Books n' Links

[wolffyluna]

Books

It's a medieval double feature, baby!

The Middle Ages: Everyday Life by Jeffrey L Singman

This book deliberately tries to be a mid-point between "books aimed at high schoolers" and "academic texts," something for the interested adult that doesn't know too much already. It's divided into sections based on different groups in the Medieval period, from peasants in villages to nobles in castles to monks to people in towns. It focuses a lot on daily living, especially ~material aspects like "what did they eat?" "what were their houses like?" and "what as a daily schedule." I have to say, while I wouldn't want this as my only source if I was writing historical fiction, it'd be a great place to start. I now have a much better idea of how castles actually worked! I know the monkly schedule! I KNOW WHAT THE THREE FIELD SYSTEM IS! My only caveat is that Singman has... interesting opinions on the Medieval diet. (He over weights the 'Medieval peasants didn't get heart disease' and under weights 'Medieval peasants regularly got scurvy and sometimes starved to death.'

Queens of the Crusades by Alison Weir

aka Plantagenets Behaving Badly.

This is about Eleanor of Aquitane, her descendants, and their wives. It's also about the giant mess of arranged marriages, and the ways a lot of the Plantagenet men made it so much worse by being physically incapable of keeping it in their pants. (At one point one of them had an open affair with his son's betrothed, which would have been bad enough except that under Medieval Catholicism, that made his son's marriage incestuous, but they couldn't explain it without pissing off the betrothed's father who was King of France, and a whole bunch of wars happened because of this.)

Though some of the Plantagenet men are nice to their wives! ...and let them be some of the worst landlords in the history of being landlords.

Oh, and I learned that Richard the Lionheart was a rapist which. makes the child friendly Robin Hood stories read very differently. And also the general historical remembrance of him. deeply frustrating.

There's something about having that all laid out chronologically which is Englightening about the Times and Culture. It's a heavy read, but I did enjoy it.

Links

• Psych wards are really poorly designed. Admittedly I like this one because it's a psychiatrist pointing out things that even I, a layman, had noticed, and it's very vindicating! (Eg things like "if you get obsessed with safety and that's the only thing you measure, you create places that are awful to be and are ...bad... for people's mental health.")
• Australian Indigenous are and dot controversies. This is an interesting news article about the thing where-- the standard idea of Indigenous Australian art is dots? Except that's a very Western Desert thing (which was where one of the first big successful studios was.) But now it's become a general signifier of Indigenous art, and this drives some people up the wall, eg artists who are not from the Western Desert who have researched their culture's traditional art and are having to fight to go 'the thing I am making is traditional! We didn't use dots!', and also artists from the Western Desert who are a bit "...hey... this doesn't become totally chill and not totally cultural appropriation just because other Indigenous people are doing it..." Interesting article, well worth a read.
• and for something short and sweet: a funny skit about dreams