Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXV

[Galloglaich]

France sent both political prisoners and common criminals to New Caledonia, near Australia. Thousands of people were hauled there after the suppression of the Paris Commune (including Louise Michel, most famously), though later an amnesty was issued, and most of them came back.

Their other penal colony was on the Salvation's Islands, off French Guiana in South America. That one was notoriously brutal, especially Devil's Island, and was preferred for political prisoners, from Alfred Dreyfus to Marius Jacob and a whole bunch of illegalists and anarchists and assorted revolutionaries. But it wasn't exclusive to them either, murder could also get you there, if you were really unlucky.

France also "transported" a lot of people to Louisiana, Haiti / Santa Domingo, Martinique, and later places like Indochina.

G

[Vinyadan]

Spoiler: spoiler

Show

This pottery in particular refers to a certain myth -- the one in which Dionysos wants to travel by ship, but the sailors (actually pirates) try to capture him and sell him as a slave. Dionysos then turns the pirates into dolphins, and the ship into a vineyard.

Concerning art in the Middle Ages, some were stylistic choices. Miniatures are incredibly expressive. Realism wasn't a main objective, although it sometimes was there. I remember one illuminated manuscript in particular that was edited on the request of the buyer to show not just a stylised cathedral, but the cathedral of the city he lived in; this was unusual, and it happened before 1100. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._Alter_Dom.jpg <- the realistic depiction of the old Cathedral of Cologne. In the original, you can see that the original miniature was edited.

But yes, I have read some texts concerning how symbolism in figurative arts was explained in the Middle Ages. I also have attended some courses relative to the metaphysical subtext that caused the choice of what may just look like colours or poses. It's a LOT of content, and the elaboration of centuries of thinking into an immediately perceivable form that also had to be enjoyable to the eye. I remember something about the other colours for Mary -- that she simply had to have some black, for example, because of certain implications in meaning. I think Georges Didi-Huberman wrote a lot about this stuff.

About the prison planet, I could see some sort of Benedectine Order appearing, in which people are not born but which nonetheless has a vital function in the conservation, expansion, and propagation of theoretical knowledge and practical skills.

[Epimethee]

This pottery in particular refers to a certain myth -- the one in which Dionysos wants to travel by ship, but the sailors (actually pirates) try to capture him and sell him as a slave. Dionysos then turns the pirates into dolphins, and the ship into a vineyard.

Correct, here is the version of the Homeric Hymns. You will notice that a ship transformed in a vineyard for a god transported on a ship in Athens seem to connect the god and the sea. As you said, we have centuries of elaboration and only glimpses of the thinking behind. But I stand by this direction, as one refreshing way to look at the famous line.

Concerning art in the Middle Ages, some were stylistic choices. Miniatures are incredibly expressive. Realism wasn't a main objective, although it sometimes was there. I remember one illuminated manuscript in particular that was edited on the request of the buyer to show not just a stylised cathedral, but the cathedral of the city he lived in; this was unusual, and it happened before 1100. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._Alter_Dom.jpg <- the realistic depiction of the old Cathedral of Cologne. In the original, you can see that the original miniature was edited.

Again I'm with you here. It stress the importance of stylistic choices, as meaningful choices dictated by cultural reasons. Of courses other explanations are needed, building a cathedral is subject to technical limitations. But some choices are really made for other reasons. It seems for example that the middle age know the perspective and use it in buildings, like in the entrance of cathedrals. But they make other choices in their pictures.

But yes, I have read some texts concerning how symbolism in figurative arts was explained in the Middle Ages. I also have attended some courses relative to the metaphysical subtext that caused the choice of what may just look like colours or poses. It's a LOT of content, and the elaboration of centuries of thinking into an immediately perceivable form that also had to be enjoyable to the eye. I remember something about the other colours for Mary -- that she simply had to have some black, for example, because of certain implications in meaning. I think Georges Didi-Huberman wrote a lot about this stuff.

Because picture were made to be immediately perceptible, I think they are a great way to touch some of the medieval sensibilities. Of course we need some symbolic vocabulary, some keys of understanding, but with only a few directions you can fell the utter strangeness of the medieval frame of reference. The bestiary is great for that aim. We see almost the same beasts than medieval people, arguably less often. We have a good grasp of what animals look but certainly worst than them. But they make specifics choices when depicting them and those choices are easy to see. I'm not sure everybody need to read Isidore of Seville, understanding that we speak of a symbolic frame and maybe feeling it a bit seem a good first step.

But if you really want to dig as deep as possible in the medieval history of colors, you should read Michel Pastoureau, is mans books, Red, Blue, Green and Black are available in English, but sadly not Stripes: the Devil's Color. It's hard to dig deeper on this specific subject and most of the bases are covered.
I warmly recommend his book about the Bear, History of a Fallen King, and his work on heraldry as an aside.

About the prison planet, I could see some sort of Benedectine Order appearing, in which people are not born but which nonetheless has a vital function in the conservation, expansion, and propagation of theoretical knowledge and practical skills.

Exactly, and as a warden I would want that! Such order is easy to shape and manipulate with a few well placed agents! I would have involuntary pawn everywhere, and the population would seek them every time they need an explanation about some unusual phenomenon, giving me a huge network of intelligence. The curious minds would come to me and I will have process in place to dispose with the most dangerous. My order would be the better placed to shield any dangerous knowledge from the feeble minds of the people. Then add some circle to preserve the most arcane knowledge, and you have every opportunity to better manipulate the planet with as few direct action as possible. The inmates are their own warden again.

By the way you want rebels and adversaries. You should use the cultural differences to nurture a few different societies. It may take more effort at first but then you add a political weapon to your arsenal. It will use a lot of energies on the planet.
You may not wish a total militarization, but coupled with other means of control, a military society may be more disciplined. As much as war tend to drive innovation, in this case you should be able to engineer an equilibrium between your different societies and use your social engineering tools to reinforce the stasis.
Think of the nobility, or of the samurais of the Tokugawa shogunate. You will use honor, social order and other noble values to cut any head too high.
Again, this violent state play totally into your hand.

The rebels are great to play your narrative, to instill a sense of danger in your population. You could totally play the devil's card and use your technological knowledge to mimic magics, so you could burn some credible witches. More to the point it will make a great way of explaining any rogue galactic citizen, new inmate, lost traveller or interstellar helper of the inmates.

By this point we need to talk about the wardens. As my prison may endure an infinite amount of time they are likely to have made their own society. They may be close to human and here for as many generations as the inmates, or they may be something else, human with an expanded lifespan, AI, any kind of alien.
In any case their society is centered on their duty and could certainly be broken in two, the planetary agents and the space warden (They may be on a moon for all I care).
If you wish they could be as strange and arcane as their prisoners, stuck for the most part of their life on a backward planet upon which they have godly power.
I think it work better than a regular changing of the guards, as you will need a huge amount of time to engineer something like that.


I was also thinking about the Culture of Iain M. Banks, because it is always worthwhile when you ponder dubious social engineering. Something like the culture may have an old pact with an extinct society to preserve an old planet (thus the evilness of the process is less evident) and your galactic society use it as a prison for special personalities because it is already there. It open another path of stories, what was the aim of the extinct society for example, but if some players as inmates discover the truth it may be more interesting to see their reactions to this complex reality than go for the straight evil.

Also special Circumstances make for great field agents in this kind of scenarios, and the description of technology could be easily adapted to ressemble magic. So...

[Galloglaich]

All this is quite interesting, particularly enjoying the detours into Classical Greek etc. cult practices and philosophy, but when it comes to the later part of the medieval period, I think it becomes increasingly dangerous to confuse some distinct subset of medieval theology or religious orthodoxy with a general medieval point of view.

In the later periods I'm familiar with - say 1200-1500, you had myriads of different religious orders (the 'religious' - monks, nuns and friars) and theological factions within the priesthood, and a wide and steadily widening gap between almost all of the clerics of every stripe and nearly all of the other estates of people (princes, burghers, gentry, peasants, etc.).

