Via an link at medievalist.net, I stumbled across this really interesting article in the Scientific American. It's a look at the Icelandic saga of Egil, a man of heroic stature and singular ugliness. There are quite a lot of descriptions of this man, including poems he supposedly wrote himself with complaints about body conditions, that according to this article all hint on him having an illness called Paget's Disease, a disease causing abnormal growth of bone.

I found this article fascinating due to two reasons. Firstly, it (again) shows that it is a good thing to look at a given historical source from all different kinds of angles and perspectives, not only literary or historical. And secondly, it shows in a very impressive way that the oral tradition that served to hand down the saga material from its start to it being written down at least a century later must have been very accurate in passing from one "carrier" to the next one, preserving all the details and hints that led to this diagnosis in 1995. I totally recommend reading this article!

When doing my daily bit of aimless link-clicking yesterday, I stumbled across a very, very interesting article via medievalists.net, titled "The codpiece: Social fashion or medical need?" The short version of the article: The development of the prominent codpiece might be closely connected to a strain of Syphilis running rampant at that time, with symptoms including swelling of the genitals and treatment involving local bandages that, in addition to the swollen private parts, have to go somewhere.

This, to me, is another proof that clothes and what we call today the "development of fashion" are connected closely to a lot of other areas of daily life, even to things like illnesses. Availability (or scarcity) of certain materials and colours, climate changes, influences by marriages in the upper crust, availability or scarcity of food, work or travel requirements and social signaling, age and wealth as well as fads in the smaller social groups one is involved in and, of course, personal taste all blended (and still blend) together to a complex influence on the wardrobe of each person in history.

This blend is so complex that we will never be able to pinpoint all its ingredients for a person that lived in history - it would probably not even be possible to correctly analyse the blend for a person currently living, I suppose, since a lot of the elements are probably not things said person reflects upon. However, that makes this article about a connection between illness and fashion even more delightful to me: There is another factor that can actually be traced by an interdisciplinary approach, adding more knowledge about the mix. And at the same time, this proves that a) looking beyond one's own discipline is a really, really good thing and b) that we can never be too open-minded when we are looking at the history of garment development.

By the way, if you don't know medievalists.net yet, make sure to take a look around - it's a very interesting page!

Well, actually, the blogiversary was yesterday. Which I had written in my calendar to make sure that this year I would not again forget when the blogiversary was, and write a post on the actual day.

And then I remembered after posting the blog entry.

So... as of yesterday, this little blog of mine is two years old, and has grown very dear to me in that time. Blogging in the morning has become a daily little ritual (not so little on the days that I find inspiration, though, and write a longer bit), and I actually look forward to blogging again when I've been off-blog for a while.

But a blog is never only about writing - it's only a proper blog if it does get read and enjoyed as well. And blogiversary is, of course, a wonderful opportunity to ask you readers: If you could wish for something on this blog, what would it be? A topic that should be covered more often? Something that has come up too frequently for your taste? Anything else? (Of course I give no guarantees that I will actually fulfil these wishes, but hey, worth a try, isn't it?)

Just like all youngsters in my generation, I had to learn a tiny bit of Middle High German when I went to school. But unlike most of my classmates, that old German language somehow fascinated me immensely, and I really enjoyed learning the old-style words of that little poem we had to know by heart (and then recite).

I don't really remember when I immersed myself deeper into that old language, but I picked up enough of it during my time at the Uni to be able to read most texts fluently (with occasional help of a dictionary) and translate the texts into modern German. And that is an immense help, of course, when hunting for garment descriptions and clothes in context, a part of research that I also like very much. Those texts, with their garment descriptions and focus on beauty and fashion in some of them are really invaluable to get an idea of how clothes were supposed to look and what was important for them to fit correctly and give the right picture to the contemporaries; and when I'm looking for text passages about special items, I always turn to the MHDBDB. In case that doesn't ring a bell for you (yet): That's the Middle High German Conceptual Database where you can search for a term and get it with a bit of context from a large number of texts.

And sometimes I want to read a bit more of that text, to see if I have the context correctly or to know a bit more about the scene including my term-in-context, and for that, there's an internet solution as well: Middle High German texts on the Net. So in case you feel a need to read some of them, here's my link list:

Digitales Mittelhochdeutsches Textarchiv
Mediaevum.de
Anthology of Medieval German Literature
Biblioteca Augustana
Erlanger Liste (scroll way down)

Enjoy! (There's a bit of English info in the Anthology, plus translations into modern German, if that is of help for you.)

I stumbled over a batch of nice links recently, and I'm finally sharing them with you:

The Anjou Bible is fully digitalised and online - you can see it here. The Book Viewer is in Dutch, but the icons' functions are very, very obvious, so you should have no problem looking at the pictures.

I also stumbled across a site called Decameron Web with an article about sexual positions in the Middle Ages. There's also a lot of other resources and information about the Decameron there, including an Italian and English version of the text.


And finally, there's an interesting non-medieval project going on: An artist called Christopher Salmon is on the quest for money to make a short film from Neil Gaiman's short story "The Price". The text will be read by Neil Gaiman himself, and there's stunning artwork in graphic-novel-style going with it.



If you like the teaser and want to support it, you can pledge money (starting from 10 Dollars) to the project. The money will only be deducted from your account if enough supporters can be found - the film is budgeted at 150.000 USD, and there's yet a ways to go until that amount is reached.

We now interrupt our regular programme for a completely unscheduled and unexpected "Hooray!"

Yesterday, I received an e-mail telling me this little blog here has made it to a Top-50-List which you can find here - it's called  50 best blogs for Medieval History Geeks. And I was totally stunned and amazed to be in one list with the Great Ones of Medieval blogging, like the Medieval Material Culture Blog, Got Medieval, Unlocked Wordhoard and many more.

If you don't know the other blogs on the list, do go check them out (that's time well spent) while I am here, feeling totally cool because I've actually been listed in a Best-Of-List. Hooray!

The Internet holds many surprises, and one of them is a searchable database associated with the book "Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, AD 450-700" (2007) by Penelope Walton
Rogers: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/archive/clothing_eh_2007/index.cfm

This covers the period AD 450-700 and includes 3802 records of textiles from 162 Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, searchable by using drop-down menus. I have only taken a very short look at it, and it will probably be most useful if you own the book the database goes with, but it might come in handy anyways...