More Medieval Research Resources

Purses in Pieces: Archaeological Finds of Late Medieval and 16th Century Leather Purses, Pouches, Bags and Cases in the Netherlands
by Olaf Goubitz

A Preview

The University of Chicago is celebrating the acquisition of a manuscript of Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) and its reunion with Le Jeu des échecs moralisé (The Moralized Game of Chess), a manuscript that has been in the Library’s collection since 1931.


The Electronic Middle English Dictionary

Digitized Manuscripts Containing Middle English

Royal Navy Stops Goat Tests

Somehow, this reminded me of Maturin and the goat...

British Pollsters Unable to Distinguish History from Myth 60% of the Time

Shame-faced Brits are increasingly confusing fact and fiction when it comes to historical knowledge – that's the verdict of a compelling new study which found that most people believe that fictional figures such as King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby really existed.

Well, yes, but not in the way they mean.

Here’s the list:

Top ten fictional characters that the British public thinks are real
• 1) King Arthur – 65%
• 2) Sherlock Holmes – 58%
• 3) Robin Hood – 51%
• 4) Eleanor Rigby – 47%
• 5) Mona Lisa -35%
• 6) Dick Turpin – 34%
• 7) Biggles – 33%
• 8) The Three Musketeers – 17%
• 9) Lady Godiva – 12%
• 10) Robinson Crusoe – 5%

OK, I think we can quibble about Arthur. I think there’s a good case to be made that there was an Arthur who was a significant historical figure, even if he probably wasn’t a king. And there probably was a historical outlaw called Robin Hood, even if he wasn’t much like the legend.

Dumas’s Three Musketeers are heavily fictionalized, but they, like d’Artagnan do seem to have been based on living individuals. There was certainly a real Lady Godiva, although that probably isn’t how they spelled her name in the Domesday Book. There was a historical Richard Turpin, famous highwayman. Mona Lisa was a real woman.

What are they teaching young folks who work for television stations these days?

Furthermore: Steve Muhlberger’s reaction to the survey brings up the overlap between history and fiction. Many figures from the past that matter to us are lightly historical, like Roland, Macbeth, Gruoch*, Lady Godiva and Sir Nigel Loring. The historical facts about them could be summed up in a few sentences. The fictional pearls that grew around the fragment of historical grit matter more to us.

Then there are the fictionally overshadowed figures who we actually know a fair amount about: Cleopatra, Richard the Lionhearted, William Wallace, Henry V, Vlad Tepes Dracula, Richard III, John Smith, d'Artagnan, Cyrano de Bergerac, Captain Bligh, Davy Crockett. Even if we know how the historical figure differed, it’s hard to keep the fictionalized version out of our head.

Finally, there are the self-invented personas of historical figures, intentionally created from a mixture of charisma, self-promotion and selective disclosure; possibly the truth but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill ("History will be kind to me for I intend to write it") and JFK, for example.

*AKA Lady Macbeth. She is never addressed by name in the Scottish play. Now you know why.

Who Did He Know?

Knowledge of the Past: the Knight of the Tour Landry

Earlier, I gave you a sample of the cultural literacy of two medieval gentlemen. One of them was Chaucer, who was probably unusually well read. I’ve removed him from the mix. What follows is a list is characters from the past, historical, mythical, literary or scriptural, that a moderately educated medieval gentleman, the Knight of the Tour Landry, knew about and wrote about. The Knight of the Tour Landry doesn’t seem to have been exceptionally scholarly.

You shouldn’t conclude that he necessarily read Homer, or even the Bible. He probably drew much of his cultural literacy from anthologies of edifying anecdotes and moral maxims, sermons, and other secondary sources.


The Old Testament
Aaron
Abraham
Absalom
Abigail
Adam
Ahab
Ahaziah
Anna
Ahasuerus
Ammon
Apame
Athiliah
Balaam
Bath-sheba
Ben-ammi
Daniel
David
Deborah
Delilah
Elkkanah
Elishah
Esau
Esther
Eve
Hannah
Haman
Hamor
Isaac
Jacob
Jehosheba
Jehu
Jeroboam
Jezebel
Joab
Job
Joacim
Joseph
Lot
Moses
Mordecai
Naboth
Noah
Onan
Penninah
Pharaoh
Rahab
Rachel
Rebecca
Ruth
Sampson
Sara
Sarah
Solomon
Sennacherib
Sheba, Queen of
Susanna
Tamar
Tamar (daughter of David)
Tobit
Uriah
Vashni
Zacharias
Zarah
Zimri

The Greeks
Helen
Menelaus
Paris
Priam

The Romans
Cato
Cato the Younger
Nero
Sybil, the

The New Testament
Herod, (Three Herods conflated)
Herodias
John the Baptist

Other
Brunhilda

Who Did They Know?