You also had an ever-increasing gang of prince-prelates (bishops and archbishops, cardinals and abbots or abbesses) who acted in almost all respects exactly the same as secular princes, that is to say brutal, greedy, venal, cruel, capricious and generally behaving nothing even remotely resembling any kind of piety let alone the finer nuances of theological discourse such as has survived in the writings of some of the nuttier Dominicans or Carthusians or theology professors at the Sorbonne.

Just to give you a sense of how disliked the Church was in the 14th-15th Century in Central Europe consider the whole phenomenon of the Rolandstatuen, the statues of Roland erected in towns and castles as a symbol of defiance to the Church.

Towns also started running their own schools specifically to free their offspring from the influence of the Church, as early as the 1100's. By the 1250's nearly all towns in Central Europe and most in Italy had their own schools. By the 1400's many had evicted their archbishop and hired their own priests. Towns, princes and entire regions or kingdoms were so routinely placed under interdict or ban by regional prince-prelates they were in disputes with, or by the Pope himself that they got sick of not being able to perform weddings, last-rites, funerals, baptisms and so on, so therefore hired their own clerics under Church authority. More or less the same to how the Kings of France ran the Church within their own borders or how Henry VIII eventually split away into his own Church.

When you read the writing of most of knights, artisans, mercenaries, and natural philosophers of the time, it is not saturated with the kind of religious overtones you'd find in the works of 17th or even 18th Century writers. If you want to understand medieval thinking I would say first you would be wise to focus on a particular region- Central Europe, the Low Countries, Italy, the British Isles, Iberian peninsula and France all had their distinct cultural footprint. Second, you should familiarize with some of the very Classical Auctores you are referring to such as Greeks like Aristotle or Epicurus and Romans like Livy or Cicero. Then familiarize yourself at least somewhat with the Arab gurus on the Greeks such as Avicenna, Al Jabir, Al Kindi, Rhazes, etc., because those guys are the filter through which the medieval literati (and there were more literate people - and more secular ones- than you might think) learned their Classical sources.

It's not to say they weren't religious - most of them were, but the type of bizarre theological constructs that we tend to associate with the medieval mind existed mostly inside the cloisters and priestly domains. For a typical knight, burgher or even University student they were more interested in hard science like geometry of Euclid and Vitruvius - which could help them build the next marvel or win the next war, and leaned in more superstitious realms more heavily into astrology and numerology than whether the devil dwelled within the color blue or some striped pants their wife bought at the market.

G

[HeadlessMermaid]

1) @Epimethee, that brought back memories, I don't think I've ever seen Franquin comics in English. Who published that? Heavy Metal magazine, perhaps?

2) May I go back to the colour of the sea for a moment?

I believe that the only reason SO MUCH INK has been spilt about that damn "wine-dark sea" is that from the two (2) instances of the word in Homer, one refers to the sea and the other refers to cattle. If it weren't for the damn cattle, if we only had oinops pontos to work with, I'm sure everyone would interpret the phrase "sea that looks like wine" (and not "dark" or "red" or anything) simply as a nice, poetic image that likens one liquid with another. And has absolutely nothing to do with colour, hue, or luminosity. Maybe implying a frothing sea, maybe even an enticing sea, but in the end: it's a liquid, that's all.

It's the damn cattle that mess up this perfectly satisfactory explanation, and the slightly arbitrary assumption that the word must mean the exact same thing in both instances. And since "frothing" or anything liquid-related can't possibly apply to cattle, then surely it must be the colour. (Right?) And then the colour was assumed to be dark (?) or red (???) although it could literally be anything, we have elsewhere descriptions of white wines, black wines, yellow wines, green wines, grey wines, just pick a colour word, it's there - and Hippocrates opined it's a remedy for some ailment or the other.

And from there we got to what colours even mean, for ancient people, for modern people, for different cultures and languages. It's not simple you see, there's an "objective" frequency for every colour in the visible spectrum, and that's a number expressed in Hz, but how people lump them together in categories like "blue" or "green", oh, there's nothing objective about that.

And it's all the cattle's fault. Damn those wine-looking cattle. Damn them to hell.

Here's a proposal, let's stop wondering how the sea could be dark or red, and start wondering how cattle could be liquid. WHY would cattle look like wine? What went through Homer's head? How did the ancient Greeks view cattle? Were they wobbly and wavy in their eyes? Were they frothing? Were they wet? Drenched in sweat perhaps? How about drunk? DID THE CATTLE LOOK WASTED, IS THAT IT??? Now there's some worthy research I'd like to see.

[snowblizz]

1) @Epimethee, that brought back memories, I don't think I've ever seen Franquin comics in English. Who published that? Heavy Metal magazine, perhaps?

Marsipulami? Gaston? Spirou? All these I've seen in English.
Btw does that leopard monster whatever look a bit like an angry Marsipulami or what! (also that signature with the predators eyes... sublime).

I my never be able to read those Dupuis/Dargaud comics which such childful glee again...

I believe that the only reason SO MUCH INK has been spilt about that damn "wine-dark sea"

Historians like to spill ink though. If they didn't argue they'd all have toa gree they don't know anything due ot lack of sources. I remember reading or watching something that explained how little we really know of Roman times. A lot of it comes only infragments so we in many cases have only specific instances that we paint the whole Roman world with.

And it's all the cattle's fault. Damn those wine-looking cattle. Damn them to hell.

I think I'll go have a burger for lunch. Show the cows who's boss.

[Vinyadan]

About liquid, I am fairly sure that there is a Greek word meaning "fast-footed" that literally reads "water-footed".

I'd have to check the details, but oinops could also be a very old word for "one-eyed", or "one-voiced". Oinos in Greek meant wine, but oine was the number one on the dice. This meaning comes from a broader use as "one".

Ops also has two meanings. One is that of face, eye, and look. The other one is that of "voice".

Personally, I like "one-voiced", because the sea and animals can be contrasted to the variety of human expression.

[Kiero]

Talking of "ops", "opson" means "meat", and "opsonion" is "wages".

[Epimethee]

All this is quite interesting, particularly enjoying the detours into Classical Greek etc. cult practices and philosophy, but when it comes to the later part of the medieval period, I think it becomes increasingly dangerous to confuse some distinct subset of medieval theology or religious orthodoxy with a general medieval point of view.

And cue an endless debate... How to study sensibilities, mentalities? Where the generalities stops and when the specific start? A lot of fun that... I want to stress that I can totally live with both objects, generalities to have something like a medieval society to study and then specifics to fill the frame. So I'm not refuting your point, just nuancing with my perspective. In my opinion it is the fun thing with history: a different bait catch a different fish but the sea is still there!

All In the later periods I'm familiar with - say 1200-1500, you had myriads of different religious orders (the 'religious' - monks, nuns and friars) and theological factions within the priesthood, and a wide and steadily widening gap between almost all of the clerics of every stripe and nearly all of the other estates of people (princes, burghers, gentry, peasants, etc.).

You will notice that my main examples, Bernard de Clairvaux, Suger, the color blue, were mainly from the XII century. From the perspective of the church, it is a time of growing power, even with more than a single pope. The monastics orders, like Citeaux and Cluny, are present across a large part of Europe. The architecture, as much as stylistics component are diffused from Spain to Scandinavia.
Even on more ideological things, like the wedding, the church is powerful enough to impose his vision.
That's not a one way phenomenon and as you said theological factions were abundant but I think both dynamics are important.

(By the way, if I may, as much as you are really learned, I think sometimes you tend to infer some phenomenon backward from the later medieval time. It's really relevant sometimes but in this case the early medieval time has some specificity.)

You also had an ever-increasing gang of prince-prelates (bishops and archbishops, cardinals and abbots or abbesses) who acted in almost all respects exactly the same as secular princes, that is to say brutal, greedy, venal, cruel, capricious and generally behaving nothing even remotely resembling any kind of piety let alone the finer nuances of theological discourse such as has survived in the writings of some of the nuttier Dominicans or Carthusians or theology professors at the Sorbonne.

But you have also concrete proofs of the effects of the theories of Sorbonne professors on the material culture of medieval time. One of the best example is the falling from grace of the bear and the boar, replaced by the deer and the lion. The bear was a powerful symbol of royalty since the pagan time and, with the boar, they were the preferred prey of hunting parties. (BTW the hunt is a scenography of power here.) The church promoted the lion and the deer, filled with christian imagery, to replace them and succeeded. Of course the main clues are in dusty codex, but the heraldry, where lions came suddenly, or the tradition of dancing bears as a vilification of the noble beast speak volumes of the diffusion of theological constructions on the general population.
Again, it is not a binary choice, both phenomenon are relevant here.

