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Quebec legislator disapproves of British royalty.  Tempest in teapot follo...

Those belligerent jousters

In my own research on jousting  which is based on Charny's questions on the law of arms as it applies to jousting tournaments and war, I got the impression that men at arms, full-fledged warriors, were a pretty argumentative lot. But of course, since Charny's questions are about resolving arguments, Charny had to conjure up some belligerent sorts, however many there may have...

Migration and ethnicity and why the 5th century matters today

Guy Halsall gave this paper --Archaeology and Migration: Rethinking the Debate -- at the conference on The Very Beginnings of Europe? Cultural and Social Dimensions of early Medieval Migration and Settlement (5th-8th centuries) that took place in Brussels on 17-19 May.Obscure? Irrelevant?  See what Halsall has to say: Moving from the demonstration of migration to the explanation...

A $100 book

Noel Fallows' Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia is a $100 book.And I say that with the greatest respect.I have been known to rant and rave about the fact that all too many scholarly works cost a hundred dollars. But every once in a while you come across something that bears that a price tag for a good reason, and this is one of them. I am very glad I got this book that...

Syria in fragments -- from Joshua Landis' Syria Comment

 I am re-posting this important report in its entirety -- SM ******“Syria in Fragments: Divided Minds, Divided Lives,” by an American in Syria Sunday, May 29th, 2011 This is the best piece of writing on Syria since the uprising began. Read it.Hello Dr. Landis,Thanks...

The quest for answers to Charny's Questions

I  have just posted the current draft of my  translation of Geoffroi de Charny’s Questions concerning the joust, tournaments, and war.  It is in the form of a blog entitled Charny’s Questions and it is located at http://charnyqs.blogspot.com/.I have made the questions available in hopes that other scholars will know of parallels to individual questions or even solutions...

A rather intriguing plan for a wind generator

An article and some bigger pictures are here.Thanks, Rebec...

The Arab Spring and sectarian violence

There has been a lot of talk from Syria about how the loosening of the dictatorship's effective power would lead to the kind of religious-inspired civil war that took place in Iraq after the American invasion, or the somewhat different civil war that took place in Lebanon after 1976. ...

Twenty years late -- The Difference Engine

Twenty years ago, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling published The Difference Engine, an alternate world novel in which actual plans for a large, mechanical computer were actually realized, so that the steam-driven actual Industrial Revolution was hyperpowered by a cybernetic component. ...

Cinderella's Ball

A scientific treat!And now with mus...

This deserves the widest possible circulation

Thanks to Rob Galbraith, who saw it at fudge that sug...

Read this

Jeff Sypeck at Quid plura, though a great user of electronic materials, expresses his fears and sorrow over the eclipse and devaluation of the codex (the physical book):...Megan McArdle concludes:What will happen to the pleasures of pulling a random book from the shelves of a home...

Borobudur temple in Java

...or Gormenghast?From the Big Pictu...

That beautiful destrier

In Charny's Questions on Tournaments, there is a case proposed to Charny's audience about a knight who brings a beautiful destrier to a tournament and decides not to ride it. An unarmed man gets on the destrier and rides out past the lists and all over the field, until some other...

John Long wins a history prize!

An announcement from Nipissing University:Congratulations to Dr. John Long, associate professor in the Schulich School of Education, who won the Fred Landon Award honouring the best book on regional history by the Ontario Historical Society, for his book, Treaty No. 9: Making the Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario in 1905 (McGill-Queen’s University Press)....

Dipping into Noel Fallows' Jousting...

I am unwinding on the last evening of the Kalamazoo conference and having a first look at Noel Fallows' new book on jousting in Iberia. This might be the most substantial treatment of jousting ever written -- based as it is on a plethora of texts that have been ignored by just about everyone as too difficult to interpret. And Fallows includes the texts and translations!And I'm...

Next fall's courses

Here's what I am teaching:HIST 3116--officially listed as a "topics" course, this fall it will be offered as "crusade and jihad.". It is a 3 credit course. HIST 3805--History of Islamic Civilization, from the beginning or even earlier up to the present (April 2012). 6 credits. HIST 4505--this year this fourth-year seminar will be on "The World of Gregory of Tours"--early medieval...

Muhlberger speaks at Kalamazoo, May 14, 2011: Charny's Honor

A week from Saturday I will be delivering a paper on "Honor in the Writings of Geoffroi de Charny" at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI.That's Session 453 in Bernhard 208, at 1:30 ...

Susan Reynolds, There were States in Medieval Europe

This essay by one of the best of medieval historians is worth a lo...