handwritten, printed, digital – a blog about ancient, medieval & late-modern book cultures. New posts every Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Don't forget to subscribe
Social distancing measures are in place pretty much everywhere. They have been instituted to reduce the possibility of infection. No contact, no contagion. If we don't share the same space, we won't get infected. We won't get assassinated either. It may be argued that the 2-metre rule could have saved Julius Caesar's life. Since March... Continue Reading →
One thing which distinguishes medieval from ancient history-writing is the timeline. From Herodotus to the historians of the Roman Empire, time was a stream flowing in a circle. It's not that ancient historians didn't understand the passage of time – they had a very good idea of what time does to matter and human consciousness... Continue Reading →
I've noticed that the words 'pandemic' and 'epidemic' have recently been used interchangeably in the media and in everyday speech. Any extensive outburst of a contagious disease is a pandemic or an epidemic, depending on which prefix you prefer or comes to mind first. Pandemic sounds a bit more catastrophic, while epidemic has a scientific,... Continue Reading →
News travelled very slowly in the past. Just as it took months for individuals to reach distant lands, so did news reports reach different individuals and communities with significant retardation. In premodern Europe, oral information circulated more speedily than written reports. In the medieval period, necrologues travelled quickly from one monastic community to another. Before... Continue Reading →
It's hard to find a time in European history when conflicts recede and stasis takes over, like in the history of the great Asian kingdoms and empires. The European ancient period was a cycle of conflicts between small city-states, tribes against tribes, factions against factions, senators against dictators. In the long classical period, the pax... Continue Reading →
We're not going anywhere these days. So let's glance back in time. Our stop: the Middle Ages, Homer and creativity. The medieval period has been called many things: the age of faith, the Dark Ages, lowercase/uppercase, the age of chivalry, of castles, the age of the Gothic, the post-classical period, pre-Renaissance, pre-modern, epithets galore, forever... Continue Reading →
The ancient and medieval idea of 'old' is very different from our own. Modern culture was the first to introduce the notion of historical distance in a way that was significant enough to bring a shift in our consciousness. For the premodern mind, old meant old in the way our grandparents are old. To get... Continue Reading →
The study of medieval women has become quite trendy in the last decades or so. The narrative sources can tell us quite a lot about some women who have been able to escape the rigid and circumscribing expectations of most medieval authors. Perhaps there is no better example than the exceptional figure of Matilda de... Continue Reading →
Having recently read Gabrielle Spiegel's The Past as text, I realised how important it is to reflect on the articulation of text and reality. The more recent poststructuralist views that everything is textuality may ultimately be a foolish experiment, but it has the potential to cast light on some of the problems arising from the attempt... Continue Reading →
The reindeer is among my favourite creatures. Its antlers bespeak strength, yet there is an air of delicate loneliness about it that make it fit quite well in the desolate northern landscapes. With all my affection for the beast, I had no idea that there was a description of it dating back to the Middle... Continue Reading →
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