Adam Matthew Digital – A vast collection of digitized texts, including the Paston, Cely, Plumpton, Stonor, and Armburgh papers, medieval travel writing (“journeys of famous travellers from Prester John and Marco Polo to Sir John Mandefille and John Capgreve”, with translations, maps, and “fully searchable”). Unfortunately, it costs; I could not get at the pricing structure but the site seems to be aimed at institutions. They do have a “free trial” bit, which I did not access.

Early Book Society – for the study of manuscripts and printing history”. Started by Sara Horrall and Martha Driver “out of sessions planned for” the Medieval Congress at K’zoo; started in 1987. Their site is limited, but there are a couple of interesting bits (see, e.g., the Old Spice Answer Man on libraries).

Brepols Publishers – A publisher based in Belgium, with an international reach. They are the printers/publishers for an astounding number of journals, many of which are of interest to historains, medievalists, and archaeologists.

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies – Duke University. Individual subscriptions are $38, for three issues annually. The site has no information about what periods or subjects the journal covers, so you’ll have to rely on the title.

Journal of Late Antiquity – from Johns Hopkins University. “…the first international English-language journal dedicated to the study of Late Antiquity writ large”. Individual subscriptions are $30/year (two issues), for either the print or electronic delivery.

Fifteenth Century Studies – put out regularly by Boydell & Brewer, publishers. “Fifteenth-Century Studies offers essays on diverse aspects of the period, including liberal and fine arts, historiography, medicine, and religion.“ It seems to be $75/issue. I am not sure whether one can subscribe or purchase book-by-book / issue-by-issue. The URL delivers you to issue #34.

Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies – It offers a journal titled “Mediaeval Studies”, “…established in 1939 and from the outset its purpose has been the publication of research on the Middle Ages by scholars throughout the world, particularly research involving unedited manuscript and archival material.” Variously priced; the newest volumes are $90, and decrease to $40 for the ones printed before 1997. PIMS also publishes books, most of which are, although medieval in subject, tend to be aimed at a very particular, churchly market.

Plainsong and Medieval Music – courtesy of Cambridge Journals Online, “in association with the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society and Cantus Planus, study group of the International Musicological Society”. Back issues seem to cost $110, or $1,700 for the complete set (1992-2008). Cambridge Journals has other historical-type journals – Anglo-Saxon England, The Antiquaries Journal (mentioned in a previous post, I believe), Archaeologia, Archaeological Reports.

Viking Society for Northern Research (VSNR) – “…the world’s foremost learned society in the field of medieval Scandinavian and Northern studies.” Started as “the Orkney, Shetland and Northern Society, or the Viking Club.” A British group, although membership is apparently open to all; “…founded as an Antiquarian, Literary and Social Society.” A list of their publications. This page points to a North American sales agent at ACMRS (see previous blog entries), but when I clicked on the link, I got back a 404 Page Not Found error message. Perhaps one might instead contact Roy Rukkila, Managing Editor, ACMRS, at mrts@asu.edu

Magnum Legendarium Austriacum – or, rather, the Wikepedia article on it. At the bottom of this page are 3 links to the M.L.A. and one to the Diplomarbeit zum Thema, which seems to be a thesis on the MLA submitted for the degree of MPhil. All four of these links take you to sites in German, but damned if they don’t look interesting anyway.

SFB-Project: Visions of Community – under the auspices of Universitat Wien. “VISCOM focuses on the question how universal religions have shaped the construction of particular communities and identities in the middle ages. The project proposes a comparative approach focusing on Christian, Islamic and Buddhist examples in the course of the ‘Middle Ages’ in order to explore the interaction between religious and political ‘visions of community’. “

I have a note about one of the exhibitors at K’zoo that reads “king alfred’s notebook – ‘”the worlds most famous lost medieval book’”, with an address in South Carolina. I Googled it, and found only one reference, to the LLC registration at the South Carolina’s Secretary of State’s office. Any more information would be gladly received; I have a severe case of curiosity about a guy who’d pay for a table at K’zoo for something that might not exist.