Knowledge of the Past for Chaucer and the Knight of the Tour Landry

What follows is a list is characters from the past, historical, mythical, literary or scriptural, that two educated medieval gentlemen, Chaucer and the Knight of the Tour Landry, knew about and wrote about. Chaucer’s mentions are drawn only from the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Cressida. Chaucer was unusually well read, but the Knight of the Tour Landry doesn’t seem to have been exceptionally scholarly.

You shouldn’t conclude that either necessarily read Homer, or even the Bible. Both, and particularly the knight, probably drew much of their cultural literacy from anthologies of edifying anecdotes and moral maxims, sermons, and other secondary sources.

The Old Testament
**Aaron
*Abraham
*Absalom
*Abigail
*Adam
**Ahab
**Ahaziah
**Anna
*Ahasuerus
**Ammon
**Apame
**Athiliah
**Balaam
Belhazzar
**Bath-sheba
**Ben-ammi
*Daniel
*David
**Deborah
*Delilah
**Elkkanah
**Elishah
**Esau
**Esther
**Eve
**Hannah
**Haman
**Hamor
Holfrenes
*Isaac
Isaiah
*Jacob
**Jehosheba
**Jehu
Jeremiah
**Jeroboam
**Jezebel
**Joab
*Job
**Joacim
**Joseph
Judas Macabeus
Judith
Leah
**Lot
*Moses
**Mordecai
**Naboth
Nebuchadnezer
**Noah
**Onan
**Penninah
**Pharaoh
**Rahab
**Rachel
*Rebecca
**Ruth
*Sampson
**Sara
**Sarah
*Solomon
**Sennacherib
**Sheba, Queen of
*Susanna
**Tamar
**Tamar(daughter of David)
**Tobit
**Uriah
**Vashni
**Zacharias
**Zarah
**Zimri

The Greeks
Achilles
Alceste
Alexander (poisoned)
Amphiorax
Antenor
Archemorus
Athamas
Calchas
Capaneus
Cassandra
Circe
Clymenestra
Croesus
Cyrus
Darius
Deiphebus
Deianira
Diomede
Eteocles
Ipomedon
Simois
Theseus
Haemonides
Hector
*Helen
Hercules
Hippolyta
Medea
Meleager
**Menelaus
Menestheus
Midas
Oedipus
Pandar
*Paris
Parthenope
Pasiphae
Philippe
Polites
Polydamas
Polynestor
Polynices
*Priam
Ptolemy
Sarpedon
Synon, the Trojan Horse
Socrates
Troilus
Tullius (Marcus Tullius Cicero)
Tydeus
Xanthippe
Xanthippus

The Romans
Aurelian
Boethius
Brutus
Cassidorus
Cassius
*Cato
**Cato the Younger
Claudius
Dares Phrygius
Dictes Cretensis
Galien
Hasdrubal
Julius Caesar
Juvenal
Lucrece
*Nero
Ovid
Pompey
Portia
Seneca
*Sybil, the
Tarquin
Tullius Hostillius
Turnus
Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra

The New Testament
*Herod, (Three Herods conflated)
**Herodias
*John the Baptist

Britain
Arthur
Lancelot

Other
Pope Urban
*Brunhilda
Piers Alfonse
Hugelino, Count of Pisa
Petro of Spain
Petro of Cyprus
Barnabo of Lombardy

*Chaucer (CT or Troilus and Cressida) and Tour Landry
**Tour Landry only

Tourney Swords

The 15th century tournament sword described by King Rene had a blunt point and edge. There is a tendency to assume that this was equally true for earlier tournaments.

However, while the late 13th century English Statute of Arms prohibits the use of pointed swords and knives in tournaments, it says nothing about the edge: the permitted weapon is an espee large pur turneer.

