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Bertran de Born's castle…
I was very amused to read in the current Radio Times, re: the Drew Barrymore Cinderella film, Ever After, that the castle which appears in it is Hautefort in the Dordogne…
Ah, I thought.
Altafort.
Bertran de Born's place. -
Blondel de Nesle
A lovely arrangement of L'Amour dont sui espris…
Stuff the silly stories about Lion-boy, Blondel is superb. The tune was re-used in the Carmina Burana and by Gautier de Coincy.
Lyrics are here.
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Mediæval embroidery…
The Victoria and Albert Museum has just finished an exhibition on Opus Anglicanum: the website is worth a look, costume and fabric-wise! -
More on the Runciman biography...
A review from The Spectator. -
A few notes on historians...
Sad to note that Jonathan Riley-Smith died a little while ago.
However, there is a new biography out of Steven Runciman, Outlandish Knight, by Minoo Dinshaw. The famous Beaton portrait of him with his parakeet Benedict is on the cover. I met Runciman briefly in his later years, when he lectured to the Scottish Hellenic Society in St Andrews: he was ( Read more... ) -
Gorgeous 'new' 15C book on Outremer!
If you are a connoisseur of beautiful books, Taschen are the publishers to go to... Now they've done something Outremer-friendly! I picked up this gem in the university bookshop while sheltering from the rain at lunchtime: Sébastien Mamerot: A Chronicle of the Crusades. It's a translation of a 1470s history of Outremer, with the original MS ( Read more... ) -
Exhibition review - 'Sicily: Culture and Conquest'at the British Museum
As so often happens with an exhibition close by that you can visit any time you feel like it, I only finally caught this a few days before it closed. So, apologies to anyone who might have been inspired by a more timely review to sprint to the BM to see it for themselves!
The Guardian's reviewer raved about it, and certainly the prehistory and ( Read more... ) -
Online Regesta!
New website for the updated Regesta regni Hierosolymitani! This will be fun to play with...! -
The earliest mediæval heraldry? - the Notitia Dignitatum
The Notitia Dignitatum has some fascinating proto-heraldry (late 4-early 5C CE) in the form of military shield designs, with different units having their own devices. There's a great website on it here. I discovered it via the Osprey books on the late Roman and Romano-Byzantine armies. It's interesting to see the roots of armorial devices in the ( Read more... )
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