All posts with the tag: history...
The field grew dark with the blood of men after the sun,
That glorious luminary, God’s bright candle,
Rose high in the morning after the horizon,
Until the noble being [creation] of the Lord Eternal
Sank to its rest
- From the Battle of Brunanburgh, a poem inserted into the Anglo-Saxon chronicle celebrating Athelstan’s victory against the Irish Vikings and Scots in 937.
- The god of art, dance, games, beauty, music and flowers in Aztec mythology. Known as the “Flower Prince”.
The Memory of ſome Men is like the Roſe and other odiferous Flowers, which caſt a ſweeter and ſtronger Smell after they are plucked: the Memory of others may be ſaid to be like the Poppy, and ſuch Vegetables, that make a gay and ſpecious Shew, while they ſtand upon the Stalk, but being cut and gathered, they have but an ill-favoured Scent. The worthy Perſsons examplified in theſe Records, may be compared to the firſt Sort, as well for the ſweet Odor of a good Name they had while they ſtood, as alſo after they were cut down by the common Stroke of Mortality.
Stephen Wren, from the preface to Parentalia or Memoirs of the family of the Wrens, a family history that concentrated on his illustrious architect grandfather, Sir Christopher Wren.
Stone age man took drugs. No real surpise there.
The Rare Book Room is filled with amazing photographs of some of the most beautiful old books in the world.
Full size scans of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a fifteenth-century printed book with beautiful typography.
Israeli researchers planted a 2000-year-old date palm seed that archaeologists collected from Masada in the 60’s and it actually grew!
(via The History Blog)
Champagne is an an English invention, according to kottke:
Merret came to sparkling wine through his interest in glass. The process of secondary fermentation had been known since before medieval times but was not reproducible because the glass bottles would explode under the pressure. Using stronger English glass and sturdy corks, Merret was able to dependably reproduce the sparkling effect and publish the technique for anyone to do the same. A bit less glamorous than ‘drinking the stars’ perhaps, but a deft illustration of the scientific method nonetheless.
How would you survive if transported into the medieval age?
Filaticcio
Coarse silk from cocoons where the silkworm has hatched out. (Taken from Glossary of Mediaeval Terms of Italian Business: Italian Edition by Florence Edler)
An interesting article on using human height as a source in history.
This wasn’t just another data set, he realized. Height records offered a new angle on history, and they were readily available. Measurements of French military conscripts date back to 1716, and anthropologists have collected much older skeletal measurements. “There are millions of these data lying around and nobody is looking at them,” Komlos remembers Fogel suggesting at the lecture. All that was needed was a few good graduate students to gather them up.
I hadn’t realised, but the memoirs of William Hickey, our favourite Georgian rake, are available to read online. God bless Google Books!
From the memoirs of William Hickey, a Georgian rake:
This was in the summer of 1756. In the month of July of that year a large party dined with my father, at Twickenham, at which were present Lord Cholmondeley, and his brother, the General, Sir Charles Sheffield, the owner of the Queen’s Palace in St. James’s park, then called Buckingham house, Sir William Stanhope, to whom Pope’s place belonged, Mr. Simon Luttrell, afterwards Earl of Carhampton, my God-father Colonel Mathews, and others. As I was sitting upon the knee of the latter, after dinner, having just swallowed a bumper of claret which he had given me, I, with a deep sigh said to him,
“I wish I was a man.”
“Aye,” observed the Colonel, “and pray why so, William?”
To which I quickly replied,
“That I might drink two bottles of wine every day.”
This wish, and the reason, being communicated to the company made a hearty laugh, and Mr. Luttrell, who was a famous hard liver, pronounced that I should live to be a damned drunken dog, the rest agreeing that I should undoubtedly be a very jolly fellow!
A Yürük [a nomad, walker] does not need to go anywhere, but needs to be moving.
-Turkic nomad proverb
Here is a list of different currencies used in Europe in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, gleaned from F. Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II by J. H. Hexter:
ducats, ecus d’or, sequins, lire, soldi, zeanars, dobles, soltaninis, livres, sous, ecus d’argent, doblones, escudos de oro, reales, aspri, tourrones, escus pistolet, courrones, tallieri, quat-trini, bajocci, kronenthaler, marchetti, pesos, reali ad 8, 6, and 4, maravedis, pfennigs, drachmas, reales, deniers, thalers, maidin.
How to build a cathedral, on BBC iPlayer. (UK only)
I’m revising for some exams, and I’m trying to use the Memory Palace method, which interestingly I first heard about in connection with Matteo Ricci, a sixteenth-century Jesuit who travelled to China. He would use the memory palace to perform feats of memory, such as remembering 300 Chinese symbols that he had never seen before in sequence. This, and much else of his fascinating life are documented in Jonathan D. Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
A Viking hoard of Arab silver has been discovered in Sweden. It’s so strange to think these two cultures, which are so completely separate in my mind, interacted and traded. (via The History Blog)
I’m reading Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. It’s the autobiography of a Lakota holy man, a Heyoka, and it’s a brilliant insight into I world I know nothing about, a fascinating man, and a chilling reminder of how vulnerable groups can be persecuted even in the self-proclaimed “land of the free”.
Today’s Wikipedia article of the day is an excellent biography of Suleiman the Magnificent, the longest ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.
-Giordano Bruno, d. 1600, after being sentenced to burn at the stake for claiming there were planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. (Via the How to Live blog.)
John Hawkwood is a fascinating character from history. A 14th century English mercenary, he terrorised the Italian countryside and its city states for over 30 years. His extremely interesting and very eventful life is described in Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman by Frances Stonor Saunders, which I read recently.
Top 10 Historical Hoaxers compiled by The Times, with links to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Buzkashi, a sport played by Central Asian peoples since the days of Gengis Khan. The players are on horseback, and the “ball” is a dead goat.
Shamanistic remnants in Hungarian folklore - pretty interesting, pretty esoteric.
It strikes me that the thousands of blogs like this one will make a fantastic resource for future historians. With the thoughts they contain, and the metadata that accompanies them, statistical analysis of the notions held by many thousands of people will allow a far more accurate social history than is possible for any other age.
The problem will be that, for now at least, it will only offer a statistical analysis of tech-savvy people, predominantly in economically developed countries. All this assumes, of course, that there are future historians, or a habitable planet for them to live on.
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