Just to give you a sense of how disliked the Church was in the 14th-15th Century in Central Europe consider the whole phenomenon of the Rolandstatuen, the statues of Roland erected in towns and castles as a symbol of defiance to the Church.

Yeah, you have also a lot of fabliaux where the priest were ridiculous, greedy and so on. But look at the many daily shows today: when peoples use humor, derisive symbols and so on, it is often to mock the power in place. In a way, an act of defiance assess that you are the less powerful side.

Towns also started running their own schools specifically to free their offspring from the influence of the Church, as early as the 1100's. By the 1250's nearly all towns in Central Europe and most in Italy had their own schools. By the 1400's many had evicted their archbishop and hired their own priests. Towns, princes and entire regions or kingdoms were so routinely placed under interdict or ban by regional prince-prelates they were in disputes with, or by the Pope himself that they got sick of not being able to perform weddings, last-rites, funerals, baptisms and so on, so therefore hired their own clerics under Church authority. More or less the same to how the Kings of France ran the Church within their own borders or how Henry VIII eventually split away into his own Church.

Yeah, but that's a lot of centuries. And it was also a dynamic process were the church was not always the loser, as shown by the many Interdicts that were put upon almost every christian country with various results. The kings were not always powerful enough to resist.(BTW, this possibility is a clue to the extent of christianity and to the cultural power of the church.)
Also, as shown brilliantly by Georges Duby, the roots of the Henri VIII situation can be traced back to the X-XI century, when the church was able to use a new definition of incest to become a necessary intermediary in the wedding, as the warrant of his validity.

When you read the writing of most of knights, artisans, mercenaries, and natural philosophers of the time, it is not saturated with the kind of religious overtones you'd find in the works of 17th or even 18th Century writers. If you want to understand medieval thinking I would say first you would be wise to focus on a particular region- Central Europe, the Low Countries, Italy, the British Isles, Iberian peninsula and France all had their distinct cultural footprint. Second, you should familiarize with some of the very Classical Auctores you are referring to such as Greeks like Aristotle or Epicurus and Romans like Livy or Cicero. Then familiarize yourself at least somewhat with the Arab gurus on the Greeks such as Avicenna, Al Jabir, Al Kindi, Rhazes, etc., because those guys are the filter through which the medieval literati (and there were more literate people - and more secular ones- than you might think) learned their Classical sources.

The regional approach may work but there is also in my opinion a more general landscape, unified at least by christianity and maybe by the classical references. Roughly speaking you have like a synthesis between regional footprints, and the huge cultural streams of the growing christian faith, the roman intellectuals framework, the more germanic traditions of the late roman era (don't forget that vandals were in Spain), and then some, like the Celtic influences brought by the great Irish monks, like Gall, Colomban or Urscisinus.

And I tend to like the Compilations better than the classical sources. The like of Ovide could be interpreted as a biblical metaphor so the Ancient were taken with a very specific frame of mind.
So I think Isidore of Seville or some other compilation like The Six Age of The World, may be more useful. That's also why I like bestiary, as they use and reshape the Authorities. As explicit encyclopedia they tend to be already organized among epistemological lines. And the compilations were often actually used to share knowledge with the less literate. As much as the connection was never really lost with the ancient, the general public would only read the originals in latter time.

It's not to say they weren't religious - most of them were, but the type of bizarre theological constructs that we tend to associate with the medieval mind existed mostly inside the cloisters and priestly domains. For a typical knight, burgher or even University student they were more interested in hard science like geometry of Euclid and Vitruvius - which could help them build the next marvel or win the next war, and leaned in more superstitious realms more heavily into astrology and numerology than whether the devil dwelled within the color blue or some striped pants their wife bought at the market.

G

Here I tend to disagree with you, and the reaction of the peoples to Interdicts, the huge reach of the Crusade, the size and efforts and money put in religious constructions, the reach and success of pilgrimage, the dotation of abbey and so on show that medieval peoples were not as secular as you make it sound. Again, that's not to say they were blind to the natural order, and of course the most arcane theological constructs were reserved to theologians. But I think hard science is the worst choice of words. Vitruvius was read (if at all) as much for his technical informations as for the aesthetic of his writing that hinted to the construction of the world.


Also superstition is anachronistic. You need to have a scientific frame to have superstition. Take the case of Astrology. In early medieval age it is linked to a christian frame. It is not a superstition but one of the many ways God reveal itself to the world. The status of astrology change in latter time, defined as heretical then as a false thing, and only latter as a superstition. Superstition is a construct of modern time, and was also promoted by the church to reshape faith for a more secular society (According to Carlo Ginzburg in the Night Battles).

Again, I agree with most of what you said and have only a different point of view. As I said I don't think they are opposed, but at one time you should choose where to focus.

1) @Epimethee, that brought back memories, I don't think I've ever seen Franquin comics in English. Who published that? Heavy Metal magazine, perhaps?

2) May I go back to the colour of the sea for a moment?

1) and also @Snowbliss

Honestly I don't know. Here I think it is the Phantagraphics edition of Idées Noires. It was published in French by Fluide Glacial.

I love Franquin as much today as yesterday and I'm always amazed by how powerful his drawing is. His sense of movement is incomparable and he is able to express a full range of emotions even on objects.

Also keep the childish glee, he liked that but that was not the only point of his work.

About 2.)

Interestingly, the French translation read: "la mer vineuse", "la mer aux couleurs de vin", or "la mer aux teintes lie-de vin". Dark is never really used. The word is also fairly archaic, disappearing after Hesiode and Alcée. Remember as an aside that greek were drinking in dark recipient, not transparent like our own, thus the wine would appear as a dark and brilliant surface. Notice also that the wine dark sea is often violent, dangerous.
Also the wine is only qualified as red (eruthros) and black (melas) in homeric epics. It was not any color you like but a precise range.
And most scholar I know make a distinction between the cattle and the wine. The wine metaphor is more used in sources, and more prevalent in greek culture.

Later we have drinking cups decorated on the side with ships, as if they floated on the wine. The connections between sea and wine run deep and mobilize a lot of sensibilities, not only the visual one.

Most scholar think that the cattle metaphor is visual. As you said it is part of the problem because it implies a notion of color. But connections between sea and cattle are really rare, the only think I could think of, and that's something totally different, is the bull of Poseidon. Also the probatov was a kind of fish and a word for sheeps and little cattle. And they said goat of the sea, and dwelled on the likeness of the word for whirlpool.

But yeah, I would like to see an essay on wasted cattle.

[Vinyadan]

If the word is "probaton", it sounds to me like "that which goes forward". It's rather vague, and so it isn't strange that it was applied to many different animals.

[Galloglaich]

(By the way, if I may, as much as you are really learned, I think sometimes you tend to infer some phenomenon backward from the later medieval time. It's really relevant sometimes but in this case the early medieval time has some specificity.)

Well, it's true there are always simultaneously contradictory trends in medieval society. I find it annoying when one gets emphasized to the exclusion of the others. The role of the Cistercians in particular can't be overstated to the development of medieval society in general, but it was in fact in this same early period when the independent cities started splitting away from both Feudal and Church society. The rural world was not yet fully indoctrinated in many rather vast parts of Europe, and the nobles and military estates were doing their own thing as well without much concern for the demands of the Church (or their complex internal struggles over doctrine)

The first university (bologna) arrived autonomous outside of Church control in the 11th Century.

But you have also concrete proofs of the effects of the theories of Sorbonne professors on the material culture of medieval time. One of the best example is the falling from grace of the bear and the boar, replaced by the deer and the lion. The bear was a powerful symbol of royalty since the pagan time

And yet, for cities like Berne or regions like Samogitia in Lithuania (just to name two among many), the bear remained a heraldic symbol of the utmost importance. The reach of such trends doesn't go as far as is typically assumed.