This is the second part of my notes and comments from the 46th annual Kalamazoo Medieval Conference – web sites and journals that struck my fancy, and/or thought might be of interest to readers of this blog.

ACMRS – Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; supported/supervised/of, by, and for Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona. Usual studies-abroad programs, graduate travel awards, public programs. They also give two online courses of interest to calligraphers – an introduction to Latin Paleography, and a video course on Medieval and Renaissance Paleography. Some interesting publications, too.

AVISTA – Association Villard de Honnecourt for Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science and Art. “AVISTA is concerned to bring important contributions in medieval science, technology and art to interested readers.” They sponsor several sessions at the medieval conferences at Kalamazoo and Leeds, “…devoted to topics ranging from medieval military technology, the cloth industry, the resources of wood and stone, medieval medicine to the mechanical arts, Ars Quadratum.” Publications available.
It’s hosted by the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, and named for “a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio of 33 sheets of parchment containing about 250 drawings dating from the 1220s/1240s, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (MS Fr 19093). The great variety of subjects (religious and secular figures suitable for sculpture, and architectural plans, elevations and details, ecclesiastical objects and mechanical devices, some with annotations), makes it difficult to determine its purpose.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villard_de_Honnecourt, accessed 6 June 2011)

Bildindex der Junst und Architektur – a site for accessing a large number of museums and images on art and architecture, the German Documents Center for Works of Art (“Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte”), with the museums spread around Europe, not just in Germany. Architecture, stained glass windows, etchings and engravings, paintings, sculpture, watercolors, mosaics, textiles…..
“Mit rund 2 Millionen Bildern zur Kunst und Architektur in 13 europäischen Ländern ist der Bildindex Ihre Datenbank für Forschung, Lehre und redaktionelle Anfragen. Sie recherchieren Bilder und Daten von rund 80 Partnern.”, which an indifferent Internet translation site (slightly edited by me) gives as “With around 2 million photographs of art and architecture in 13 European countries[, this] is the multi[site?] database for research, teaching and editorial inquiries. You can find pictures and data from approximately 80 partners [read: museums, cities, libraries, and such].”

Bildserver des IMAREAL (“IMAREAL’s image server”) – A “conceptual search engine” of material objects, themes, actions, and gestures. Very well indexed (animals, coelenterates; animals, insects; animals, mammals; animals, arachnids; animals, component…..) The index is in English, but nearly all of the rest of the site is in German. If there’s any site that makes me want to learn another foreign language, it’s this one.

British Archaeological Association – “….founded in 1843 to promote the study of archaeology, art and architecture and the preservation of our national antiquities. It encourages original research and publishes new work on art and antiquities of Roman to post-medieval date, although the art, architecture and archaeology of the Middle Ages form the core of its interests.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association is published by (Maney Publishing).

CRMH (Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, The Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies) – Entirely in French. It is, obviously, a journal, which I suspect after a brief perusal is entirely online, and not in print. Run from the Centre de recherche en histoire européenne comparée (CRHEC), Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne. Articles in the current issue include “Idylle et récits idylliques à la fin du Moyen Âge”, and “Le Même et l’Autre, entre amour et croisade“ – and they do publish some articles in English: “Adolescence, anxiety and amusement in versions of Paris et Vienne”. They also carry, as is true of most historical journals, book reviews in each issue.
It is published through “OpenEdition…the umbrella portal for Revues.org, Hypotheses.org and Calenda, three platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences. If you wish your university to subscribe to this service and give you access to articles in downloadable formats (PDF, ePub), please visit OpenEdition Freemium presentation page.”
The CRMH I accessed on 6 June 2011 apparently allowed for some free downloads of articles in PDF; I suspect (without much proof) it may be through a URL that offers attendees at Kalamazoo free access for a limited amount of time, but cannot confirm this. On the bar at the top, there’s a button-URL for “calenda”, which takes you to a calendar of upcoming meetings, seminars, colloquia, and conferences in various social sciences. It seems to be a very comprehensive list. It certainly looks interesting.

The Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture – A relatively minor web site, one that I’m not sure I can find enough information on to give an accurate description of why they’re organized.

Council for British Archaeology – From my non-professional non-archaeological viewpoint, this site is more of a popular site for those interested in archaeology than it is one for professionals. There are links to, e.g., university departments, governmental agencies and groups, regional societies, and opportunities for fieldwork. There’s a good-sized list of publications, some of which are available online, some via “cd fiche” (a term I’ve never seen used but seems self-explanatory), and some out-of-stock, darn it: studies of North East Yorkshire archaeology, Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at Beckford, Welsh industrial heritage, “environmental Archaeology in the Urban Context”….

Digital Scriptorium – “…a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloguing.” Hosted by the Columbia University Libraries. There are 30 participating institutions – public and private libraries, and universities, all located within the United States. There’s a basic search available; I do not know whether the problem is with my computer or the site, but I was unable to pull up some images (e.g., a search for “ships” got the bibliographic information, but no pictures of ships; a search for “antiphonals” got both bibliography and images).

The Early English Text Society (EETS) – Self-explanatory, I hope. Transcriptions of texts from King Alfred, Aelfric, Bishop Wulfstan, “all” surviving medieval drama; most of the Middle English romances; much of John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve and William Caxton….”In all the Society has now published some 475 volumes”, and nearly all of them are still in print. If you want primary sources in a form that can be regularly used and allow for notes being written in the margin, here they are.

Encyclopedia of the Crusades – A site of sites; not only the encyclopedia, but also pointers to primary and secondary sources, a bibliography, a link to links on “Islam, Judaism, and the Crusading Movement”, a link to academic links (employment, conferences, “academic watchdog groups”…) and others.

English Heritage – the folks who preserve and protect a lot of English historical buildings and grounds – castles, gardens, Hadrian’s Wall, Roman sites, prehistorical sites. Many, many, many publications. If you do any traveling in England as a tourist, you’ll run across something run by E.H. Annual membership for an adult is £46, but I am not sure whether or not this includes the EHHR (see below); I doubt it, but one never knows.
They also publish the English Heritage Historical Review, printed by Maney Publishing. The EHHR “publishes discoveries made through the documentation, surveying, excavation, scientific examination and historical interpretation of English Heritage properties. It is supported by the apparatus scholasticus necessary for verification, endorsement and further investigation. At the same time it is lavishly illustrated and produced to the highest production standards.”

Glasgow Centre for Medieval and Renaissance StudiesS, University of Glasgow – There are links to its special collections, which contain “some 10,000 printed books and over 600 manuscripts”, fully searchable.

Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) – Originally founded to make copies (photographic, microfiche, microfilm, all the way up to modern digital) of every manuscript they could find, they’ve recently broadened their mandate. Their library-of-facsimiles is currently a bit over 100,000 items. In 2004 they also launched something called Vivarium, an “online digital object database allows users to browse and search for images and their accompanying metadata”; it consists “mostly of art and manuscript images from HMML’s own holdings”. Good source – and they accept donations to help continue their mission. It’s located at, and run under the general auspices of, St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, a Benedictine college.

MPRG Research Strategy and Agenda – “A Revised Research Strategy and Agenda for Post-Roman Ceramic Studies in Britain”, under the aegis of English Heritage. Much of the site is being modified and/or under construction, but there are some useful bits – a list of ceramic reference collections, for example.

Opuscula – “Short Texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance”, published by “Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, specializing in short texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. We seek single-witness editions of a broad range of pre-modern texts including but not limited to literary and philosophical works, letters, charters, court documents, and notebooks.” As it was organized only this year (2011), it doesn’t have much in its archives yet.

Powell’s-Chicago medieval section – This is the sister store to one of the nation’s largest independent bookstores, the one, true, original Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. In particular, they have a sub-site with a selection of medieval books. This is the kind of bookstore that we want to grow up to own.

