S. Worthen | Weblog

About a year and a half, we stopped by the Ozark Medieval Fortress for a visit. It had only opened a few months earlier, the first layers of stone already defining the fortress's walls. It was going to take 20 years to build, using only medieval techniques, as much as possible, and as much as permitted by health and safety laws. Modern works in shoddy medieval garb (the weakest part of the recreation as the focus was on building techniques) worked in modern steel-toed boots on the quietest building site I have ever been near.

It was fantastic, for its aspects of recreation archeology and the sheer enthusiasm of the modern workers for researching and deducing how thirteenth-century building techniques worked in practice. I took photos, and I vowed to return every few years, certain that the process of constructing this medieval fortress in northwest Arkansas would be far more engaging than visiting the finished product.

Now, the whole project looks in doubt. The site is closed for 2012 until a buyer can be found, someone who might want to invest in a modern medieval American castle. Much as I love the project, I don't have faith in this being a product likely to be strong on monetary returns. The workers will largely have gone on to other jobs too, I would expect; they need employment from somewhere, which will set the building back still further.

Know anyone looking to buy a medieval-style fortress in the US?

It is a source of great satisfaction when a major news venue runs an article on a medieval topic the same week I have proposed a session related to it. This week's coincidence was particularly good: my proposed session is (in part) on Viking navigation - and The Economist ran a news article subheaded "Viking navigation", about the feasibility of Icelandic spar as a navigational tool usable for tracking the sun even under heavy cloud cover.

In an unrelated moment of context, I went to a history of jam event earlier this week. I had far better jam there - raspberry with lime, blueberry with black pepper - than I did at my afternoon tea venture. I also learned, satisfyingly, that Girl Scout/Guide badges were real, valuable, meaningful qualifications before the 1960s. Not just collect-them-all accruals as they have, in part, become. It was also one of two occasions this week that the role of the Women's Institute in jam-making in the UK came up in conversation.

If you ever require an approximate rhyme for "almanac", may I recommend to you the obsolete word "quidaniac"? It's a fruit syrup or jelly, often made from quinces, where "often" is "probably not since the seventeenth century, at least, by that name". Known use from the OED:

1655 T. T. de Mayerne Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus (1658) cxlviii. 100 To make Quindiniackes of an Apricocke Colour.

I finally saw the medieval reliquaries show at the British Museum this weekend. It was the last weekend, but same-time tickets were still available. Even so, it was, as usual, crowded enough to require negotiation to see most given objects up close.

After reading other peoples' reactions to the shows, I was expecting lots of body parts. That's what reliquaries are for, right? Well, that and other remnants of holy things. There were plenty of bits of the true cross on display, a couple of thorns from the Crown of Thorns and... well, that was it, in terms of visible relics.

There were reliquaries galore, but the focus was very much on the vessels, the craftmanship, the forms as a focus of worship, and more generally belief in the intercession of saints. But with very, very few exceptions, every one of those reliquaries were ones which *used to* house sainted body parts. They didn't currently.

Those few exceptions were, on the whole, ones at the other extreme: large collections of lots of very tiny bits of saints, tidily parceled up and labeled, visually sanitized. If there were any other body bits in that show, the labels omitted them and they were not visible.

It's not as if I'm habitually obsessed with seeing bits of long-dead corpses, but it is a rather normal part of seeing reliquaries. That's what they were made for, in effect, although tidily wrapping and labeling the small bits is good form too. So their absence in this show really struck me. Either the choice of objects was delibrately designed to sanitize reliquaries for the general public; or those with visible bone bits were too sanctified to loan for the show; or it was a very strange accident that it just all happened to work out that way.


One of the highlights of the show was having a good look at Erhardum Reuwich's 1486 map which accompanies Bernhard von Breydenbach's Journey to the Holy Land. The focus of the caption and the map was Jerusalem, but I was fascinated by the edges. The map has east at the top (it's well-oriented), Syria/north on the left and Egypt/south on the right.