Yeah, you have also a lot of fabliaux where the priest were ridiculous, greedy and so on. But look at the many daily shows today: when peoples use humor, derisive symbols and so on, it is often to mock the power in place. In a way, an act of defiance assess that you are the less powerful side.

No doubt the priests were powerful, but it's also true that the bishops were evicted from hundreds of their own cathedrals in Europe in the 12th and 13th Centuries, typically by force. For example when Bishop Walter von Geroldseck was defeated by the Strasbourg militia in 1262. Almost all the Free Cities, most of the Italian and Central European cities with recognizable names today, did this. So it wasn't just the feeble protests of the weak against the strong.

Yeah, but that's a lot of centuries. And it was also a dynamic process were the church was not always the loser, as shown by the many Interdicts that were put upon almost every christian country with various results. The kings were not always powerful enough to resist.(BTW, this possibility is a clue to the extent of christianity and to the cultural power of the church.)

No of course they didn't always lose. They were incredibly powerful - but things like the schisms, the Avignon captivity and the three popes, and the overuse of excommunication and the ban and the interdict - ultimately weakened them. By the 1300's the ground was laid for the much later Protestant reformation. And of course it happened 100 years early in Bohemia.

And I tend to like the Compilations better than the classical sources. The like of Ovide could be interpreted as a biblical metaphor so the Ancient were taken with a very specific frame of mind.
So I think Isidore of Seville or some other compilation like The Six Age of The World, may be more useful. That's also why I like bestiary, as they use and reshape the Authorities. As explicit encyclopedia they tend to be already organized among epistemological lines. And the compilations were often actually used to share knowledge with the less literate. As much as the connection was never really lost with the ancient, the general public would only read the originals in latter time.

Depends where. Keep in mind the big push to spread the vernacular translations in places like Florence as early as the 14th Century.

pilgrimage, the dotation of abbey and so on show that medieval peoples were not as secular as you make it sound. Again, that's not to say they were blind to the natural order, and of course the most arcane theological constructs were reserved to theologians. But I think hard science is the worst choice of words. Vitruvius was read (if at all) as much for his technical informations as for the aesthetic of his writing that hinted to the construction of the world.

I wouldn't say they were secular, just not as influenced by the often very strange theology found deep in the Church. They were very interested in aesthetics and loved the Classical (and Arab) auctores, and had their own ideas of the sacred, which were a mixture of Church doctrine with whatever their own remnant traditions and new ideas from new types of communities (like the cities, but also things like knightly orders and secular literature).

Also superstition is anachronistic. You need to have a scientific frame to have superstition. Take the case of Astrology. In early medieval age it is linked to a christian frame. It is not a superstition but one

The Christian (and metaphysical) links to things like Astrology and Alchemy tend to be overstated. They created a patina of Christian acceptability but they tended to be pragmatic. Astrology being linked to Astronomy and thereby navigation, not to mention calendars for everything from when to plant crops to when to move armies out.

Again, I agree with most of what you said and have only a different point of view. As I said I don't think they are opposed, but at one time you should choose where to focus.

Of course - agreed. I just try to point out the realms typically left out of any discussion of the medieval.



G

[Epimethee]

Well, it's true there are always simultaneously contradictory trends in medieval society. I find it annoying when one gets emphasized to the exclusion of the others.

Very true, but I think very rhetorical here. You know as well as me that every historical reflexion is by necessity a reduction. I love the notion of complexity, because it literally mean woven together so I understand that following a thread blind you even momentarily to the others. I don't forget them. It's no exclusion.

The role of the Cistercians in particular can't be overstated to the development of medieval society in general, but it was in fact in this same early period when the independent cities started splitting away from both Feudal and Church society. The rural world was not yet fully indoctrinated in many rather vast parts of Europe, and the nobles and military estates were doing their own thing as well without much concern for the demands of the Church (or their complex internal struggles over doctrine)

The first university (bologna) arrived autonomous outside of Church control in the 11th Century.

About the indoctrination, I would be more cautious than you. Don't forget that the evangelization between the fall of Rome and the Great Schism of 1054 was a huge popular movement, driven of course by missionaries but unlike the latter crusades, the Cathars wars or the Teutonics expeditions for example. The help of the monarchs and the nobility was essential but the christianity was popular and baptism were genuine. (Here should follow a discussion on the difference between the political religion of the ancient and the individual concept of salvation that put the responsibility of faith on the individual and would be really relevant to the following discussion because of the consequences for the notion of individual itself, that an history of religion topic so I won't dare go further). Of course they were political tensions from the beginning. But there was also genuine concern to follow the precept of the church.
Also, the struggle over doctrine were often contiguous with political concerns, think of the Lombard against Charlemagne for example.
Really, it is a concept that I find hard to grasp and that already cost me time and effort. The speed of conversion and the extent of christianity could make for an endless debate.


One of the genius of the church, and again I point to you the excellent Georges Duby and his The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, was to be able to put itself in a position where it was a necessary interlocutor in the political problems of the time.

Also, as much as a free university appear at the end of the XI century, it is rooted in the church tradition and the scholastics guilds. The knowledge was scholastic and rooted in the christian understanding of the world, as theology was the highest and most valorized degree. What they will become a few centuries latter is quite different.

And yet, for cities like Berne or regions like Samogitia in Lithuania (just to name two among many), the bear remained a heraldic symbol of the utmost importance. The reach of such trends doesn't go as far as is typically assumed.

No, not the utmost importance. Really it was declining by the time heraldry was adopted at the end of the XII century. But they were about 4 millions documented coat of arms in medieval time so you are likely to find some bears and boars. You need more than the coat of Bern to state his cultural meaning. Also Bern was linked with the bear since pagan times, look at the goddess Artio for example and the famous statue:

Spoiler

Show

It may be a case of talking coat of arms, a kind of wordplay, but it is also a witness of the staying power of the bear since pagan time, not contradicting his more general decline.

(I will more or less copy here a chapter of The Bear: History of a Fallen King, from Pastoureau entitled Crowning of the Lion: the heraldic bestiary (and also heraldry is a very specific vocabulary, I may make some mistake translating my sources, I hope you will take them with fair play!))

At the end of the XII century, the shield with a lion became the stereotyped shield of the christian knight in French and anglo-normand literature, opposed to the pagan knight whose shield is marked with a dragon or a leopard. The germanic regions resist longer and keep the pagan mythological bestiary for some time. By the XIII century, the bear or the boar are still the attribute of heroes. But Tristan lose in Scandinavia and Germany the boar that was on is shield around 1250, taking like in France and England a century ago, and like in Austria and Italia a bit latter, a lion in his place.

The lion is present on about 15% of all medieval coat of arms, regardless of the time period and the social classes. That's huge, the second most frequent piece, the fasce count for about 6% of the total and the eagle make for about 3%. This primacy of the lion is found everywhere: from northern to Southern Europe, in the arms of nobility or non-nobility, for moral and physical peoples, in real and imaginary coat of arms, as noted above. In the XIII century they said: "who bears no coat of arms bears a lion".
It should also be noted that, among the king of christianity, only the king of France and the Emperor never used a lion in their coat of arms. At some point, any other did.

From the XIII century, the herald and authors writing about the fauna of heraldry speak of the lion as the king of animals, pared with all the virtues and the heraldic figure par excellence.

(As an aside, you should read the Roman de Renart: here again the lion is king, with all virtues and the bear is often the butt of a joke, funnily, it was written around 1150-1200)

Compare it to the bear: except in some part of northern Germany and maybe Spain, it count for less than 5% of figures. Also heralds were less talkative about the virtues of the beast. So the bear was not adopted because of his symbolic value. Mainly, they are talking coat of arms, making a pun with the name of the bearer. The most ancient known is from Canterbury, around 1190-1120. That's the famous cognizance of Sir Reginald Fitzurse, one of the killers of Thomas Beckett. Urse, ours, bear. That's a wordplay. The coat may even have been made after the death of sir Reginald, but that's not really relevant. It is the first of a series were the name of the individual, of the family, the community speak with the design of the coat of arm.
You have for example Bern, Berlin, Madrid (from the theory it was named Ursaria), Abbey like Urscamp or Saint-Ursanne (from Urscicinus, a Celtic missionary) and so on.