Renaissance Society of America – It covers 1300 to 1650; the organization is 57 years old and counting. Good society, good publications; the flagship journal is the Renaissance Quarterly.

ShelfLife – “The Bulletin of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence”. The RGME was started in the late 1980’s as a research group at University of Cambridge/Corpus Christi College. It became official in 1990, moved to Princeton (“mainly”) and started publishing a regular journal in 2006.

Sixteenth Century Studies and Conference – An international history-related group, obviously, which for the purposes of this group covers ca. 1450 through ca. 1660. Their journal is the Sixteenth Century Journal; membership also includes “discounted access to the Iter bibliographic databases”. Annual conferences, with this year’s (2011) being in Fort Worth, Texas, USA.

Society for Medieval Archaeology – British. Produces an annual journal (“Medieval Archaeology”, printed by Maney Publishing.) and a semi-annual newsletter, hosts biennial conferences, on things archaeological. Varying membership rates; personal memberships are $74, registered students are $47.

Finnish Medieval Archaology Society, aka Suomen Keskiajan Arkeologian Seura – Sällskapet för Medeltidsarkeologi i Finland (in English, The Society for Medieval Archaeology in Finland)– Publishers of Archaeologia Medii Aevi Finlandiae. A Finnish archaeological group, which offers some interesting books, mostly on castles but also on other artifacts, all of which look quite interesting.

Museum of Printing – Based in North Andover, Massachusetts, USA. Several newsletters, occasional special events (currently (mid-2011) they’re hosting a Typecase Design competition, and a Printing Arts Fair in mid-June. Good collection, good library (including the drawings for the Mergenthaler Font Library, all 300,000 of them), Ludlow Typograph matrices, Intertype Photosetter fonts, and a collection centered on machinery and products. A bit more focused than other groups listed here, nevertheless worthwhile for printing-press enthusiasts like me. They also have two neat-o downloadable PDF’s, one on the various kinds of printing presses, from the Gutenberg Press through the Nichle Vertical auotmated press of 1947, and one on the various kinds of printing (lithography, intaglio, movable type….)

Journals not otherwise mentioned above:
the Antiquaries Journal, published by Cambridge University Press for the Society of Antiquaries of London. Print and online versions. The price I have is $192/year.

Lightly edited. Also, there’s a lot of stuff I’d love to track down first so as to give a good overview (definitions of unfamiliar terms, URL’s for sites good and bad, interesting books, people I met, scholarly affiliations) but upon looking at my notes, that’s going to be damn near impossible without a month or so for the research and another month of writing – and what would come out the other end would be a scholarly, notated, footnoted, and pompous paper.

So, let’s do the fallback commentary: quick and dirty, and I may add more information throughout the next little while. And if anyone has questions about particulars, write me.

(I not only threw out the 300-page-or-so program before I left Kalamazoo, not wanting to take overweight baggage onto the plane, but they seem to have excised the PDF version from the website – and probably won’t put it in the archived sessions bit for a while. That’s why I can’t give the titles of the sessions, nor any sense of who the participants were unless they are in my notes.)

[And the HTML mark-up problems I had with version 1.0 of this post have been fixed!]

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The iPad 2 I took to the conference was wonderful. It has a long-lasting battery (rated at 10 hours), it has internal illumination so one can use it in a room darkened to show slides, it has WiFi (and some models also have access to the telephone system) to allow Internet access. It’s got a keyboard almost large enough for even my non-slender fingers to almost touch-type on it.

The one problem is that the only word processing loaded on it is Apple’s Notes, which is about as stripped down a piece of software as you can get. You type in new stuff. You can erase stuff word-by-word. It’s got auto-correction if you like. But I couldn’t find any way to put the cursor in the middle of any word to correct a typo, which means you have to put it at the end of the wood and delete and then retype. No formatting other than a choice between three fonts. Not much of anything other than typing, really basic deleting, and automatic saving – you type in one extra letter, and it’ll be there the next time you open that note. And to my great disgust, there’s no Undo feature, which I badly need because I sometimes delete one or two words extra.

