Read The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, which I borrowed from my former housemate. It read like a much older book than something originally published in 1981. It was an amusing and informative passage through the various forms of medievalist and chivalric revivals in Britain from the C18th on. It makes quite clear that ( Read more... )

Because writing about books is more fun than tedious paperwork …

A pre-Christmas visit to Minotaur saw me purchase some books, strangely enough. Four in fact, including Timothy Zahn’s The Green and the Gray about trying to stop an alien gang-war in contemporary New York. Wasn’t entirely in the mood, but it was a reasonable thriller built around ( Read more... )

What is the greatest achievement of human history? How about the achievement in particular societies of sufficient levels of per head economic growth that death by hunger was no longer a significant threat ( Read more... )

When you see this, post a poem in your LJ ( Read more... )

Recently finished Frances Gies’s The Knight in History, a highly readable work which conveys recent scholarship very easily.

The book is built around interspersion of biographies of prominent knights (William Marshal, Bertrand du Guesclin, Sir John Fastolf and his Paston heirs) with thematic chapters (Troubadors and the Literature of Knighthood, ( Read more... )

Juliet Barker’s The Tournament in England: 1100 - 1400 is a highly informative, well-written book marred by a dubious conclusion.

After starting with a chapter on Early Beginnings, the book treats the tournament thematically, dealing successively with The Tournament and War, The Tournament and Politics, The Tournament and the Church, The ( Read more... )

Having previously posted on these matters, have been doing more reading on serfdom and unfree labour. Notably, Evsey Domar’s classic article (scroll down), summarised here by Paul Krugman. Also found an updated version of Domar’s model. (And furtherBasically, if labour is scarce compared to land - as it was in the New World, in Europe from the ( Read more... )

Read another of my Pennsic books, Ramon Lull’s Book of Knighthood & Chivalry (with the Ordene de Chevalerie). Lull’s piety makes this at least as much a religious text as a chivalric one, but what I found most striking was the clear emphasis on the local social protection role of the knight. There is a tendency for modern historians to be rather ( Read more... )

Just finished one of the most brilliant and depressing books I have read for quite some time, David Pryce-Jones’s The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. I had previously read and enjoyed his The War that Never Was: the Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985-1991 (also published as The Strange Death of the Soviet Union). In the latter book, ( Read more... )

Finished Thomas Bartlett’s excellent The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350. Bartlett traces the roots of Europe’s post-medieval colonial history in medieval history: Europe the coloniser was itself the result of a process of colonisation. Thankfully, his analysis is done as intelligent history, rather that ( Read more... )