How Charny uses the term "honor" in his Book of Chivalry

An excerpt from something I am tinkering with: Charny most often uses the term to mean "military achievement that leads to higher status or reputation," or occasionally "military effectiveness." Recall that Charny's three books all treat the life of arms as an ascent from the least difficult to the more difficult, and in his most developed presentation of this argument in the...

Two historical traps to avoid

This is mainly relevant for my students in this year's Chivalry and War seminar, HIST 4505.  But you never know who might be reading.  As they prepare for a term test/essay I will warn my students about these traps to avoid: Thinking too much about “the code of chivalry”...

You can own the "Rochefoucauld Grail," a 14th-century manuscript of medieval romances...

...if you are very, very rich.  (Most mss. of this age and quality are in national or university libraries and are not for sale at any price.)What's so special about it?   Here are some images borrowed from the Booktryst blog, who borrowed them from Sotheby's, to whom...

Egypt and Israel/Palestine from space

Thanks to NASA, Juan Cole and Amity Law for bringing this to my attention.  Click on the pic for a better vi...

More good reading from Phil Paine: "identity," slavery, and genocide

The misuse of identity:...I tend to get most on my high horse when I feel that some stu­pid or wicked notion is being smug­gled into our sub­con­scious by a turn of phrase or an implied definition. This is exactly the case with the cur­rently accepted use of the word iden­tity. You see this word used all the time, and phrases like “iden­tity pol­i­tics” are assumed to...

New book on jousting -- already out of stock!

Ever since I started actively researching chivalry and formal deeds of arms (jousts, tournaments, duels, and challenges), I have been aware of Noel Fallows' work on Iberian chivalry.  He's the go-to guy in the English language and the articles I've read are very thorough.Now...

Phil Paine on Walter Scott

I've been known to talk up Walter Scott. Phil does it bett...

Bush's errors, from Foreign Policy -- two worth noting

Foreign Policy  is currently featuring a response by Stephen M. Walt to George W. Bush's self-justifying book on his presidency.  The FP piece is appropriately subtitled "Don't fall for the nostalgia -- George W. Bush's foreign policy really was that bad." (John Ibbitson, that means you!) Even if you read the news closely from 2000-8, it's worth a look at this list of...

The Secret History of Democracy -- coming in February 2011

A year or so ago, two Australian scholars, Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell, approached me to contribute an article on ancient Indian democracy to a book called the Secret History of Democracy. I jumped at the chance. Now they have just written me and other contributors to tell us that the book will out from Palgrave in February of next year. The book is now listed at Amazon.uk,...

"No ethnic cleansing without poetry."

Slavoj Zizek, philosopher, on Al-Jazeera English.  This man knows a thing or t...

Brad DeLong reprints one of his better short posts...

...and asks us to count our blessings:November 12, 2004:Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Let Us Give Thanks (Wacht am Rhein Department): Daniel Drezner writes: danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: The dogs that don't bark in international relations: Newspapers,...

The cost of failure in Afghanistan

A series from good old McClatc...

And while we consider Canada's "role" in Afghanistan...

...TomDispatch.com puts the war in a bigger context, that of gigantic US embassies in Baghdad, Kabul, and Islamabad.Image:  The Baghdad embassy in late 20...

The Sack of Rome, AD 410: what do historians and archaeologists think now?

Some of them got together in Rome earlier this month to talk about the subject.  I wasn't there, but Guy Halsall was, and he reports at length.  Some excerpts I liked:After these preliminaries, Arnaldo Marcone gave a lengthy run-down of the symbolic importance of Rome in imperial sources from the Battle of Adrianople onwards and then, more interestingly, Carlos Machado...

Harassmap.org -- using web-based publicity in Cairo to fight the harassment of women

From PRI:Cairo is a bustling city. Its streets are almost always full. But walking around for women here can be unpleasant. EMAN MORSI: You get people just saying things like hey sweetie, hey honey… Or just insults. Eman Morsi is an Egyptian woman in her twenties.EMAN MORSI: Another...

My thought was ---

"How Carolingian!"A giant Jesus in Poznan, Poland.  Thanks to MSNBC....

One scholar's view on love, beauty and courtliness in the Middle Ages

From James A. Schultz's 2006 book, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality, page 80-1:In what follows, I will show that nobility is an attribute of bodies, that it is visible, and that visible nobility provokes love.…The heroes and heroines Middle...

Does anyone know about the "Ehs" and the "You-Alls?"

In Afghanada, CBC Radio's excellent drama about Canadian soldiers fighting in Kandahar province, the Canadians call the Americans "You-Alls" and the Americans call the Canadians "Ehs."  Does anyone know if these slang phrases exist, or whether it is just inspired invention?Image: ...

A sample of sufi poetry -- for students in HIST 3805

For non-Muslims in countries that are historically non-Muslim, understanding the sufi tradition in Islam is perhaps difficult.  It's mystical -- concerned with direct contact with God -- rather than legalistic.Perhaps the best way to get the flavor is to read sufi poetry, which might be described as "love poetry to God." Wahiduddin's Web, an English-language site devoted to...

"Whatever happened to the great novel of ideas?"

...asks an unnamed Time reviewer on the back of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.  The reviewer continues:"It has morphed into science fiction, and Stephenson is its foremost practitioner."Please.Count on Time to miss, for decades, the fact that science fiction has been the literature...

I feel this way about the Early Modern sometimes

Dr. Beachcombing:Beachcombing’s first thought on reading this was just how glad he is to not have lived in the seventeenth century. The Middle Ages did bigotry with style, whereas modernity manages tolerance tolerably well. The early moderns though fall between two stools – even...

Horse round-up in Iceland

Plenty more at the Big Pictu...

Women and Empire: Anne Clendinning speaks, November 5, 2:30 PM

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Kites over Afghanistan, October 2010

From the Big Pictu...