What Vikings Really Looked Like
Basically this is the best article and website about Scandinavia I have stumbled across yet.
Also: Viking women were pretty awesome.
There is some interesting info here on the appearance and dress of Viking women.
Tag: sca
Beginner and veteran transcribers, this app is available for free, on both Android and iOS devices. Manuscript database, basic info on each of them, typography galore…
The origins of this app lie in online exercises in palaeography developed for postgraduate students in the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, U.K. The aim is to provide practice in the transcription of a wide range of medieval hands, from the twelfth to the late fifteenth century.
Truth be told, some of the pages might be in higher resolution, but still, it’s one of the best edu apps I’ve seen lately.
Hey, pulltheotheroneithasbellson! I found another tower! 😀
From the Beinecke Rare book and Manuscript Library’s record:
La Sfera
Creator: Dati, Gregorio, 1362-1436
Language: Italian
Date: [between 1450 and 1500]Subjects:
Astronomy, Medieval
Italian poetry–15th century
Illumination of books and manuscripts, Medieval
Manuscripts, Medieval–Connecticut–New Haven
Early maps
Navigation–Early works to 1800
Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Beinecke Library
Dati, Gregorio,–1362-1436
This is folio 17r.
So the University of Iowa Libraries has this DIY thing for the historian in all of us – transcribing old texts and handwritten letters for the public record. It’s a group effort, and the sort of nitty gritty thing you’d get to do if you actually used your history degree for a thing related to it.
KATE BEATON + DIY HISTORY?!?
So, this is a thing. 🙂
English Heritage Archaeological Monographs – FREE
English Heritage Archaeological Monographs – FREE
English Heritage has a long tradition of producing highly illustrated archaeological monographs about key sites and topics of importance to the understanding of the historic environment in England. Many of the past titles have long been out of print… As a service to the wider archaeological community, English Heritage is now making these titles available as ebooks, available from their website, and as PDFs which can be accessed from the ADS for free.Look! This is so amazing!
Ask your question, get an answer!
Ask your question, get an answer!
You know that research you’re doing?
You should ask me about it. 😀
The WayBack Machine and Curing your Defunct Website Woes
It’s happened to you. It’s happened to all of us.
You’re chugging along doing your research, and you see a site that looks promising. Best of all, it’s by another Scadian. You gasp with joy and excitement! Someone else is interested in the Weird Thing You’re Researching and has already done some of the legwork! And sometimes, what you’re looking at is an image – in a search engine, Pinterest, or some other place – that is spot-on the kind of thing you’re looking for.
Eagerly, with much anticipation, you click the link.
But then your hopes are broken when the site is either not there, broken, or otherwise doesn’t live up to your expectations of Glorious Research Breakthrough.
It probably did, at some point. But we Scadians are really bad about webpage upkeep, it seems.
Feel better, my fellow Catalog Crawlers. For I have a tool for you. It carries a +5 to Research bonus to boot!
Introducing – the WayBack Machine.
Enter a web address, and you can see a timeline of when it was last archived – and more often than not, you have some choices.
Case in point: The Purple Lotus and Leah’s Attempts to Research Sasanian Persia.
I found a series of delicious, delicious pins of metal plates depicting women in the Sasanian period. But when I clicked on them, they took me to a site that had information, but no pictures. Pictures mean context! It was clear to me that the author was changing her website around, and the HTML that pointed to the images was broken. I didn’t lose faith though! I waited a bit to see if she was in the middle of fixing it, but after a few weeks, I went to the WayBack Machine.
Not only is thepurplelotus.org archived, but it has been archived several times. The earliest snapshot had a PDF of the information I wanted, but it wouldn’t load – but I wasn’t surprised. A snapshot from 2011 had what I wanted – the article, plus images. One print-dialog later, where I chose to save the “print” as a PDF instead of sending it to the printer, and I’m home free.
So take heart, my Delvers of Dusty Dissertations! The WayBack Machine will resurrect that old dead website (most of the time) and get you the information you seek!
I briefly mentioned the book Pharaonic Egyptian Clothing (one of the few available surveys on, predictably, pharaonic Egyptian clothing) in my historical fashion master post some months ago, but I also mentioned that it’s out of print and a royal pain in the butt to get your hands on.
