Saw THE BEEKEEPER (2024) last night. I, of course, loved this movie. I will watch anything with Jason Statham (I'm not the only one as it turned out after the movie was over last night. 😆).
I also got a kick out of the movie as a medievalist. Apparently, there is a secret society of assassins called Beekeepers, who protect human civilization based on the idea that it is like a beehive.
Two upcoming online lectures next Tuesday, 14 May (alas, their times overlap).
Here's the first, sponsored by the Celtic Studies Association of North America: Sarah Waidler (NYU) will speak on ‘Arthur, Authority and the Saints Revisited’ at 12 noon EDT (= 5 pm BST).
Disappointing conclusion to a manuscript 📖 search, but it was nice to receive such an informative reply from the keeper of manuscripts at the Universiteitsbibliotheek #Utrecht
Final Call for Papers, 37th Irish Conference of Medievalists, Dublin, 20-21 June 2024 (from Immo Warntjes, TCD):
Speakers from Ireland and abroad are welcome to submit c 100-word proposals for 20-minute papers on all aspects of the Middle Ages, including (but not limited to) history, art, literature, linguistics, theology, philosophy, and palaeography.
Loek Luiten focusses on Italian #emdiplomacy from the other end of time making them both the perfect match! Luiten has done his PhD Oxford University on the Farnese Family in the 15th century. We can recommend his article “Friends and family, fruit and fish: the gift in Quattrocento Farnese cultural politics”. What a great title! (4/11)
"Our analysis of 49 coins from the North Sea zone indicates that Byzantine silver plate was the source of silver for the initial minting of the first post-Roman silver coins in England, Frisia and parts of Francia. From c. AD 750, freshly mined silver from Melle, Aquitaine, was introduced to this North Sea zone, becoming the dominant source following the coinage reforms of AD 793."
Small update: 🤖⚔️ #ParzivAI - our #GenAI language model specialized in translating #MiddleHighGerman into modern #German, and explaining the #MiddleAges to students - is halfway done with another round of training...
Morgen ist Torsten Hiltmann zu Gast in der #DigitalHumanities Brown Bag Lunch Series des Max-Planck-Instituts für Wissenschaftsgeschichte mit einem Vortrag zu:
I just finished Spear, by Nicola Griffith. It's an Arthurian retelling set in Wales about the knight Percival (rendered as the more obscure Peretur Paladr Hir) with a queer and feminist twist.
I love Griffith's attention to detail, the main character's interaction with her environment, and how the story veers from the expected "hero's journey."
It's a short work, showing the mastery exhibited in her other work set in early medieval times, Hild (which I loved). You can sense the research that undergirds her presentation of the characters and their surroundings and see with what care she makes her literary choices.
"It aims to extend the study of the dissemination of plainchant from localized research focused mostly on Europe and the Middle Ages to global research tracing transmission to other continents through to the modern era. "
🙏 @sapiens Such interesting questions from this project!
"Do you own a chant fragment or do you know someone who does? What do you know about its history and travels?"
"The project ‘The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages’ will show the importance of medieval reading culture as a European movement by bringing together (digitised) manuscripts produced between c. 500 and c. 1550 from across Europe, unlocking their educational potential by curational and editorial enrichment, using innovative ways for displaying and handling digital objects in an educational context."
Quite popular among several countries, there was the belief that, during childbirth, knots had to be untied.
Everything, in the house, had to be loose to ease the delivery.
Also, a broom was kept in a corner of the room – this custom was followed in #Japan, too!
#Roman husbands wrapped their wives with special belts, which then were untied, to ease the pain of the labor.
Also, in the #MiddleAges, special birth girdles¹ were used.
✨#Wunder? #Magie? Der #Legende nach, sollen die Ärzte und Brüder Cosmas und Damian viele Menschen geheilt haben. So auch diesen Kranken, dem ein Bein abgenommen und durch ein Bein eines Verstorbenen ersetzt wurde 🦵 .
Aufgrund ihrer selbstlosen Taten (sie haben kein Geld für ihre Hilfe verlangt) wurden sie #heilig gesprochen. 😇
Dieses Tafelbild aus dem 16. Jh. zeigt die Szene des Beinwunders: https://www.landesmuseum-stuttgart.de/sammlung/sammlung-online/dk-details?dk_object_id=309
"This book does not attempt to answer this seemingly unsolvable puzzle either but aims to shed light on a simple fact usually overlooked by linguists and laypeople alike: the conceptual pair is not a timeless given but has a history, and a much shorter one than one might assume."