A Canadian Viking in the Governor-General’s Court: Medievalism in Pre-war Canada, by Janice Liedl

An interesting article  at academia.edu about a late 19th century attempt to use Viking exploration and settlement of Canada as a symbol of European settler unity.

A human kaleidoscope

People who wish to introduce medieval dancing into the SCA have a real problem – almost all of our documentation for dances done in the medieval period actually come from late in the Renaissance. Some people who want to dance often use other styles as inspiration, in particular in English country dancing. Once you get past the anachronism here, there's a lot of fun to be had doing known country dances or choreographing new ones.

One member of the SCA, known in it as James Blackcloak has created several new country dance inspired choreographies. Some of them are on YouTube. For your enjoyment, I direct you to this one, entitled St. Paul's Cathedral:

Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France during the Hundred Years War, by Craig Taylor

I just ran across a reference to this book in the last few days, so this is not a review.  I know Craig Taylor and I consider him a very intelligent historian, so I expect this will be a valuable book. Here is what Cambridge University Press has to say about it:

Craig Taylor's study examines the wide-ranging French debates on the martial ideals of chivalry and knighthood during the period of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). Faced by stunning military disasters and the collapse of public order, writers and intellectuals carefully scrutinized the martial qualities expected of knights and soldiers. They questioned when knights and men-at-arms could legitimately resort to violence, the true nature of courage, the importance of mercy, and the role of books and scholarly learning in the very practical world of military men. Contributors to these discussions included some of the most famous French medieval writers, led by Jean Froissart, Geoffroi de Charny, Philippe de Mézières, Honorat Bovet, Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier and Antoine de La Sale. This interdisciplinary study sets their discussions in context, challenging modern, romantic assumptions about chivalry and investigating the historical reality of debates about knighthood and warfare in late medieval France.

And in the grand tradition of overcharging outrageously for academic books, this one even in e-book format goes for $79 US !

I am rather sorry I didn't have a chance to see this before I published Charny's Men at Arms, but in fact my book was essentially finished a year ago. Would it have made a big difference? No. My book is a tightly focused study, Taylor's a much wider one. But if it were a reasonable price I would own this book already.  Note that mine costs only $25.

At last, a book

Faithful readers will recognize this as the infamous book on Charny's questions that I've been slugging away at, with some interruptions from other work since the millennium was young. Really young!

If you don't know the book, it is an investigation of a list of questions put forward by a 14th century French knight Geoffroi de Charny to his fellow aristocratic warriors, presumably to educate them in their duty and privileges as warriors. Because there are no answers given, Charny's questions are an unresolvable puzzle and maybe for this reason there have been few detailed looks at the questions and their purposes. Also, no one I know has translated all the questions before now.

Like historical puzzles? Wonder about what chivalry meant to those who fought in the Hundred Years War?  Is your curiosity piqued by the phrase "who gets the horse?"

Now all this can be yours – the answers, I mean, if you are willing to stick out your neck and propose some yourself.

Here's a link to the publisher.

If you are close with the dollar, you might try poking around this blog for some of my reflections on Charny's questions over the years.

Armor

The mystique that surrounds armor, then and now, is masterfully evoked in this BBC 4 documentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FzoZ-wVWUY

Another answer -- Shevek speaks

Shevek the anarchist from another planet speaks to the dissatisfied people of the homeworld:

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when it is forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers and what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And
the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made 200 years ago in this city – the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have  nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you can have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Charny's answer

People who know my scholarly work on the writings of Geoffroi de Charny, a fourteenth century knight, may associate me with "Charny's questions," a set of hypothetical problems related to "the law of arms" meant to be analyzed by knights, squires and "men at arms" so that they would be better prepared to relate with other aristocratic warriors.

Charny's questions are unanswered.

But if you want his answer to the problems of the life of arms, consider this from Charny's Book of Chivalry:

[T]hose who have the will to achieve great worth [who] because of their great desire to reach and attain that high honor … do not care what suffering they have to endure, but turn everything into great enjoyment. Indeed, it is a fine thing to perform great deeds, for those who rise to great achievement cannot rightly grow tired or sated with it; so the more they achieve, the less they feel they have achieved; this stems from the delight they take in striving constantly to reach greater heights. And great good comes from performing these deeds, for the more one does, the less one is proud of oneself, and it always seems that there is so much left to do.

Charny's answer?