Seeing how I’m never one to selfishly hoard good reference (and I’m tired of checking it out of the library over and over again like I’m Belle or something), I finally scanned the whole damn thing and uploaded it HERE for you to download and peruse!
(point of note: this book was published in 1993 so there’s always a slim chance that some of this information might be considered out of date over the past twenty-odd years, but there are so few resources dedicated to the topic that I’m more than willing to take that chance.)
Enjoy, let me know if the link stops working, and go draw some historically accurate Egyptian people! NOW. GO GOGOGOGO.
YES THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.
Boosting the signal. 🙂
The Dialogus Creaturarum
Incunabula are books that were printed in the early days of the printing press in Europe, from the 1450s to the end of the 15th century. Because this technological advancement came when books were still hand-copied and decorated (manuscripts) the typography and decoration was designed to mimic their more time-intensive predecessors. Because that’s what books looked like, you know?
The Dialogus creaturarum optime moralizatus (or, Dyalogus creaturarum moralizatus) is a collection of 122 fables in Latin and conversations of creatures. It was the first book ever printed in Sweden, in 1483 by Johann Snell. Five copies of the original printing survive today.
From Wikipedia: The fables are organised in sections according to the different kinds of protagonists: first the astronomical, then the elements, followed by living things. The fables tell of the interactions of various anthropomorphized animals and ends with a moral explanation. Common human problems are solved according to the teachings of the Bible, church fathers or classical Greek or Roman philosophy. The author is unknown, but surviving manuscripts suggest the fables may have been gathered and edited by either Mayno de Mayneri (Magninus Mediolanensis) or Nicolaus Pergamenus, both active in the 14th century. A number of the fables are from Aesop, such as The Lion’s Share, The Frog and the Ox and The Wolf and the Lamb.
The first English edition of Dialogus creaturarum was published in 1530.
Color digitization, from the Ghent University Library, Belguim: [Link]
English Translation: The dialoges of creatures moralysed: a critical edition, by G. C. Kratzmann and Elizabeth Gee (1988): [Worldcat] [AbeBooks]
Excerpts from English translation with original illustrations: [Wayback Machine]
And, because of the ones I have found in English so far, this is my favorite:
About the Monkey who wrote Books: Dialogue 97
Symea, a monkey, used to write the most beautiful of books; but he was never completely whole-hearted about what he was doing. He would rather talk with other people, or listen to what they were saying, and because of that he used to spoil his books by writing in them what he was saying, or what he heard the others say. But since he refused to improve himself, no-one would offer him any work, and from his poverty he said:
Nichil scriptor
corde si non meditatur
– “Nothing the scribe writes will have its effect if it is not meditated in the heart.”
Scribal Documentation Template.docx – Google Drive
Scribal Documentation Template.docx – Google Drive
I made a thing that I think is ready to see the public eye.
I don’t know about you guys, but I am really bad sometimes about remembering to write down my bare-bones documentation for scribal stuff. That is, write it down somewhere other than on the back of the scroll that is leaving my possession. I would like to, at some point, have a portfolio of everything (or most things) that I have done along with write-ups. Writing scribal documentation for a single piece is a bit different than doing so for a portfolio type thing, but only by a little in my mind.
That being said, and in interest of promoting scribal stuff at the upcoming Northshield Kingdom Arts and Sciences Open Division and Triathlon, I made a template for scribal documentation. My hope is that if you have never written documentation before, that it will help you do so for your scribal work.
Even if you aren’t planning on submitting your work, this is a great way to keep a diary of your process, sources, etc. that you can look back on and see how you have improved. Also, writing about something you’ve done helps you learn more from it by learning more about yourself and how you think, process, and do – it’s a kind of meta-cognition.
Anyway, please feel free to use this. Remember, it’s just a template – open it up in Word and replace my guidance text with what you’re writing.
I’m open to constructive criticism about it too – if you have an idea for how I can make this better, please let me know.
YIS,
Leah Jolifaunt of Schattentor
Northshield Do-er of Things and SCA Reference Desk Librarian
P.S. Feel free to share!