A love-letter to Canada

Phil Paine's great mountain adventure. This post is mainly for archival purposes. See the illustrated version at Phil's blog. . If you are on Facebook, see Filip Marek's pictures. What fol­lows here took place dur­ing the sec­ond week of Sep­tem­ber. It was planned a long time ahead. A quar­ter cen­tury of friend­ship between myself and Filip Marek would be cel­e­brated with...

My interview with Medievalists.net: chivalry in the era of the Hundred Years War

Five Medieval Minutes with Steven MuhlbergerSEPTEMBER 24, 2015 BY MEDIEVALISTS.NETBy Danièle CybulskieThis week at Medievalists.net, we’ve been thinking a lot about The Hundred Years’ War, so we thought we’d bring you five minutes with an expert on fourteenth-century chivalry and combat. Like so many things in the Late Middle Ages, The Hundred Years’ War was deeply influenced by...

On libraries

This is a Soviet-era technical library that I first saw on the pioneering Russian picture-blog English Russia.  Any scholar or other lover of books has to have a visceral reaction to this scene of apparent devastation.   But quite recently I visited a nearby university...

What's wrong with the Canadian Conservative Party

I needed to include this column in my blog. It says so many important things. There’s truth in advertising after all – Stephen Harper isn’t perfect TABATHA SOUTHEYThe Globe and MailPublished Friday, Sep. 11, 2015 1:26PM EDT It’s clear the Conservatives were caught off guard by the general public’s recent swell of concern for Syrian refugees, a cause for which the party has...

Medieval Mounted Combat

The Jousting Life has made available some amazing demonstrations of how cavalry combat in the Middle Ages may have worked. Have a look at this YouTube video and tell me you aren't impressed. What impresses me is the level of horsemanship that is both demonstrated and impli...

Folk of the Air

I promised a couple of weeks ago to discuss The Folk of the Air, a novel by Peter S Beagle, which contrary to the opinion of some readers I think is a very successful piece of literature.It might be considered a novel of hippy-dom in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1970s. It is also a book about the intrusion of supernatural elements into a modern community. And most of...