Tag Archives: Middle Ages

A Bright Age for Dropouts Drinking Coffee and Reading Defunct Lit-mags

One of my daughters likes spicy food but doesn’t eat it much. She’s willing to try anything hot, and this week it was a dried Carolina Reaper, the world’s hottest pepper. I urged her to prepare for eating it by reading what she could find online, but no, she just scarfed it up and downed a milk shake as a counter measure. She told me she was going to do it but not when she would, so I didn’t know she had until she came to us at 1:30 a.m. to ask for help with sharp stomach pain. She threw up a few minutes later, which I understand is a normal response to eating these peppers.

So what are we linking to today?

Local Coffee: Some poor businessman failed to read the room when launching plans to remodel an Arby’s in Livingston, Montana, into a Starbucks. The community has a number of local coffee shops, like Chadz on N. Main and Eastside Coffee in the historic district, and the Livingston Business Improvement District don’t want Big Coffee to put a squeeze on them.

The Bright Ages: On the latest Prufrock podcast, Micah Mattix talks to the authors of a medieval history that focuses on many of the details we ignore about the Middle Ages. “It was, for the most part, seen as neither a virtue nor a vice that a city or region would contain various people from various places speaking various languages. It was a fact.”

Kudos to Mattix’s revived Prufrock newsletter, which you can subscribe to through the website of Spectator World.

Dropping Out: Hippies and drop outs were afraid, in part, of societal brainwashing and the mind-control everyone was talking about in the 60s. They wanted to know and live their true selves. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Closing Shop: Literary magazines are being shut down. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

Racism: A popular anti-racist author claims, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That’s how you fight bad discrimination, friends. You fight it with your own discrimination.

Photo: Newman’s Drugs, Lake Huntington, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Medieval Women Were Not Waifs

A new exhibit at the Getty offers a revealing look at women from the Middle Ages.

With an understandable weariness, the exhibition’s creators acknowledge, both on the introductory museum label and catalogue book jacket, that most people imagine medieval women as damsels in distress, being rescued perhaps by a dragon-­hunting St. George. One has to meet the popular mind, fattened by dismissals of the Middle Ages (“a world lit only by fire”), where it unfortunately lags. But to slay this myth as surely as St. George speared his dragon, the curators unfurled manu­scripts of a different, lesser known legend, that of St. Margaret. Consumed by a dragon, Margaret ripped her way out of his stomach herself with a crucifix. Like Jesus, it seems, Margaret could be born (from a dragon at least) without the help of a man.

How the Normans Ruined the British Isles for a Thousand Years

Battle of Hastings reenactment 2006

October 14 was the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. Peter Konieczy of the University of Toronto offers three reasons why this was not a typical medieval battle. One reason was that the Normans and the English were evenly matched.

We can read some of the battle’s details in this post on a French poetic account, Estoire des Engleis History of the English, by Geoffrey Gaimar. It includes a part about a Norman juggler who demonstrated his spear skills before the English army.

Konieczy also touches on how the Normans meddled with the Irish several decades later, never fully conquering them, and by 1180, “would leave the island unstable and divided.”