Medieval merriment from the wonderful Toast. A critique of medieval maps, this article is part of the excellent Two Monks series. One monk is supremely confident about all things despite never travelling further than his own closet. His colleague is an incredibly gullible artist. Together, they invent various styles of crazy historical art.

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 So the anonymous writer of my favourite history/culture blog, Ex Urbe, has just outed herself as the American historian Ada Palmer. And she's got a book out soon with Tor! And there's a photo of her wearing an amazing coat here! And she's blogging for Tor!

This is a great thing because Ex Urbe is awesome and well worth reading for the posts on ( Read more... )

Aaron: That which thou canst undo.

Demetrius: Thou hast undone our mother.

Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother.

Shakespeare: 'Titus Andronicus'

The oldest recorded mom joke, from 'a tablet full of crude jokes and riddles about beer' written in cuneiform and dating back 3500 years to Ancient Mesopotamia. Translated as: "of your mother, by ( Read more... )

 "A young Florentine was going down to River Arno with one of those nets in which they wash wool, and met a frolicsome boy, who, out of fun, asked him what birds he was going to catch with that net of his? “I am going to the Brothel’s outlet,” replied the youth, “to spread my net there, and catch your mother.” “Mind you search the place carefully ( Read more... )

Operation Chastise

"Bombs away!" cried Gibson as George sent Wallis' bouncing bomb spinning down towards the darkly shining water with a single flick of his curved talons. Gibson peered down past the Lancaster's olive-green shoulder to follow the bomb as it fell, and in the erratic light of the flashes of anti-aviator fire that lit up George's cloud ( Read more... )

...this is relevant to my interests

'Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society' by Yossef Rapaport.
Free -and very readable-pdf. Three out of ten marriages in fifteenth-century Cairo ended in divorce-higher that modern times. Nusaybah would have loved this one.
Read and download here.Jan Morris' 'The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage ( Read more... )

Ex Urbe has the third part of Machiavelli essay up! And it's about the Borgias! Needless to say, it's the best yet. I do love the Borgias. You just can't make that shit up.
Read all about it here: Ex Urbe

Some choice quotes:

"Once upon a time (circa 1475) the whimsical Will that scripts the Great Scroll of the Cosmos woke up in the morning and ( Read more... )

So auragirl requested a summary post of all my AC stuff. It's been something I've been considering for a while so-here goes.

UPDATE: Both Livejournal and my Net connection are being more than usually temperamental. It's late and tomorrow I head off to spend 3 weeks living in a campervan. I meant to add links to the relevant stories, but for now I'll ( Read more... )

 In which squid314 takes my favourite 'History; you just can't make this shit up' trope and runs with it, demonstrating that World War Two was completely unbelievable and, further more, would have made a shit tv show. I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it...