Of course, the ancient meaning of the bear is not totally forgotten, as shown in the crest of some helms again mainly in northern Germany. But you have also around the XII-XIII century a few German, Danish and Swedish coats were the bear is also talking but with an ancient royal name, like in Königsberg, Königgut, Könnecke, Kungslena or Herringa. It is interesting as a witness of the ancient dignity of the bear but as a trace of something disappearing.
Everywhere else, the lion was the king.

And soon the king was also a lion: Richard King of England and Wilhelm of Scotland for example: The Lion, the Generous Lion...

Interestingly, there is a limit, a last germanic dynaste to be called a bear: Albert, Magrave of Brandeburg, in his fight against Henry, Duke of Saxe, Henri the Lion... (that was 1164-1168).
Funny that... Notice that the Lion won. And that it is not certain if the name was given during the lifetime of Albert the Bear.

So by the XIII century the bear was really declining, from a symbol of royalty and power to some kind of more domesticated beast. The lion, an imported creature was the new symbol of royalty and easier to connect with christian imagery.

No doubt the priests were powerful, but it's also true that the bishops were evicted from hundreds of their own cathedrals in Europe in the 12th and 13th Centuries, typically by force. For example when Bishop Walter von Geroldseck was defeated by the Strasbourg militia in 1262. Almost all the Free Cities, most of the Italian and Central European cities with recognizable names today, did this. So it wasn't just the feeble protests of the weak against the strong.

No of course they didn't always lose. They were incredibly powerful - but things like the schisms, the Avignon captivity and the three popes, and the overuse of excommunication and the ban and the interdict - ultimately weakened them. By the 1300's the ground was laid for the much later Protestant reformation. And of course it happened 100 years early in Bohemia.

We clearly agree on most of this. I would point out this time that there could be many reasons for the eviction of a bishop, as he may have been a secular figure as much as a religious authority. So as much as the bishop was evicted, faith was not really under question. The same play for the Protestant reformation: even with the political context, you have a theological problem that grow and became one of the most violent war in Europe. The truth of christianity was never under question. In this sense, the ideological victory of christianity seem evident. But of course the true power of the church is hard to asses and varies according to time and places.

Depends where. Keep in mind the big push to spread the vernacular translations in places like Florence as early as the 14th Century.

Here I think the general trump the specific. But you're right to point it out.

I wouldn't say they were secular, just not as influenced by the often very strange theology found deep in the Church. They were very interested in aesthetics and loved the Classical (and Arab) auctores, and had their own ideas of the sacred, which were a mixture of Church doctrine with whatever their own remnant traditions and new ideas from new types of communities (like the cities, but also things like knightly orders and secular literature).

Ah ah, here I have found our biggest difference, I think! And unsurprisingly it is about interpretation! So I don't think we could have a definitive position.
In my opinion, the medieval time is of course a synthesis that bring on new things (like the cities as you rightly point out), and for a synthesis you need a few sources, or streams. Of course, the remnant of traditions were used, but there is like a cut, as if christianity was the decanter in which those sources melt. As I said, the roman tradition never disappeared, and was easier to find again because of written sources but it was melted with other component like the germanic laws, the Celtic literature and son on. But the traditions were reshaped not only aesthetically but also symbolically. Christianity implemented a new frame of reference in which the ancient traditions were read. So for example the medieval romance that play the same tunes that the theologians but shaped for their audiences.
Notice also that the first vernacular pieces on ancient matter, like Alexander or Cesar, are also romances, clearly reshaped by christian and medieval ideology.

As much as I believe in the own ideas of peoples at any time, I think ideas, ideologies, play also a part and the difficult part is balancing those two realities.

The Christian (and metaphysical) links to things like Astrology and Alchemy tend to be overstated. They created a patina of Christian acceptability but they tended to be pragmatic. Astrology being linked to Astronomy and thereby navigation, not to mention calendars for everything from when to plant crops to when to move armies out.

Again, I think that the way the church reshaped the medieval culture was more than an aesthetic. And again I think you overstate a bit the term pragmatic: as I said the symbolical does not exclude the pragmatic. They were balancing both differently!

Of course - agreed. I just try to point out the realms typically left out of any discussion of the medieval.



G

And I thank you for that!

[snowblizz]

It may be a case of talking coat of arms, a kind of wordplay, but it is also a witness of the staying power of the bear since pagan time, not contradicting his more general decline.

Everywhere else, the lion was the king.

Funny that... Notice that the Lion won.

So by the XIII century the bear was really declining, from a symbol of royalty and power to some kind of more domesticated beast. The lion, an imported creature was the new symbol of royalty and easier to connect with christian imagery.

That's interesting because here (In Finland) we still talk about the Russian bear. To be understood as the everpresent though not always acute threat of the deep uncivilized forests of the east. Despite the fact that the Russian empire used the eagle as device which could as easily been used in such connotations. There's at least one famous nationalromantic painting depicting a fight between Finlandia and an eagle tearing up the book of law.

Unsurprisingly the heraldic device of Finland is a lion (created by the new Vasa dynasty to increase their prestige).

[Galloglaich]

Very true, but I think very rhetorical here. You know as well as me that every historical reflexion is by necessity a reduction. I love the notion of complexity, because it literally mean woven together so I understand that following a thread blind you even momentarily to the others. I don't forget them. It's no exclusion.

Thee thing is, though historians are aware of these things, only one part of the historiography typically makes it into the popular culture. This is what I'm referring to.

I also think historiography for by and about one region, or a couple of closely linked ones (England and France for example) tend to get erroneously extended well beyond that area. France for example was very influential in matters such as heraldry and princely or knightly fashions of all kinds, but there were definite limits to that, and to the dominance of such estates in other parts of Europe. The thing with the Bear and the Lion for example, is a case in point.

I don't see Berne and Samogitia as outliers for sticking with their Bear symbology, in the Baltic region which I specialize, the Bear was quite common as a symbol or coat of arms across Latinized, Greek-Russian, and indigenous Pagan regions. The boar too was not exactly rare.

The depictions in heraldic symbols - which are often portrayed the same way also typically correspond to the ritualized keeping of live bears in captivity, and a ritualized and highly dangerous method of hunting wild bears on foot, with a spear. I'm referring specifically to the method you see depicted here in one of the Bern Chronicles - on foot with a spear featuring a crossbar.


You can also see the Bear coat of arms above the gate in the town behind the hunters.


This was a common hunting technique in Poland, in Prussia, in Lithuania, in Bohemia and in Pomerania and Silesia, among both German and Slavic speaking people, as well as the indigenous Baltic tribes. They would stab the bear in the chest and then prop the spear against the ground, the bear then wearing itself out trying to push against the crossbar. Needless to say a very dangerous way to hunt, but it was a somewhat common trait of hunting in this period, at least in the Central European polities with which I am familiar, to hunt in dangerous ways and during dangerous times (for example in Spring when many animals are in rut)

I have a colleague in fact who is researching the Bear heraldry and associated practices as some kind of remnant of a bear cult throughout Central Europe. Last time I spoke to him he mentioned over 70 polities which fit the pattern. As you pointed out, the Bear symbol and associated practices (for example during Carnival) of course predates Christianity and like many other things, continued into the Christian era.

Perhaps the best single source on all this is Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, where he carefully documented practices such as at Carnival or 12th night celebrations ala Krampus et al, which include cult like practices associated with animals such as bears. Consider these traditional (peasant) Carnival costumes found from Portugal to Bulgaria:









We also see bear Carrnival costumes in places like Nuremberg in the 15th Century:



So undoubtedly, the French court was influenced, but I think it's very common to overstate the actual influence beyond certain courts. Nor is a count of symbols sufficient since it matters more how powerful the polity, noble family, town or prince in question was. Berne was very powerful.

Another important example is Madrid - still using this bear in the 16th Century



Veliki Novgorod, one of the most powerful City States in Russia (in it's heyday, comparable to Venice)



Berlin, rather small in the medieval period but of increasing importance as we know...

