Oddball medieval name of the day

Galobie de Panassac!A warrior and captor in the Hundred Years War.Update: another soldier with the personal name "Sauvag...

Guys and Guns: Nathan Kozuskanich speaks, March 1, 2013

"Manhood and the Militia in the Early American Republic."...

Somewhere there's a village/where things turned out OK

Think of all the exotic religious beliefs you have read about.  Is it fair to say that most of them are held by people who live in exotic climes, have exotic names, speak exotic languages, perhaps even wear exotic clothes?  But one day you have your nose rubbed in the fact  that your ordinary neighbors might be as exotic as anybody else.  Or maybe you yourself!Above,...

Racism as a political ideology and its tactics

Ta-Nehisi Coates: One of the great contributions of Arnold Hirsch's Making The Second Ghetto is the conception of racism, not as deviancy, moral degeneracy, nor stupidity, but as a political ideology whose employers tactics differ according to class, but whose goals remain the same. The goal of post-war white Chicago was to keep African-Americans sealed in the ghetto. Working...

The remarkable book by Sebastien Nadot, Le spectacle des joustes

Update:  I have not finished yet, but feel I should post my conclusion about Nadot's book.For the period covered, the 15th century, it is the most thorough book I know.  It compares to Noel Fallows' equally thorough book on Iberian jousting -- though the books are quite different, since they rely on different sources.  Likewise it is quite a bit fuller than my Jousts...

Reading the Edinburgh Companion

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Freedom to Read Week at Nipissing University

See what's up:http://www.nipissingu.ca/departments/external-relations-and-advancement/nunews/Feb-20-2013/Pages/Celebrate-Freedom-to-Read-with-a-banned-book.a...

R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane

It was neither:  it was the  biggest population movement in human history.New Books in History features a meaty  interview with the author.http://newbooksinhistory.com/2013/02/14/r-m-douglas-orderly-and-humane-the-expulsion-of-the-germans-after-the-second-world-wa...

The Maple Leaf Dog with snow on his nose...

...true patriot love in his sad brown eyes!Stringband was a Canadian folk group of the 1970s.  They wrote the best patriotic song I know: My immediate circle of friends was quite fond of this song, and became more so when we realized that some of the band memmbers lived on the...

David Tabachnick, Technology is blurring the line between work and play

A valued colleague has an op-ed in the Globe and Mail.An excerpt:The critical role of play has a long history in Western civilization. Way back in the 4th century BC, Aristotle wrote extensively on the importance of leisure. The ancient Greek word for leisure is schole, from which we get “school.” At least for Aristotle, leisure was supposed to be time to think about higher...

Medievalist roots

A  historian of my acquaintance posted the following picture to Facebook to illustrate why he became a medievalist:Quite a laudable reason!Then I realized that I too could illustrate my medievalist roots.  And no, it has nothing to do with deeds of arms:Yes, Richard III's...

Cuneiform fan?

For the real fans: Oxford presents the 100 most important cuneiform items.&nb...

Luck

Know any unappreciated geniuses?  Alexis C. Madrigal in the Atlantic:To ask these things is not to demean Noyce's talents, but rather to wonder how many other would-be Noyces were frustrated? How many other legends just missed? Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs and Bob Noyce: all brilliant, hardworking people. But how many brilliant hardworking people were just in the wrong place...

Deeds of arms and me

Since the late 1990s, I have been studdying  and  writing  about  formal combats -- challenges, tournaments, jousts, trials  by combat -- in the late Middle Ages.  What did the fighters do? Why did they do it?  What did it mean to them?Over this decade or so, I have generated a lot of material entitled "Deeds of Arms," because, well, it's  all...

Jousting in Frankish Greece, from the Chronicle of Morea

The Chronicle of Morea is an important source for the  history of the Frankish lordships that  grew up in Greece as a result of the Fourth Crusade,  and for  that reason Anne van Arsdall is translating the  French version  for the  Ashgate Crusader texts in translation series.  It includes this interesting story of  a  mid-fourteenth...

Senegal, Madagascar and Dr. Amadou Ba

Dr. Ba, who teaches history at Nipissing and Laurentian Universities, yesterday presented a paper entitled "African Soldiers in the French Colonial Army during the Conquest and  Colonization of Madagascar."n The several points of interested included: the fact that there were a lot of colonial wars in  Madagascar, which pretty much no one  knows...

An interim review of Sebastien Nadot’s Le spectacle des joustes

I read French rather slowly, so I may move on to other books before I properly finish this one.  But Le spectacle des joustes deserves some attention and so I am writing this comment.Few scholarly books look at all aspects of medieval deeds of arms in detail. This is one of them.  The book’s title is deceptive in that the book, though it treats jousting very thoroughly,...

Combat of the Thirty -- a 19th-century depiction

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Combat of the Thirty -- my new book

Out today!I have collected and translated the most important accounts of this famous 14th century deed  of arms, and Doug   Strong has contributed an appendix  on the armor.A pretty book and a barga...