to 12 months if you have systems for gathering, training, and arming them, and those trainers and vehicles are dead or destroyed in Ukraine. Putin is scared of mass popular movements like the original levée en masse. So until 2023, the main effect of Russian mobilization will be a lot of dead Dagestanis and Buriyats and a lot of rich landlords in Tbilisi and Istanbul.
In my post on that hilarious book on US soldiers overseas under the second President Bush, I mentioned that its full of pithy ethnography of the people Americans fight with or against (or both, as in Iraq and Columbia). Some things I read in January 2022 make me want to come back to it. This week let us think about the relationship between ethnography and military theory.
In my first post on Iron Age bows, I showed that there is a lot of evidence that archers in England, the Ottoman Empire, and Qing Dynasty China used bows with very heavy draw weights (over 100 pounds / 45 kg at the intended draw length) around the 15th-17th centuries CE. People who are keen on early modern archery often project these heavy draw weights onto all war bows in all cultures. But we have reconstructions of ancient bows from the area from Egypt to India by people who examined the remains of bows and arrows from that place and time. What kind of draw weights did those bows have?
Lara Broecke, Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte: A New English Translation and Commentary with Italian Transcription (Archetype Publications: London, 2015) ISBN-13 978-1909492288
This summer I am reproducing some ancient shields, and since most face-to-face classes where I live are still closed, I am turning to the best possible teachers: Theophilius (fl. around 1100 CE) and Cennino Cennini (fl. around 1400 CE). Theophilius and Cennino teach almost everything you need to prepare a shield (or a panel) for painting.
The standard way to access Cennini is through three books published by Daniel V. Thompson around 1930 (an Italian text, a translation titled The Craftsman’s Handbook, and a practical handbook called The Practice of Tempera Painting). Lara Broecke has recently published a new edition, translation, and commentary of Cennini. These are thorough and scholarly and synthesize the past 85 years of art-technological research. If you want to know the chemical composition of Cennini’s gesso grosso plaster or giallorino pigment, look here. But Broecke distances herself from people who read Cennini as a textbook (pp. 1, 13, 305). Cennini was not a very good writer, his book may have been incomplete when he died, and none of the surviving copies of his work is a perfect representation of what he wrote. To understand why the old translations and editors of Cennini’s Book of the Art have the quirks which they have, lets turn to the Italian independent scholar Giovanni Mazzaferro:
Over on another place, I have been talking to Jean Henri Chandler the fencer and RPG writer about the trope of poisoned weapons. Writers of adventure stories in the 20th century loved this trope. In Robert E. Howard’s “Black Colossus” a beast is defeated with a poisoned dagger, while in Hour of the Dragon a poisoned needle protects a treasure and can kill with a scratch. Tolkien’s Witch-King wields a cursed knife whose wounds cannot be healed by ordinary medicine, and in the Warhammer setting Dark Elves or Dark Eldar love their poisoned daggers and flechette launchers. Brian Jacques’ villain Cluny the Scourge has a poisoned barb on his tail, and Jack White’s Arthurian novels (goodreads) have poisoned needles too.
Seven years after the first volume arrived at my doorstep in the Before Times, Olympia Auctions is accepting pre-orders for Armour of the English Knight, Volume 3: Continental Armour in England, 1435-1500. You can order a copy for a 10 GBP discount from the retail price at the Olympia Auctions website. I have to be... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Capwell’s “Continental Armour in England, 1435-1500” in Pre-Order
“‘How can you say, “We are wise, for we have the law of the Lord,” when actually the lying pen of the scribes has handled it falsely?
Jeremiah 8:8 New International Version
The ancient world was a long time ago, but even in antiquity it was often hard to know what happened in the ancient world. With no trusted neutral institutions to establish facts, and no way of making many identical copies of a text or a speech, the curious had no reliable way to decide between competing claims by different interested parties. Already in antiquity, clever people turned to old writing painted on wood or carved on stone. But dishonest people realized that they could destroy or alter awkward inscriptions and forge new ones. Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians show us how this worked.
In its day, Tumblr was very effective at spreading some ideas and ways of communicating. Tumblr post found in the early 2010s, captured in January 2018, source unknown.
Anglo culture in the early 21st century makes it hard to use good curses and insults. Our middle and high culture is strongly against insulting anyone for their parentage, body shape, disabilities, religion, private life, and other natural human things. But one of the insults which almost everyone feels comfortable throwing around is LARPer. If third-parties object, it is to dispute whether the object of the insult is really a LARPer, not to ask whether being a LARPer is a bad thing. Ten years ago when I was spending time with more types of geeks, I noticed that people whose hobbies have a lot in common with LARP, such as the historical fencers in black or the Society for Creative Anachronism, wanted you to know that LARP was totally different from what they do. People from socialists to the hard right agree that being a LARPer is bad. This week I would like to talk about what people object to, and some of the things which the insult misses.