So last night I went surfing, and found an App that’s a bit more powerful. Not up to Microsoft’s Word, of course, but it does Undo, and internal deletes, and even has diacritical marks available. The app is Fast Keyboard; I have yet to put it to a good, hard use, so this is not an official recommendation, just a notice that there’s something other than “Notes” out there.

These tablet computers are quite nice. Not perfect, but nice for travelling, most assuredly.

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There was a session on Tolkien and the heroes therein, about which I remember nothing other than having attended.

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HMML is the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, a few miles west of Minneapolis/St. Paul, at St. John’s University.

Their primary mission is to, basically, copy and back-up as many medieval manuscripts as they can get, by photographing them, microfilming them, digitizing them, and otherwise storing for the long term in as good a set of facsimiles as current technology allows.

It has been, is, and will be for a long while a real bitch cataloguing all those books. It’s not a question of Author, title, length of text (as in how many pages), size of book (folio, quarto, octavo….), quires, date made, and how many illuminations there are. It’s a question of all that, plus what the leaves are made of, the color and probable formulation of the ink, ditto the illuminations, the subject of the illuminations PLUS all the people and objects depicted within the illuminations, the full text, and all sorts of what The Professionals call Metadata. Fearsomely complicated job.

“Regular” books, the type you find in your typical library, have a more-or-less standard cataloguing-entry system; the main one I’ve heard talk of is called MARC. There are probably others that are more recent, more usable, and more whatever, but that’s the one I’ve heard. It’s been around for 40 or 50 years, and today’s standard-book standard-cataloguing system has pretty much gotten all the details down right.

That’s not true of pre-printing-press books, of which there are literally hundreds of thousands. (HMML, as of a few years ago, had 90,000 facsimiles.) Trying to come up with a good system that covers all the books, all the book formats, and all the information in the books, for dozens of languages, is fearsomely complicated.

This session was a very basic class on how it’s being done at HMML, in very broad language aimed at people who like old books but are not by any means professional librarians. People like me, for example.

[Lengthy exegesis on Vivarium, Oliver, and the Arca Artium, not gone into here. One’s the main database, the second is the digital database, and the third’s the database for art objects not classified as books – e.g. sculptures, paintings, textiles, and the like.]

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Then, to a session hosted by DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion, which included a presentation on the people behind the Bayeux tapestry, in essence the presenter’s book (Tina Kane’s The Troyes Mémoire: The Making of a Medieval Tapestry condensed into a half hour. Not the weavers, not the floss makers, not the drawers of the pictures that the weavers went by, but the actual designer(s), the guy(s) who decided what would be included in the tapestry together with where it all would go together with the iconography together with what scenes would go where and what would be included in the scenes. Records of such design work are exceedingly rare; La Troyes Memoire’s a valuable source of information for that reason.

Thence quickly to a short paper on farthingales, by Emma Lehman, an Independent Scholar.

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The day after the session presented by HMML, I went to one discussing the Institut fur realienkunde des mittelalters und der fruhen neuzeit realonline, (and please forgive me if I have misspelled it), a group that is overseeing an attempt to come up with a good cataloguing strategy for damn near everything – material artifacts, paintings, sculptures, books – owned by 500 European institutions with 50,000,000 (fifty million) objects. Even more massive a job than the one HMML is working on, but with lots less text to deal with. Think of it as a humongous card catalog; they won’t have (if I remember correctly) images of the artifacts, but will have links to the institutions that own the objects – you use the card catalog to see what objects you want to see, and then click on a link that takes you to the County Historical Museum for Outer Upper Prussistanistan, which has photos of the object it owns. I think.

