medieval

Citations are Rebels

In summer 2025 I finished revising the manuscript and bibliography of my second book and started to sort out the image rights and commission artwork. I will have more to say about that project in 2026. In the meantime, I want to talk about some of the troubles which come up when trying to clearly indicate where your information comes from or where readers can learn more.

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Some of My Recent Publications

A wooden bookshelf stained dark brown with many issues of the classics journal "Mouseion" in its dark blue softcover binding, three burgundy hardcover volumes of "Festschrift Rollinger", a white hardcover issue of "Medieval Clothing and Textiles," and the red and yellow hardcover "Soldiers and Silver" by Michael J. Taylor sitting on it

In the past year a number of my academic publications have come out (it often takes years from submitting an article to an academic venue to seeing it in print because almost everyone involved is a volunteer with a demanding day job and no personal assistant to help them organize and focus). This week I would like to talk about them.

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Books Read in 2024

a lifelike statue of a man in leggings and a breechclout kneeling to dig with an antler pick
One of the builders of Stonehenge as imagined for the Royal BC Museum Stonehenge exhibit in 2024

This post was scheduled late partly because I was late in writing up all the books and partially because I wanted to finish some which I left half-finished in 2024! The usual caveats about writing one of these when I read like a scholar and not like a fan of romance novels apply. John Ting calls the way academics read reading like a mongrel (picking out useful morsels and then moving on, not working all the way through). My reading was disrupted when my Tolino eReader failed in late summer. And one novel which I wanted to read did not arrive until the new year!

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Flipping the Narrative in “Slouching Towards Utopia”

One cover of "Slouching Towards Utopia" by Brad DeLong. The text is in red sans-serif over three rows of five teal refrigerators with steel handles against a white background

J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books: New York, 2022)

What can I say about Slouching Towards Utopia by blogger and economist Brad DeLong? This book is a grand narrative of the era of modern economic growth, 1870-2010. In this period incomes in many North Atlantic economies grew several percent a year for decades, and for the first time there was enough for everyone in some countries to be fed and housed and clothed and doctored. But even if all of our material needs were met and we had better entertainment than a King of Kings, we did not feel like we lived in Utopia. It is framed around a debate between Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polyani, the first arguing that people should just accept the strangeness of markets in return for wealth, and the second replying that people in fact feel that they have rights to some control over their shape and population of their community, the ability to earn a living from skills that they suffered to acquire, and who is rewarded and who punished. Deny people control over these things and they will react violently and outside the market, regardless of what theorists say that should do. But how on earth can I respond to it?

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What is gelbe Lösche?

out of spoons sorry
Mark Nugent gives a talk on the ODY-C comic to the Classical Association of Vancouver Island, 23 January 2025

Elisabeth Singer’s article on pavises in the Vienna Zeughaus is excellent but she wrote in ordinary Austrian German not chemical jargon. While the grammar is simple, the words include a few informal terms.

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CFP: WTF, Arras France, 24-26 September 2025

the logo of the conference Coding Medieval Worlds 5Ö Power and Institutions, a workshop of historians and gamers, 22-23 February 2025

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.

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An Unusual Obstetic Technique

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.
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Linen Armour in the Twelfth Century

the cover of Medieval Clothing and Textiles 18, a thin hardcover book, in a patch of sunlight on a hardwood floor

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.

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Coiled Shields and Helmets

a coiled grass bowl wrapped with light brown and off-white fibres on a vanished wooden tabletop lit by a candle and an electric lamp
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.

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