About the indoctrination, I would be more cautious than you. Don't forget that the evangelization between the fall of Rome and the Great Schism of 1054 was a huge popular movement, driven of course by missionaries but unlike the latter crusades, the Cathars wars or the Teutonics expeditions for example. The help of the monarchs and the nobility was essential but the christianity was popular and

The Cathars was are a good example of what I'm referring to. Christianity - in theory- spread far and wide, but the "Devil was in the Details" to use an aphorism, and to Rome the Cathars were very much Devils, leading to the devastation of much of Lange-D'Oc and the crushing of what might have been an early Renaissance into a smoking ruin. Much of the details of Church doctrine, what Latin Christendom considered "legitimate" Christianity, was imposed, or attempted in imposition, by force. Numerous rural clans, towns, principalities and even entire Kingdoms were attacked in the Middle Ages within Europe in attempts to enforce Christianity.

For The Church (writ large) much of Europe had a thin patina of Christianity but were not in fact on the road to salvation. In practice this frequently meant what to them were pagan practices or even diabolical ones. They could not accept Greek Orthodox Christianity, and even relatively minor variations in ritual such as the Czechs slightly more liberal attitudes about women (like when women could and couldn't enter a Church after childbirth) or whether to have wine at communion, triggered a long series of bloody wars (which were failures for the Church).

Debates between towns and Church leaders over doctrine and what would be taught to Children, especially by the Inquisitional Orders such as the Dominicans, are what led to the towns establishing their own schools. Nor was this sense of unease with Church doctrine limited to the burghers - many of those Roland statues I posted earlier were in castles and erected by princes or Imperial Knights.

Really, it is a concept that I find hard to grasp and that already cost me time and effort. The speed of conversion and the extent of christianity could make for an endless debate.

No doubt - I think it just depends on how you define Christianity. Rome itself defined it rather narrowly as time went on. If you say - how many people accepted baptism and liked the idea of Jesus and / or the Virgin Mary, I would agree it was very widespread. If you said, how many people were paying their tithes, sticking to doctrine on matters of the nature of the Holy Trinity, or eschewing pagan rituals, I would say it was much more patchy and as evidence I would point to the numerous wars and Crusades fought over the issue of Church control and 'thoroughness' of conversion in various areas.



Often, significantly - these were right next to the Church.

Another urban example of the pagan beneath the Christian, are the sacred linden trees in Central Europe. Tanzlinde, Dorflinde, DoomLinde, and by various other names, hundreds of these sacred trees still exist in the very center of dozens of cities, towns, villages and castles throughout Europe. They were closely associated with a cult of Freyja. Later downgraded to a 'good faerie'. More importantly these were the site of weddings, court judgements including condemnations, carnival and May Day celebrations, and public assemblies of all kinds (including the Vehmic Court in many cases).

These were in larger cities as well as small villages, almost all the Free Cities of Central Europe had them and most still do. A good example is the Lindenhof in Zurich, site of a settlement with cultic activities going back to at least the Iron Age. used as late as 1798 for the citizens as a site to swear oaths for their new constitution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindenhof

Quite a few of these that still stand today are over 1,000 years old. If the Church had sufficient authority I believe they would have stamped this out - they may have put some kind of thin patina of Christianity over it but it's really not Christian.

Here is a partial list (via auto-translate / wikipedia) (here is the German Wiki)

https://translate.google.com/transla...de&prev=search

One of the genius of the church, and again I point to you the excellent Georges Duby and his The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, was to be able to

In France, no doubt - I think part of what is going on here is a French historiography vs. a Central / North European and Italian one.

Also, as much as a free university appear at the end of the XI century, it is rooted in the church tradition and the scholastics guilds. The knowledge was scholastic and rooted in the christian understanding of the world, as theology was the highest and most valorized degree. What they will become a few centuries latter is quite different.

The original focus of Bologna was on Civil - specifically late Roman law based on the digest and other documents of Roman Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_(Roman_law)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus...ry_in_the_West

This is what the first professors at Bologna were teaching after it was rediscovered

Scholasticism isn't precisely Christian either, it represented a kind of fusion of Christian doctrines with Classical Auctores with the aim of making the latter acceptable for study in the Christian era.

G

[gkathellar]

@Epimethee, can you expand on the matter of Georges Duby's work on the church's involvement with marriage that you mentioned above?

@Gallogliach: The dogs in that bear-hunting image remind me of something the Ainu did, where a specially trained Shiba would leap on the bear's back while a hunter speared it from the front.

[Galloglaich]

I should add though, i do think we are just debating different emphasis of the same facts. And I like the way you write, it has a poetic ring.

G

[Vinyadan]

About Bern and Berlin, the name of the city probably played a role there, when it came to bears.

I wonder if the spread of eagles actually had more to do with Rome and Constantinoples, than with purely Christian symbolism.

The bear being turned into a dancing bear also reminds me of stories of saints like Saint Corbinian, who forced a bear to carry his luggage. This is stuff that occasionally saints were said to do to devils, forcing them into temporary servitude to help them do God's work. Frisings still has that pack bear in its emblem.

[Galloglaich]

About Bern and Berlin, the name of the city probably played a role there, when it came to bears.

I wonder if the spread of eagles actually had more to do with Rome and Constantinoples, than with purely Christian symbolism.

A lot of what we think of as the spread of Christianity was really the spread of Latin (or in the East, Greek) culture to various barbarian tribes. Sometimes voluntarily sometimes by force.

Historians usually refer to medieval Europeans West of the Volga as "Latinized" - you'll see me use that term in here myself. A lot of cultural baggage (and some advantageous cultural "software") was spread that way, and it was also a large part of the basis for the inability for Eastern and Western Churches to unite and for more or less permanent enmity across certain borders like Poland / Russia.

How you measure the actual impact of Christianity is of course subject for deep debate as Epimethee noted. Tribes didn't become peaceful that is for sure, but you can certainly identify many Roman traditions ranging from the military through economic and cultural spectrums.

G

[Deepbluediver]

I'm sure this question has been asked before (maybe we should make an FAQ thread?) but does anyone have any good resources on how long it would take a smith in antiquity (any era) to make weapons and armor? Just rough estimates would be good.

I know from previous discussions that one of the issues historians have with things like production time and cost is that many of the surviving records and examples only refer to the most ornate equipment, because that's what the historians of the day considered important to record. And probably was the most likely to be preserved, instead of being recycled or just straight-up scrapped. It's the same mentality that leads to people putting Ferraris and Mercedes in museums, but not a Honda-Civic.
So while there's at least one account I read of ceremonial dress-armor for a king or prince taking nearly a year to complete, I'm more interested in the stuff a common soldier, sellsword, or low-ranking knight would use.

Anywho, I've seen youtube videos were modern smiths with readied stock, bandsaws, gas-fired forges, and power-hammers can throw something together in a few hours, but does anyone know of attempts using entirely traditional tools that I might be able to watch/read? Or anything similar.
I've heard that classical smiths could sometimes keep suits of armor, particularly maile, in a partially-completed state and then just fit them to the buyer as necessary, but I don't know how if there would be any benefit to try and do something similar with a sword or spear blank.

Anything anyone can contribute to help satisfy my curiosity would be appreciated.

[Galloglaich]

For armor, it wouldn't usually be just one guy making it. It would be a workshop. For one guy to make a whole "suit" of armor ... it would take a while. Months.

Same for swords though it's a bit less involved. You still have a cutler who designs the sword and supervises the whole thing, an ironmonger who provides the steel and / or iron billets (this made in a blast furnace or bloomery forge which would be a fairly large scale operation), a blade maker who forges the blades from the billets, a hilt maker who makes the hilt and scabbard, another smith who specializes in heat-treating the blades, a sharpener and a polisher.

At any one time many blades would be in different stages of production, they were usually done in batches of 20 or 50.

The whole thing could be done for one blade though fairly quickly if you rushed it. I think there are reality TV shows where they make a halfway decent sword in 48 hours or so. More normally it would probably be more like at least 2 weeks.

G

[Saintheart]

1) @Epimethee, that brought back memories, I don't think I've ever seen Franquin comics in English. Who published that? Heavy Metal magazine, perhaps?

2) May I go back to the colour of the sea for a moment?