…..there’s still no satisfactory OCR (optical character recognition, i.e., usable by computers to convert text-in-books to text-on-hard-drive) software. And they suggest it may take years, especially when you consider not only how many hands were used (everything from Carolingian minuscule to Tudor English secretary hand to Italian humanist script) but also how many languages (Old High Dutch, Old Low German, Church Slavonic, Syriac, Greek, Hebrews…..) there were.

MAREAL’s image server may be found here.

Another database-type scheme is the MHDBDB (the “mittelhochdeutsche begriffsdatenbank”), a “middle high German conceptual database at the University of Salzburg”. Yet another thing I want to check into later. It has something to do with an “intelligent query system”, that, I believe, lets you not only click on a word or phrase to find all examples of that word/phrase in one book but also in other books – and will link to physical representations of the word if it’s a noun (e.g., clicking on “Jesus Christ” will not only find you every book that mentions “Jesus Christ” but also all paintings and sculptures and illuminations that have Jesus Christ the person somewhere in the art work.

They’re nuts, I tell you, nuts. Nuts with OCD. But my kind of nuts with OCD.

They’re also working on “beispiel fragment-identificationem”, the ability to search for fragments of sentences from fragments of pages, in other works. If you have a page, a folio, of which the left half has been eaten by worms or toasted by a fire, you could enter the surviving three sentence fragments (“…nd then Saint J….. which is right above “…..mitted an act of…..” right above “….ite him into b….”), and see if those bits match up any other document – and if it does you know what manuscript your fragment came from, which is a lot more information than you had before. My note on this was “it is quite impressive”, after they did a quick demo of it.

My favorite quote of the session : “Disambiguation is a long process for us.”

At the end, during the questions-from-the-audience portion, I asked about whether there already was a standard cataloguing system for artworks the way there already is for regular books; the common consensus was “HA! We wish!” There is no such thing; every country/grouping-of-museums/professional organization seems to have its own, and I got the impression there’s not only no one system, there’s no approaching consensus on which system will win out, and no desire to even think about having a group think about forming a consensus. At least not yet. That’s why the MHDBDB, and the HMML (up at top of this note) and all the others are developing their own cataloguing system, their own structures, their own databases – there’s no overarching authority nor consensus about which way is best. Hell, there’s no consensus if anything will work, much less which one will work best.

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And, finally, I went to a session on gardens and gardeining. There’s something called the Medieval Association of Rural Studies which is trying to get off the ground, so to speak. I do not know much else about it, but I signed up for their email newsletter.

Some discussion about the uses to which garden produce was put, as opposed to those hoity-toity professional theoretical historians who discuss….well, never mind. I wasn’t expecting much from this bit of the session, and I got it.

Then came a pair of brief presentations on gendered garden transfers (turns out that while women may have done all the gardening, it was by a vast majority the men who actually owned the gardens that the women worked on, at least in this one small town in Provence). The second presenter’s contribution was one of those “I came across this interesting set of data that is good enough to talk about for ten or fifteen minutes, but isn’t worth actually publishing as anything other than a footnote to someone else’s paper” things. For what it was, however, it was interesting.

I have a note to check out the “homepage of Martha Carlin, which you can get to if you Google her; her webpage comes up first”. I will, soon.

By request:
The first edition of Contact Juggling was available through us in the summer of 1990; it was photocopied and stapled within a green cover, and was authored by John P. Miller.
The second, current edition came out the next summer (1991), with James Ernest as the author. This is the one with black covers and a comb spine, and we still have some copies available.
The author suggests that a new, 3rd, edition may be coming out soon, perfect-bound, in a somewhat smaller format but a larger price.

