I've done a little research work these past days, and I've stumbled across, the title might be a hint, free books!

The University Publisher of Kassel University offers books (dissertations, but other types as well) both as printed volumes and as pdf downloads, the latter being entirely free. You can see the whole programme of the publisher here.

Two books that I came across that may be interesting for you, too, are Presche, Christian: Kassel im Mittelalter and Wolkewitz, Ursula: Die gravierten Messinggrabplatten des 13. und 14.Jahrhunderts im Bereich der norddeutschen Hanse - ihre Herkunft und ihre Bedeutung.

There might be more, but unfortunately there is no good search function for the catalogue, and I have not had the time (nor the inclination or patience) to click my way through the long list. In case you find something interesting, too, please let the rest of us know in the comments!

It's Friday, the cat is sleeping, and everything is "back to normal" as in "I thought I'd get much, much more done this week".

At least we have proper winter weather here at the moment, with temperatures below zero and a nice snow cover on the ground. That makes cycling a bit slower, and somewhat both more exciting and more exhausting, but it is feeling really good to have season-adequate weather for a change. (It's also really, really good for the bees, who need colder weather so that the varroa mite situation can be kept under control in the hives.)

So while I'm trying to catch up a bit, here's some links for your delectation and procrastination possibilities!

British History Online is offering all their research free online until April, to make things a little easier for everyone during the lockdown. The online content includes the Calendar of Close Rolls, covering the reigns of Henry III to Henry VII (1244 to 1509).

If that's not colourful enough for you, here's a textiles, garments, and dye glossary. It's an ongoing project for terms from the 17th century.

There's a seminar series called "The Silk Road seminar series", run via Zoom, on several Mondays and some Fridays. It's hosted by the UCL Institute of Archaeology; find out more about it here.
Finally, here's the archive of the Zeitschrift für Lübeckische Geschichte.

Have fun, and a nice weekend!

I've stumbled across a mention of an upcoming deadline for the Janet Arnold Awards - that is a grant given out by the Society of Antiquaries of London. The current awards will focus on dress in colonialism and its legacy; deadline for award applications are in January 2021.

If you think that might be interesting for you, or if you know someone with a project that might be given a grant by the foundation, check out their info page about the awards. And in case you apply: Best of luck!

It's hard to believe that it's blogiversary day again, and that this blog is now another year older. I'd never have imagined that it would stay an almost (work-)daily part of my life for so long when I started it back in... let me check... 2008.

So - happy 12th birthday, Blog! There might be some bit of celebratory cake this afternoon here, because any excuse is good for having cake. This certainly counts as one. And you, as a reader of this, are obviously also provided a reason to have cake, too. Having to celebrate this blogiversary, and so on.

So... thank you for reading, and for commenting here! It is always delightful to get comments, to know that the things here are being read and that some of them are proving useful.

By the way - do you have any favourite birthday cake recommendations?

 

We have three doors in our home that have a glass inset, and they are each decorated with a coat of arms. When we moved in, we were told that these had some meaning for the family who built the house and lived here in the first place, but we never looked into it more.

This weekend, after being told that one is the coat of arms of Cologne City, we had a little rootle to try and find out more about the others. It was interesting, even though we remained unsuccessful - it's not so easy to look for specific arms when you don't know how to describe them, and even then it can get complicated.

I've always been half-amused and half-fascinated about the special language of description used when talking about coats of arms. Colours are not red and blue, but gules and azure; there's rules about using metal (white or yellow) and colours on each other; there's bits that are to be included in the description, as they are relevant for telling one variation from another, and bits that are down to artistic license. So I know enough about heraldry to know I don't know much at all - and not sufficient to use portals and search engines to track what we have on these doors.

If you'd like to have a look at some coats, you can do so in the wappenwiki.org, which lists coats of arms from Europe and beyond, starting from those dating back to 1100. It does not have the blazons, unfortunately.

An introduction in the different colours, arrangements, and motifs can be found here. More about the art of describing, also called blazoning, is offered on the website of the Heraldry Society.

There's a bunch more pages, and registers, and databases on the 'net. Enjoy the rabbit hole!

It's time for a link onslaught again - there's way too many tabs open here with things that are hopefully interesting for you, too!

If you understand German, here's a hilarious video about the (not-so-hilarious) ongoing debate in the EU parliament about the budget. It will be... interesting to see how this will end. I do hope that the 25 states who have not vetoed will not give in; that would not only be a bad thing but also the wrong signal for all bullies.

If you live in Germany and share my feeling that there's not enough happening to slow down the climate change, you can sign a petition for the Bayerischer Landtag asking for a greener distribution of funds. Here's the text of the petition, and here's where you can sign.

In case French in Medieval England (and learning it) sounds intriguing to you, take a look at this site, which is about the "Tretiz". There's also a Twitter account to go with it.

More old manuscripts, all digitised, can be found in the Virtual Library of Lauresham. The monastery in Lorsch once, in the Middle Ages, had a large number of books and was quite famous. It's not possible to bring the books back to Lorsch in reality, due to a number of reasons, but digitisation of manuscripts allows a virtual reconstruction of the medieval library - which is free to access.

And now on to some other, more textile-y stuff: There's a Research Center for Medieval Nubia, and it has an online textiles database. There's also an interesting article about textile analysis on the page, in case you're not familiar with this and would like to read an introduction.

More textile stuff: Eventbrite has tickets for several events by the Gawthorpe Textile Collection, taking place as online presentations. You can get insights into the collection for a very affordable 5 GBP per ticket, and the money goes right back to the collections, helping to keep them alive.

Are you a medievalist, and on your own? You might want to check out The Lone Medievalist, which is committed to support those of us not within a local academic network of medievalists, and help form a network.

And finally, if you're using graphs in any form or way, or colour-code things - here's an article about how to choose colours that will let your work be readable to colour-blind people as well. There's not only an explanation about what colourblindness is, and how it happens, but there's also graphics showing what the effects are (as in this is how the colour scale looks with condition X or Y).

That's it for now - hope there's something for you in the list!

Random pictures! No, not here - though speaking of it, you could actually have one:



The random pics I am talking about are actually on my phone... and are helping me to learn Finnish. I've posted a while ago about some of the things I learned about language learning over the years. One of the things that is a rather new tool for me, and that I enjoy a lot, is getting little images and charts and explanation pics via feeds on Instagram. There's a hashtag that I follow where a lot of these turn up, and if there's an especially helpful one, or funny one, I take a screenshot and save the image.

However, having the stuff is good, but not completely helpful yet - these things will only get more language into my brain if I can actually see them. So I've looked for a smartphone widget that picks random images from a folder and displays them.

There's a few of them in the GPlay app store, but most free ones that I tried had some trouble, or cut off the image if it did not by chance fit the frame, or were otherwise annoying. But a few days ago, by pure chance when looking again, I found one written by a German developer called Zufallsbild. This little thing does exactly what it should - you can select a folder or several folders and have it swap the image after a given time, or swap to the next one yourself. It scales the image to fit into the frame, too. Which means that I'm now very happy, and get to see all the nice and funny things on my phone home screen, one after the other.

So if you're looking for an android app for displaying images on your phone, because just having all those funny or nice or beautiful things is not enough... maybe it's the thing for you, too!