In Egypt, in addition to all those Christian churches and tombs on top of the burial or death places of Christian saints and martyrs, Breydenbach visited the pyramids, which were, as the map label helpfully tells us, built "over the tombs of the rulers of Egypt". I know they're all tombs, but I never mentally structured pilgrimage to the pyramids as par for the course with pilgrimages to the Holy Land. No reason they shouldn't be, as ancient Egypt is certainly implicated in the Old Testament. The walking route across the Red Sea is also marked on the map, for example.

The pyramids engraved by Reuwich are cute. He clearly just knew they were "pyramids" and made them all really tall, sharp, and pointy.

This is a photo of part of the music and animated photography "raves" presented at the beginning and end of the Oxford Symposium. It seems suitable for the end of the Leeds IMC conference too. Good to have seen so many of you here! I'm leaving a little early in order to make it to Paris in time for Bastille night fireworks, which is likely to also be as chaotic as this photo.

I haven't finished uploading the photographic highlight of our visit to the Ozark Medieval Fortress back in July, but here is one of them: the stonemason demonstrating putting a surface on one of the stones he was working on.

Last September, construction began on a medieval-style fortress up in the Ozarks in northern Arkansas, not too far away from Branson, MO. The Ozark Medieval Fortress opened to the public in May of this year. It's a twenty-year project on land donated by a French couple living in Arkansas who had seen a castle being built in France from scratch and suggested to the man whose project it is that one be built in the Ozarks too.

( Lots on the castle, but photos will be another post... )

I think it's a wonderful project. The building of it is likely to be far more interesting than the existence, twenty years from now, of a thirteenth-century style castle in Ozarks. Their historical overviews may be problematic, but where it matters, the staff is engaging, accessible, dedicated, and very much engaged in discovering how to use old techniques they are trained in only just enough.

I recommend it. The $12 admission (plus $1 for the tour) goes toward building costs. I especially recommend it for medievalists and historians of technology: you can help this project with what you know about the subject, the more specifically about medieval building and fabric-working techniques, the better.

( More on project infrastructure issues... )

C.'s mother is an extraordinary cake decorator. For the birthday party we went to this past weekend, in honor of the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, she made a Bayeaux Tapestry Embroidery-themed cake. Behold.



( See two more sides of the cake... )

Edited to add: I've passed all your lovely comments on to the cake maker!

( Further edit: Now with photos of the whole cake... )

I went to a talk on the history of Walthamstow tonight. The speaker said that the sewage pumps, installed at the end of the nineteenth century, reduced infant mortality (before the age of one) from 15% to 7%. The audience was impressed. Then he contextualized it: the infant mortality rate at the time in Poplar was 35-40%.

I've spent a lot of the past day thinking about demographics and how little I know about them. geesepalace observed that, contrary to my sarcasm, it's true that life expectancy in the Middle Ages was about 25. And he's right. If you don't take infant mortality into account, the number of children dying young brings the average age of death way down. (Although not as far down as it did late nineteenth-century Poplar, I'd bet.) Equally, however, it's disingenuous and misleading to do so. It gives the impression that the average person could expect to die in their 20s, which isn't really true. Anyone who survived their first few years in the period stood a good chance of living to 50+ years.

That's the standard line I've been using for as long as I've been having discussions about medieval life expectancy, but I couldn't tell you where the figures come from. What's the research on which it's based? Are they any better than the Black Death mortality rate estimates, which vary by at least 40% between the higher and lower estimates? Our statistics are only as good as our data, our use of them, and our intentions. The data's not great, but improving with every new census record and with many archeological digs.

So: medieval demographics. What are the major sources and who are the major authors? Joel Rosenthal has published several relevant articles and Old Age in Late Medieval England. I've found Josiah Russell's Medieval Demography: Essays. I'm intending to read Peter Biller's historiography work on the subject, The Measure of Multitude.

While, I'm asking, here's a related question from geesepalace:

On the other hand I've decided, based on no evidence whatsoever except my own retrospection, that most of the vikings and others who shared in what (I gather) was a sort of northern-european warrior death-cult were around 15 to 25. Not of course that they died out then, just that by their 30s fewer of them might have subscribed so whole-heartedly to the belief, unless of course they had risen to positions of power, where the cult would have served them well. For some reason contemporary artists who depict ravaging vikings rarely show them in their teens or early twenties. Do you know whether anyone's done much work on the age of the average viking thug?