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

Ashgate Publishing has available a series (Music in Medieval Europe) that looks to be of interest to musicians with a fair knowledge of early practices and theory. Unfortunately, as you can see from the listed prices, they are expensive. We have a list of books we already want to order from Ashgate; we are wondering if there’s enough interest in these that they should be appended to that order.
While we will not be taking deposits (yet), we would hope that anyone who expresses an interest would carry through on that interest as we do so dislike expensive stock that collects dust rather than orders. Please drop us a line at owner@potboilerpress.com if you are seriously interested, with which books you are interested in and how many. And passing this information along to others would, as always, bring a smile to our lips and a song to our heart (albeit not necessarily one in medieval Occitan or Church Latin).

Series Editor: Thomas Forest Kely, Harvard University.
“This series of … volumes provides an overview of the best current scholarship in the study of medieval music. Each volume is edited by a ranking expert, and each presents a selection of writings, mostly in English which, taken together, sketch a picture of the shape of the field and of the nature of current inquiry. The volumes are organised in such a way that readers may go directly to an area that interests them, or they may provide themselves with a substantial introduction to the wider field by reading through the entire volume. The editors introduce readers to an enormous swathe of musical history and style, and present the best of recent musical scholarship. Taken together, they will increase access to a rich body of music, and provide scholars and students with an authoritative guide to the best of current thinking about the music of the middle ages.”
1. Ars antiqua: Organum, Conductus, Motet. Edited by Edward Roesner, New York University, 2008. Hardback, $275.00 (“The ars antiqua began to be mentioned in writings about music in the early decades of the fourteenth century, where it was cited along with references to a more modern “art,” an ars nova. The essays in this collection address the broad range of issues regarding ars antiqua polyphony: the nature and definition of genre; the evolution of the polyphonic idiom; the workings of the creative process including the role of oral process and notation and the continuum between these extremes; questions about how this music was used and understood; and of how it fits into the intellectual life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”)

2. Ars nova: French and Italian Music in the 14th Century. Edited by John L. Nádas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008. Hardback, $275.00 (“This collection of articles brings together scholarship that reflects a broad methodological and chronological span of analysis of the ars nova, the polyphonic tradition which blossomed in France and Italy in the fourteenth century.”)

3. Chant and its Origins. Edited by Thomas Forrest Kelly, Harvard University, 2008. Hardback, $250.00 (“Plainchant is the music that underpins essentially all other music of the middle ages and is most abundantly preserved. It is a subject that has engaged a great deal of debate in the last fifty years and the complex issues that have arisen in the course of this research form the basis of this collection of articles.”)

4. Embellishing the Liturgy: Tropes and Polyphony. Edited by Alejandro Planchart, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2008 c. 500 pages. Hardback, $250.00 (“The tropes, together with the sequences, represent the main creative activity of European musicians in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. This volume provides an introduction to the study of tropes in the form of an extensive anthology of major studies and a comprehensive bibliography, and it constitutes a classic reference resource for the study of one of the most important musico-liturgical genres of the central middle ages.”)

5. Instruments and their Music in the Middle Ages. Edited by Timothy J. McGee, 2008 c. 500 pages. Hardback, $250.00 (“This collection of twenty-nine influential articles and papers about medieval musical instruments and their repertory considers the construction of the instruments, their playing technique, the occasions for which they performed and their repertory. Taken as a whole, they paint a broad and detailed picture of instrumental performance during the medieval period.”)

6. Oral and Written Transmission in Chant. Edited by Thomas Forrest Kelly, Harvard University, 2008. Hardback, $250.00. (“The early history of chant is a history of orality. In this volume, scholars of medieval music have taken up the ideas and techniques of scholars of folklore, oral transmission and ethnomusicology—for the chant is, in fact, an ancient music transmitted for a time in oral culture. Ironically, the use of written documents is also vital for the study of chant, involving analysis of oral issues in the writing of music.”)

7. Poets and Singers: On Latin and Vernacular Monophonic Song. Edited by Elizabeth Aubrey, University of Iowa, 2008. Hardback $250.00 (“The essays gathered here represent the principal themes and issues that have occupied scholars of late medieval monophonic songs over the last half century: their place in history and society; the role of women as composers and performers; poetic and musical structures, styles and genres; relationships between poems and melodies; written and oral transmission; and performance practices.”)

We are in the process of becoming an affiliate of Reconstructing History, a supplier of historical clothing patterns and notions. While they carry such from the 15th through late 20th centuries, we shall carry just those patterns for clothing dating from before 1600, and no notions or sundries.

Please excuse the construction. Our kind Technical Department is in the process of adding both a link to our FaceBook page (username: Potboiler Press, as if it would be anything else), and a link to, errr, links. The latter we hope will list web pages that show stuff being made, or useful historical sites (there seems to be an explosion of digitized medieval books, for example), and so forth. It will take some time before everything’s laid out exactly and elegantly.

In addition, our phone lines are still static-filled, the Internet connection is woefully slow when it’s working, and our computer has developed a wonky network card. It has not been a good couple of weeks. While we are still able to take orders over the website, there may be a day or two added onto Order Fulfillment during bad weather.

The computer is in for repairs. We have ordered a T1 line, which should be in by the end of May (and if it isn’t, There Will Be Words with the company involved). We are doing the opposite of rain dances for continued perfect weather. Or, rather, rain-only-at-night dances. (There’s been a drought here for the last three years or so, and most earnestly do we not want that again.)

There will be some mild delays in uploading new inventory, and possibly with answering email and processing orders. The company handing our connection with the Internet (WildBlue) seems to be having severe congestion problems. The only other alternative, since we live in a very rural area, is a telephone line, and that would be much slower.

Bear with us. Or, even better, visit us.

A few selected samples of the digitally photographed books for sale may be found at http://pics.livejournal.com/tedeisenstein/

1) NEW URL:

The Technical Department suggests that the direct URL to this blog is

http://potboilerpress.com/blog/

if you want to avoid going through the store’s portal for now.

2) Payments:

We would prefer payments to be made via PayPal (owner@potboilerpress.com), or, if you don’t have an account with them, via money orders or good checks made payable to Potboiler Press and mailed to

Potboiler Press

3940 State Route H

Fayette, MO   65248

3) Size:

For those thinking about getting the whole set of books, a very rough estimate suggests that it may take 15 DVD’s, give or take 1, to get them all on. That would cost $52.50, plus $3.00 shipping. We thought you might like to know….

edited three days later:

We finally managed to figure things out, and load all the available books onto DVD’s. Somehow they all fit onto 11; we are unsure of how or why, since it should have taken at least 12, but there it is.

So, the total cost for all the currently available information will be (11 x $3.50 + $3.00) = $41.50. Those who have already paid, based on earlier guesstimates, will be refunded the overage.

And we should reassure you: you do not have to order all 11 disks. We are quite happy to run off copies of just one or two books, as you wish.