I believe that the only reason SO MUCH INK has been spilt about that damn "wine-dark sea" is that from the two (2) instances of the word in Homer, one refers to the sea and the other refers to cattle. If it weren't for the damn cattle, if we only had oinops pontos to work with, I'm sure everyone would interpret the phrase "sea that looks like wine" (and not "dark" or "red" or anything) simply as a nice, poetic image that likens one liquid with another. And has absolutely nothing to do with colour, hue, or luminosity. Maybe implying a frothing sea, maybe even an enticing sea, but in the end: it's a liquid, that's all.

It's the damn cattle that mess up this perfectly satisfactory explanation, and the slightly arbitrary assumption that the word must mean the exact same thing in both instances. And since "frothing" or anything liquid-related can't possibly apply to cattle, then surely it must be the colour. (Right?) And then the colour was assumed to be dark (?) or red (???) although it could literally be anything, we have elsewhere descriptions of white wines, black wines, yellow wines, green wines, grey wines, just pick a colour word, it's there - and Hippocrates opined it's a remedy for some ailment or the other.

And from there we got to what colours even mean, for ancient people, for modern people, for different cultures and languages. It's not simple you see, there's an "objective" frequency for every colour in the visible spectrum, and that's a number expressed in Hz, but how people lump them together in categories like "blue" or "green", oh, there's nothing objective about that.

And it's all the cattle's fault. Damn those wine-looking cattle. Damn them to hell.

Here's a proposal, let's stop wondering how the sea could be dark or red, and start wondering how cattle could be liquid. WHY would cattle look like wine? What went through Homer's head? How did the ancient Greeks view cattle? Were they wobbly and wavy in their eyes? Were they frothing? Were they wet? Drenched in sweat perhaps? How about drunk? DID THE CATTLE LOOK WASTED, IS THAT IT??? Now there's some worthy research I'd like to see.

Cribbing a bit from Guy Deutscher, apparently one of the reasons for this oddity is because the Greeks didn't have the word "blue", and possibly not even a word for the colour. It wasn't genetic colour blindness; it may have simply been cultural colour blindness in the sense that not all cultures identify all colours. Indeed some cultures -- the Piraha, see Daniel Everett -- don't name colours at all, they just use "like a leaf" for green. We do the same for "orange", "cherry", or "peach", but for us these are names of colours; for the Piraha, they are descriptions, and only descriptions, of colours. Deutscher notes that linguistically, blue tends to be the last colour that's identified in a language. Ancient texts (Semitic and Greek alike) had a much smaller vocabulary for colour, and those much more clustered around the concepts of light and darkness.

[Galloglaich]

It's a bit of a cliche I know but the inuit have dozens or hundreds of words for 'white' right? We see all the same shades they do but don't focus on them as much, they are more transitory for us because less precisely defined.

But I think the wine dark sea thing is just about the deepness of the color though. A poetic analogy. I once looked into the North Sea from a ferry and that phrase came right into my head. It's just a certain depth of color you never see close to shore.

[DerKommissar]

It's a bit of a cliche I know but the inuit have dozens or hundreds of words for 'white' right? We see all the same shades they do but don't focus on them as much, they are more transitory for us because less precisely defined.

For most, but not all of us. People who work with colors might know a huge amount of words for e.g. different types of white, possibly far more than the inuit:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_colors

But outside of these professions, there is not much point to it as you said...

[Epimethee]

The word was probaton, I forgot about this one! A reminiscence of the greek letter...

I musst confess first that I will start today ten days of movie festival. I regret nothing but I may not be in the perfect state of mind, after an Indian superhero movie and before an Italian musical comedy about the maffia to go as deep as necessary on the very interesting subjects we are exploring.

So i will clear some little things here, in the hope you could wait a few days for more extended answers. I may come atsome point between two movies to clear my mind but remember I try to blow it for the next ten days! Sorry for the timing!

@gkathellar: gladly, but shortly. I will come back later and it may be rough for now. Please take it accordingly!

You have the families of the nobility. They are concerned by the next generation. As much as mariage are documented, it is usual for the men to have many spouses. Also most mariages take place in the extended family, a circle of allies, friend, and other parents. Those ties are important to keep the political power of a given extended family.
Then you have the church. At first, the church is not so sure about sexuality, even celibacy for the priests was not a given. They decide then for an asceticism were te body is frown upon. So (so short it sound bad) they cannot tolerate the ways of the nobility.

The genius of the church was to insert itself into the political struggles of the powerful to promote this new vision. The way was to use incest. As I said above, the the nobility married in a close circle. As a registry of weddings, the church was able to make genealogical assessment. A lot of union were forbidden or broken because of incest, with a expanded definition that included more and more relatives, even some distant cousin. Of course, the church followed often the political interest of the time, but it became an authority, a necessary player in the power struggle that were the weddings of the nobility.


By this mean the church was able to distill his new vision of wedding. As much as some kings were able to change wives, the difference is really startling for most of the nobility. One of the most visible effect is to deprive a lot of young men of their usual spouses among the close relatives. As mariage were more difficult to arrange, a lot of young men stayed alone, limiting also the possibilities of a fief. This was one of the causes that made the crusades possible, a lot of young men without anything better to do. Also you have one of the roots of the fine Amor, as those unwedded men needed a new ideology to understand their relationship when wedding is less an option.

That's the sketch, I need to read a few pages for dates and characters. And I don't want to give the impression it was some Machiavellian scheme from the church. When discussing ideas, it is easy to characterize them as such, as if there was a conscient will behind each step. That's not the case.

@vinyadan: I need a little time but I should be able to come back with a few things.Notice that the Holy Roman Empire used an eagle, as the czar, so the connection is clear, but I don't know the specifics by hearth here.

@Galloglaich : Glad I don't sound gibberish, honestly. That mean something to me as it is always harder to write in another language. Every word has more weigh so I'm relieved it's not a bad thing and I am grateful of the compliment.

And I really agree about the different emphasis. We are mainly talking about interpretation, about tools and perspectives. In my opinion it is the hardest part, as erudition is only about reading but interpreting is about trying to understand. As as I said repeatedly I think there is no definitive answers to the problems we discuss. As was brilliantly said by Eco: I prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events that I happened to observe in my youth, now repeating verbatim all I saw and heard, without venturing to seek a design, as if to leave to those who will come after (if the Antichrist has not come first) signs of signs, so that the prayer of deciphering may be exercised on them.
I love the sound of something like "the prayer of deciphering".


You will feel that I let you down, because I don't think it is the best moment for me to answer all your interesting points.

I disagree strongly with the implication that latin and greek culture were equal to christianity, but that's also up for a long debate.

And I think we could go even deeper on the bear, but it is not the best of time. I will just point out that a vilified beast still retain different meaning even in the same cultural range. Take the case of the spider. As much as it is a vilified beast in occident, it still could be used as a laudative surname, like for Lev Yachin, the Black Spider, goalkeeper of the Russian soccer team a few years ago. So even when the bear was vilified, every use of the beast is not a vilification.

But if you agree I will concentrate on my movies and come back as soon as possible! If you disagree I will in any case do the same!

But I will be glad to come back to you after that long awaited parenthesis!

[Galloglaich]

@Galloglaich : Glad I don't sound gibberish, honestly. That mean something to me as it is always harder to write in another language. Every word has more weigh so I'm relieved it's not a bad thing and I am grateful of the compliment.

So... French?

I love the sound of something like "the prayer of deciphering".

Umberto Eco is one of a very, very short list of modern authors who I believe has some genuine insight into the Medieval World, albeit for him specifically just the Italian part for the most part. Italy was at it's zenith then and (as I have argued) near the pinnacle of cultural and economic influence in Europe in the High- to Late Medieval periods so it's a good place to start. Name of the Rose is an excellent book, Baudolino also if somewhat less accessible.

And a poetic author, so much so that it sounds good even after translation into English.

You will feel that I let you down, because I don't think it is the best moment for me to answer all your interesting points.

I understand completely - this happens to me often as well (usually big arguments or interesting discussions start up right when I'm going on a work trip). Enjoy your films, I will only briefly comment to give you something to mull over for your triumphant return.

I disagree strongly with the implication that latin and greek culture were equal to christianity, but that's also up for a long debate.