Last week, we took possession of a long-expected shipment from Cornell University Press and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts: a book on manuscript studies, three cooking-related titles, one on medieval smelting and fire, and one on Silkewormes [sic]. Check the Featured Products section on the store’s home page for this set.
We’ve received a shipment of 10 titles from Dover Books, mostly coloring and cut-and-assemble books on medieval subjects – heraldry, helms, armor, tournaments and jousts, castles – and a book on the history of sundials and the making thereof. Most of them have been put into a new category, Children’s Books, with the sundials book in Artifacts, Buildings, Archeology.
While we’re on the subject of categories, we have decided to shift the five or six titles in the Used Books – Facsimiles into the more general Used Books – C&I category, just in case anyone was curious as to where they disappeared to. (And, obviously, the Facsimiles category has been discontinued….)
We shall be signing up with an appropriate service to start accepting credit cards when we go on sales trips; we are unsure as to exactly when this will happen, but we are hopeful it shouldn’t be too long. If you order from the web site, please continue using PayPal or sending checks or money orders as before, until further notice.

We have added several ceramic items to the bookstore’s site, in the All! New! Arts & Crafts (non-books) section. Selection is a bit limited, and it will be a couple of months, perhaps longer, perhaps much longer, before we can restock these items, as the ceramist (Susan Harfield of Uncommon Clay, in the Florida Keys) also works full-time….
The category currently contains mugs, shot glasses, plates, chalices, a milk pitcher, a “likker” bottle, and drop spindles (ceramic whorls, wooden spindles).
Since this is a new area for us, this is a test: while we hope that it becomes quite successful, we also have no illusions that we will ever become millionaires off of it. If it does take off, we shall be looking for other crafts people to include; preference will be given to 3-D artists and crafters – potters, woodworkers, tool-makers (we hear there’s a market for lucets…..), small decorative ironwork (we own a nifty bottle-opener with a dragon’s mouth)…..

Just added over the past couple of days, 140+ used (some more heavily, some less heavily) cookbooks from the owner’s personal collection. It’s nice to have some free shelf space in the kitchen, finally.

Just received (FedEx delivers non-overnight packages on Saturdays?) today, three-volume sets of D.S. Richards’ translation of The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh. Parts 1-3: The Years 491–629/1097–1231. The three-book set has been added to the website; we shall add the individual titles within the next day or two. This brings to a dozen or so the number of titles we carry of translations of period sources concerning the Crusades.

When we got back from vacation a week ago, we found in the held-mail containers copies of Corwin’s Chasing and Repousse: Methods Ancient and Modern.

…and the books keep rolling in:
Oxford University Press, two facsimiles of Books of Hours (Gualenghi d’Este and Simon de Varie), a children’s book on illumination (Marguerite Makes a Book), and one on understanding illuminated manuscripts – or, rather, four books from the Getty Museum via OUP.

University of Toronto Press delivered two books on Italian Renaissance comedies (with translations), a book on medieval bookbinding, and a massive translation of a massive Italian cookbook, the former being of Terence Scully and the latter, Bartolomeo Scappi.

Western Michigan University’s 45th annual Medieval History Congress was held on May 12-16, 3009 (more or less), with about 3,000 attendees. The weather was drop-dead gorgeous, the sessions interesting, the food as good as college food gets; a few old friends whom I haven’t seen in years attended and a couple even gave sessions, and a few new friends were made. And I was feeling a bit less than adequately healthy, and didn’t do nearly as much as I had wished, particularly during the evening social events, darn it. A good plan with a bad implementation; I hope to do better next year.

I wonder what a journal devoted to postmedievalism is really about. I’ve read the prospectus, and still have no idea.

….but there were some interesting books at the Exhibitors….

Interesting books not yet published:
Robert W. Jones, Bloodied Banners: Martial Display on the Medieval Battlefield. ISBN 9781843835615. $95.00. Available September 2010.
Egan, Geoff, The Medieval Household: Daily Living c. 1150-1450 (new edition). 2010. ISBN 9781843835431. $60.00. Available June 2010.
Spencer, Brian, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (new edition). 2010. ISBN 9781843835448 $60.00. Available June 2010.
(The latter two are part of the Finds from Medieval Excavations in London series.)

