Living on different planets

Some odd stuff has been taking place recently within my field of view. Some people might think by reading the official documents of government in North America that cannabis is illegal. Yet at the same time there are dispensaries in many places where you can on a good day acquire some of the stuff. People come on the radio and talk about the cannabis business on the basis of...

Reviews of Royal Jousts and the Combat of the Thirty (De Re Militari)

Muhlberger, Royal Jousts at the End of the Fourteenth Century & The Combat of the Thirty (Sposato) De Re MilitariMAY 23, 2016Royal Jousts at the End of the Fourteenth Century, Deeds of Arms series 1The Combat of the Thirty, Deeds of Arms series 2ed. and trans. by Steven Muhlberger(Freelance Academy Press, 2012) i- viii, 88 pp., $24.95; ii- viii, 83 pp., $24.95Over the past...

GK Chesterton and Alan Jacobs discuss fiction and literature

I am reading Alan Jacobs' The Narnian: the life and imagination of CS Lewis. On page 123 Jacobs has a very interesting comment on GK Chesterton. One of Chesterton's most famous essays is an early one (1901) called "in defence of penny dreadfuls" – "penny dreadfuls" being what we might call "pulp fiction," but for adolescents. Apparently many cultural pedagogues of the time were...

Ripper Street and steampunk

I talked recently about the Canadian show Murdoch's Mysteries as an entertaining exploration of late Victorian Toronto, which is not exactly steam punk but close enough. I am now watching Ripper Street, which like the Canadian series is about the late 19th century and is not exactly steampunk but shares Murdoch mysteries fascination with new technology and science. The fascination...

The brutal men at arms of the Good Duke

Faithful readers and good friends know that I've been working for a while on a translation of the Chronicle of the Good Duke, a French biography of the Duke of Bourbon dating from about 1429. The events covered by the Chronicle are actually older than that. One of the most interesting things about this document is that it was written by a young person consulting with a prominent...

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation, by Robert Bartlett

This sounds like a fantastic book. But then he's written them before.  Bartlett, Robert. Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation   Reviewed by Diane Fruchtman        DePauw University        dianefruchtman@depauw.eduRobert Bartlett's Why Can the Dead Do Such Great...

On the Road in the Hundred Years War -- stories of 14th century warfare from Froissart

From Steve Muhlberger and Stonebunny Press A New book in a new series: On the Road in the Hundred Years War -- stories of 14th century warfare from the chivalric historian Jean Froissart. Would you like to hear what the knights of the Hundred Years War had to say about their personal experiences of the conflict? Jean Froissart, the era's greatest fan of chivalry, devoted his...

Kent State, Northwoods, and the SCA

This day is the anniversary of the Kent State University shootings, where the Ohio National Guard, faced with unruly demonstrators against the Vietnam War, shot several of them including people who were not part of the demonstration. I was in university at the time in the United States and opposition to the war was pretty high. This however got many people who had not...