I'm not arguing that they are equal, I think they are distinct for sure, but I was saying that what gets labeled as Christianity is often really just Latin or Greek culture, and that these cultural systems - the laws for example, but also less tangible mores and traditions, are as important as Christianity in the development of medieval culture.

Certainly the dividing line between the Greek influenced zone (Russian alphabet being essentially Greek for example) and the Latin is one of the stronger themes of medieval life in Europe.

And I think we could go even deeper on the bear, but it is not the best of time. I will just point out that a vilified beast still retain different meaning even in the same cultural range. Take the case of the spider. As much as it is a vilified beast in occident, it still could be used as a laudative surname, like for Lev Yachin, the Black Spider, goalkeeper of the Russian soccer team a few years ago. So even when the bear was vilified, every use of the beast is not a vilification.

I just don't think you could say what was vilified in one place was so in another in the medieval context. The various estates (burghers, clergy, University students, gentry, knights, princes), the hundreds of great families, the numerous cultural-religious milieux (Greek vs. Latin are just two of the bigger ones - but you could also distinguish quite clearly between Tyrolian and Bavarian say, or between Alsatian and Provencal, Occitian and Burgundian, Estonian and Latvian, Croat and Serb and so on), all had their own ideas of what was good and bad, what was fashionable and what was dull.

I think this is one of the biggest barriers to understanding the medieval world - we always tend to identify one theme which we can point to in one place, say Paris or London, and project it across Europe in space and across many centuries in time. I'm not immune to this of course, but I focus on what I think are actually the most influential and salient regions that are paradoxically the least represented in the popular historiography and Tropes. Italy, Flanders, Rhineland, South-Germany, Hanseatic etc.

But I shouldn't project either. France was France - in fact France was dozens of distinct provinces under the growing (cultural and political) influence of an increasingly powerful Monarchy. Italy was 100 city states, Flanders was 50 City States under a crafty Duke, Central Europe was 200 small Free Cities with 500 principalities and 7 Great Families Electors. They all had their own ideas, their own legends.


What I'm saying is I think it's very fraught to lump all this together into one thing.

Each of these tiny polities also had a very uneven and variegated level of indoctrination into Christianity and in many cases, their own regional variants of it, as well as varying degrees of Latin (or sometimes Greek) cultural influence, and new cultural innovations which were happening at a very rapid pace particularly in the most dynamic regions. This is precisely what happened in the Lange D'Oc in Southern France, their rapid local cultural growth had crossed over into 'editing' their own regional version of Christianity (at least among a relatively small if influential minority of people) and the Church reached a breaking point where they could no longer tolerate that, thus leading to the destruction of that region.

In other places however they weren't so successful - Bohemia defied them successfully and after the 1420's the Church had very little influence there.

The Church wasn't going to lead an inquisition into Switzerland to revise their practices and say, ban them from dressing up in Krampus costumes on 12th Night / Winter Solstace were they? Who would lead the army there to do it?

In many places, cultural homogeneity was not the rule, quite to the contrary. The Church tried to manage it as best they could, but it was not as effective as people tend to think, in fact by the later part of the middle ages it was starting to unravel. The Reformation didn't come out of nowhere.


G

[snowblizz]

It's a bit of a cliche I know but the inuit have dozens or hundreds of words for 'white' right? We see all the same shades they do but don't focus on them as much, they are more transitory for us because less precisely defined.

That's most likely not true at all. Not in the least as Iniut (the language) doens't have "words2 per se.

Usually it's "X words for snow" and that "saying" has been debunked for decades.

[Storm Bringer]

That's most likely not true at all. Not in the least as Iniut (the language) doens't have "words2 per se.

Usually it's "X words for snow" and that "saying" has been debunked for decades.

It kinda does, but kinda doesn't.

Several of the Iniut languages (there are many related languages) are additive, in the sense that modifier words in English are added to the base word as prefixes or suffixes. So for example "wet snow", or "deep snow" would be rendered as "wetsnow" or "snowdeep" or some such.


ergo, they have only a few words for "snow", but you can create a great number of single words that describe different types of snow.



however, its been proven in tests that people who work in colour related occupations have a much greater ability to distinguish. identify and remember shades of colour than the "average" population. the test I heard about involved showing the subjects three colours (such as a red and two different shades of grey), then asking them sometime later what colours they were shown. Most people could remember the non-similar colour, but couldn't remember much about the two similar shades (they'd remember they were shades of grey, but couldn't say if shade 2 was brighter or darker then shade 3, for example). However, people like graphic designers, interior decorators and such. who worked with lots of colours, were much better at getting the shades correct. Also, while "Normal" people would say they saw "a red and two greys", those that worked with colours tended to give answers like "Garnet Red, Slate Grey and Pewter Grey".

[ExLibrisMortis]

That's most likely not true at all. Not in the least as Iniut (the language) doens't have "words2 per se.

Usually it's "X words for snow" and that "saying" has been debunked for decades.

The various Inuit languages tend to be agglutinative, meaning they (can) add a lot of morphemes (non-basic/indepenent unit of meaning) onto a lexeme (basic/independent unit of meaning) to express things that English would use multiple words for. That doesn't mean they don't have words, though.

As for having a hundred words for snow: that depends on how metaphorical you're allowed to get, as it does for every language.

[Deepbluediver]

For armor, it wouldn't usually be just one guy making it. It would be a workshop. For one guy to make a whole "suit" of armor ... it would take a while. Months.

Same for swords though it's a bit less involved. You still have a cutler who designs the sword and supervises the whole thing, an ironmonger who provides the steel and / or iron billets (this made in a blast furnace or bloomery forge which would be a fairly large scale operation), a blade maker who forges the blades from the billets, a hilt maker who makes the hilt and scabbard, another smith who specializes in heat-treating the blades, a sharpener and a polisher.

At any one time many blades would be in different stages of production, they were usually done in batches of 20 or 50.

The whole thing could be done for one blade though fairly quickly if you rushed it. I think there are reality TV shows where they make a halfway decent sword in 48 hours or so. More normally it would probably be more like at least 2 weeks.

That's very useful, thank you. Most TV shows, movies, cartoons, etc, show a single blacksmith (occasionally with an apprentice) working alone in his shop. It sounds like that's the equivalent of one guy assembling Ford pickup-trucks in his garage. So it's not exactly impossible, but historically inaccurate.

[snowblizz]

As for having a hundred words for snow: that depends on how metaphorical you're allowed to get, as it does for every language.

Which they absolutely do not. Proven by linguists, there are 4 (though if it was Inuit or another one I can't recall). The idea about the "X amounts of words" is totally bogus.

And when 1 "word" is an entire sentence (say your entire quoted reply in one "word") of sounds they don't exactly have "words" in a way to compare it to English words. Because you can't compare words like that in any langauge for it to have any meaning.

I've read a linguist taking that idea to absurdum in comparing Swedish and English to prove just about anything, because Swedish has loads of suffixes (compared to English). I belive it was "X is more complex than Y because it has more words" that was the question being answered.

ergo, they have only a few words for "snow", but you can create a great number of single words that describe different types of snow.

however, its been proven in tests that people who work in colour related occupations have a much greater ability to distinguish. identify and remember shades of colour than the "average" population. the test I heard about involved showing the subjects three colours (such as a red and two different shades of grey), then asking them sometime later what colours they were shown. Most people could remember the non-similar colour, but couldn't remember much about the two similar shades (they'd remember they were shades of grey, but couldn't say if shade 2 was brighter or darker then shade 3, for example). However, people like graphic designers, interior decorators and such. who worked with lots of colours, were much better at getting the shades correct. Also, while "Normal" people would say they saw "a red and two greys", those that worked with colours tended to give answers like "Garnet Red, Slate Grey and Pewter Grey".

Uh-huh. And I describe purples as Imperial Purple, Warlock Purple, Regal Blue etc becasue that's was the name of the paints I used to paint minaiture soldiers. Nor does it have much meaning to differentiate between a dozen different purple shades. Which is entirely besides the point that I can't find any basis for the "they know X colours" other than that it sounds awfully similar to the exact same claim about snow that has no basis in facts.

None of this actuially is germain to my main point was that the posited claim seems to be entirely made up (and rendered almost exaclty like a similar false aphorism. And circles back into how difficult it is to make guesses based on words without the context.