Interesting non-book items (I believe these recordings can be had; if anyone is interested, let me know):
The Chaucer Studio Recordings. Produced by a non-profit group loosely affiliated with the English departments of the University of Adelaide and Brigham Young University, founded in 1986 “with the aim of producing cassette recordings of medieval English texts” (now “CD’s, CD-ROMs, videos, DVD’s, monographs, and books”). “Readings are made in association with conferences of the Australian and New Zeland Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ….conferences of the New Chaucer Society, …the International Arthurian Society,….the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo,…and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds.” Languages and books include Chaucer, Middle English Other than Chaucer, Middle English (Chaucer, of course), Old English, Old French, Old Norse, Middle High German, Medieval Italian, and Medieval Music.

Interesting Books currently available, but a bit on the pricey side, and thus I won’t order any unless there’s real, definite interest:
Van Arsdall, Anne, Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine. 2002. 9780415938495 $115.00 (Routledge)
Nigel Morgan and Stella Panayotova, eds., Illuminated Manuscripts in Cambridge, in several volumes. Volume 1: A Catalogue of Western Book Illumination in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges: (Part 1)The Frankish Kingdoms, Northern Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, and Austria; and in Part 2 the Meuse Region, and Southern Netherlands. £200 (Volume 2 will cover Italy, Spain, and Portugal; Volume 3, France; Volume 4, England, Ireldand, Scotland, and Wales; 5, Illuminated Incunabula. Harvey Miller Publishers (a Brepols imprint; available in the US through the David Brown Book Company.)
Owen-Crocker, Gale R., ed., Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles c. 450-1450. Approximately $275. Possibly available July 2011.
Taylor, Larissa Juliet, ed., Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, Brill. 2009. ISBN 9789004181298. $288

Online Resources that are wonderful but out of the reach of individuals:
The Parker Library on the Web: a digitization project by Corpus Christi College, Standford University Libraries, and Cambridge University Library. Published by Harrassowitz, available from October 1, 2009 – for a list price of $9,500., with an annual maintenance fee of $480. An annual subscription is $3500. And a beta version is available (I think) without charge.

I also have a list of 21 blogs put out by various university presses, which I shall get around to looking at and possibly linking to, here, one of these days.

There’s also a set of books that some who read this might want to get. Ashgate Publishing has come out with new translations of a whole bunch of texts written during and about the Crusades. I’ve ordered a lot of them; the ones I haven’t ordered are (if memory serves) not yet published or are available only in hardback for a hair under US$100. I suspect most of my customers can wait until the inexpensive paperback version is out.
Crusade Texts in Translation Series:
“The crusading movement, which originated in the 11th century and lasted beyond the 16th, bequeathed to its future historians a legacy of sources which are unrivalled in their range and variety. These sources document in fascinating detail the motivations and viewpoints, military efforts and spiritual lives of the participants in the crusades. They also narrate the internal histories of the states and societies which crusaders established or supported in the many regions where they fought, as well as those of their opponents. Some of these sources have been translated in the past but the vast majority have been available only in their original language. The goal of this series is to provide a wide ranging corpus of texts, most of them translated for the first time, which will illuminate the history of the crusades and the crusader-states from every angle, including that of their principal adversaries, the Muslim powers of the Middle East.”
Letters from the East Crusaders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th–13th Centuries (hardback)
Robert the Monk’s History of the First Crusade Historia Iherosolimitana
The Book of Deeds – the first known autobiography by a Christian king. Its author was James I of Aragon (1213–76).
The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh (in three volumes):
Part 1 The Years 491–541/1097–1146: The Coming of the Franks and the Muslim Response
Part 2 The Years 541–589/1146–1193: The Age of Nur al-Din and Saladin
Part 3 The Years 589–629/1193–1231: The Ayyubids after Saladin and the Mongol Menace
The Chronicle of the Third Crusade: The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi
The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade
The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa: The History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederic (hardback)
The Gesta Tancredi of Ralph of Caen: A History of the Normans on the First Crusade
The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin or al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya wa’l-Mahasin al-Yusufiyya by Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad
The Seventh Crusade, 1244–1254: Sources and Documents
The Song of the Cathar Wars: A History of the Albigensian Crusade