In the middle of the 14th century, Geoffroi de Charny wrote series of questions about possible scenarios in jousts, tournaments and war. In his ninth hypothetical question about tournaments, he imagines a scenario in which a knight is pulled to the ground and his opponents cut the girths and breastplate of his saddle. If the only allowed weapons are tourney swords, what did they use to make the cuts? Does that mean that the edges of tourney swords could still be sharp when he was writing?

What is Conservatism?

Liberalism and conservatism in America today don’t so much define coherent philosophies as temporary coalitions of ideas and interest groups flying in loose formation. Laissez fair economics, government regulation of sexual relations, a strong military and a willingness to use it: these ideas don’t necessarily go together. Neither does the combination of government intervention in the economy, sexual libertarianism, environmentalism and a dovish foreign policy.

Neither do the political parties map cleanly to conservative or liberal.

Here’s an interesting site that maps legislators spatially based on how often they voted with or against the majority. Here’s the last 50 Senate votes. You can see that although a clear party difference on economic conservatism/liberalism (using liberal in the New Deal sense). there’s a lot of more overlap in the social liberty dimension. The wing of the Democratic Party that’s more socially liberal than the most liberal republican is fairly small, and so is the group of Republicans that’s more socially conservative than the most conservative Democrat.

This puts things in perspective when one Republican candidate complains that another candidate is “out of the conservative mainstream.” Try and graph that spatially.

Margins of Error in Iraq

Let me start by saying that finding out what is actually happening in Iraq is very difficult, and that actually gathering that information requires admirable courage.

That said, I think that those that try and make sense of what’s going on there need to display at least a minimal level of introspection, humility, and recognition of how limited our information is.

In September 2007, the British polling survey firm ORB issued a survey from Iraq that suggested that more than a million Iraqi citizens had died violently since the invasion. The ORB website used a less neutral term: “murdered”.

ORB’s core competency seems to be the familiar western opinion survey by random phone interview. That isn’t actually very relevant to doing a cluster sample mortality survey in a war zone. And the survey work itself was done by an Iraqi firm, IIACSS, that didn’t exist before 2003, founded by an Iraqi with apparently only limited formal training in survey methodology.

This may not be as much of an issue in surveying public opinion. Similar opinions may be broadly spread through either the Iraqi population as a whole or regional subsets. If so, exactly where you sample may not affect results too seriously.

Violent mortality, on the other hand, can be lumpy. It’s pretty clear that some parts of Iraq are a lot more violent than others, and even when you get down to the local neighborhood some blocks or even houses can be can be lot luckier than others, or the reverse. Mortality surveys are very sensitive to even small sampling errors.

ORB doesn’t seem to have provided a lot of added value in terms of oversight and quality control. They originally reported that the survey was based on “a nationally representative sample.” Later, they admitted that the original survey was “undertaken in primarily urban locations” Given that about a third of Iraqis live in rural areas, this is a significant omission, and ORB failed to disclose the choice when the results were first published. They should have. When they did a follow up survey and sampled more rural areas, they reduced their initial estimate of violent deaths by about 200,000.

Their latest press release on the study indicates that it covered "112 unique sampling points". That is, it was a cluster sample of the sort used by other researchers in Iraq. It wasn’t the 2,163 independent observations you’d get if you did that number of random phone interviews. ORB calculated their margin of error as though it was that number of independent observations, not the much larger margin of error for a cluster sample of that number of households. This not only grossly understates the level of uncertainty in the estimate, but makes you wonder how well they understand this sort of work.

And even when theoretical sampling error is correctly calculated, that doesn’t include other sources of uncertainty. Researchers make subjective decisions on when to skip areas because of security or other issues, and when to do follow up interviews of clusters missed for these or other reasons, violating a truly random sample. Survey teams may curbstone, or invent responses, particularly when the risks of carrying out the survey are as real as they are in Iraq. There may be errors in tabulating the data.

The survey was originally published with a glaring error in Baghdad’s religious composition undetected. This does not speak well for ORB’s diligence in checking for possible error, bias or fraud.

Collecting the number, age and sex of household members is a powerful tool for checking the plausibility of the sample in a mortality survey. It is unfortunate that neither the ORB survey nor Burnham et al did so, since the absence of this data limits the credibility of the information gathered at considerable personal risk by the survey teams.

Follow up visits by supervisors is another powerful check of survey accuracy. I think it’s important for those publishing survey results in Iraq to disclose if this was done, as well as the number of sampling points and what factors, if any, were used in weighting the raw data.