[Steppes] Period Week in Review 08-06 through 08-12-2006

[Mike]

Heilsa,


Hope the reader will enjoy this look at History
within Period - both from the past and the present
as it affects the history that is known today.

Week in Review 08-06 through 08-12:

August 6th:

Modern Day
Scotland   3500BC through 20th Century
Women Warriors Website
Lothene, an Edinburgh based group involved in researching and
recreating aspects of life in Scotland in the 11th century, has
produced a website listing links related to women as warriors
throughout history.
 From the website:
"Throughout history war and fighting have been seen as men's
activities, however women have always been
involved in battles and sieges, not to mention duels, prizefights
and so on."
Website:  http://www.lothene.demon.co.uk/others/women.html
"The first time it was fathers, the last time it was sons
In between your husbands marched away with drums and guns
And you never thought to question,
you just went on with your lives
And all they taught you who to be was
                  Mothers, Daughters, Wives"
(The Corries)
The most common occasion on which women would take part in
battles was when their home, castle or town was attacked.
A medieval lady would have expected to take charge of defence
in her husband's absence. Some exceptional women like Boudiccia
and Joan of Arc also led attacking armies. There were also a few
women disguised themselves as ordinary soldiers or sailors in
armies through the ages.

August 7th:
Modern Day
England 
Roman Empire  Before 601
Roman Road Leads Nowhere   The Romans were a methodical
people, not given to acts of folly - so why did they apparently
build a road to nowhere? Known as the Peddars Way, it is a
typically straight track marching from near Thetford directly
through the heart of west Norfolk until it peters out at an isolated
coastal spot at Holme, and is now favoured by walkers
and cyclists. Peddars Way near Thetford in west Norfolk, England,
was built by the Romans 2,000 years ago and
appears to lead nowhere. Archaeologists are now searching for
clues to a destination, such as a fort, which
would make construction of the road logical. "Usually the routes
ended at a fort or garrison, or had another obvious
destination," said Andrew McCloy in his book Exploring Roman
Britain. "Here you come out at Holme, and you
think, Why? Where were the Romans going?" McCloy believes
the road might have led to a ferry port. There
was a Roman settlement at nearby Brancaster, known as
Branodunum, but if that had been the destination they
would surely have gone straight there instead of hitting the
coastline and then meandering eastwards for a couple
of miles. Peddars Way was one of a number of routes that the
Romans carved through East Anglia, and was
probably finished around 70 AD. Its name is more recent,
however, referring to its use as a thoroughfare for pedlars.
It has been designated a National Trail, and runs from
Knettishall Heath near Thetford for 46 miles to the sea,
passing near Anmer, Fring and Ringstead before meeting the
dunes at Holme. Andrew says there is little else quite like it.

Modern Day
England  Time Period  1001 - 1100
Researchers excavating a site in Bolsterstone, England believe
they may have found the home of Robin Hood. Experts base
their claim on the belief that the mythical Robin Hood was based
on the son of the Earl of Huntingdon. The excavation,
in the South Yorkshire village, is of an 11th century castle
believed to be the home of Robert Fitzwalter, an archer who
became known as Robin Hood.

August 8th:
Modern Day
Italy  Time Period  1401 - 1500
And they say women have trouble deciding what to wear.
An X-ray and infrared analysis of the portrait called Laura by the
Venetian artist Giorgione indicates that at one stage she may have
been wearing a round-necked dress instead of the present
transparent veil across her chest. Later, the artist broadened
the fur collar of her jacket and added a piece of fur around her
waist, limiting the area of skin shown.
"The repeated changes to the woman's costume show Giorgione
in the process of inventing a daring new type of image: the
seductive female," an explanatory panel concludes.
The portrait, painted in the early 1500s, is included in a National
Gallery of Art exhibit of 52 paintings by Venetian artists of the
same time period. Some of the works have been scientifically
analyzed. X-rays and reflectography, using infrared light, have
disclosed under-drawings that show the artist's original idea --
often changed in the course of actual brushwork. Barbara Berrie,
senior conservation scientist at the gallery, said early X-rays
arose out of collectors' wish to preserve pictures as completely
as possible, to detect cracks and chips not visible to the naked
eye. Her own scientific examinations have found that the special
glow of the light in Venetian paintings has to do with tiny bits of
glass the artists often mixed into their pigments. In the early
1500s, Italians were taking great interest in ancient literature, its
tales of nymphs and muses and love between gods and mortals.
One quintessentially Venetian theme is the female nude and
eroticism, Brown told reporters. At least 22 of the 52 pictures in
the show have religious subjects. Despite the new interest in
pagan themes for paintings sold to the nobility and rich business
people, artists still depended for their living on work for churches
and their devoted parishioners. Ms. Berrie said the Venetian
painters did not spare expense to get the complex effects they
wanted, even when viewers could not easily see how the effects
were produced. She pointed to one religious scene where the
bright blue of the Virgin Mary's cloak was achieved by putting a
highly expensive red pigment underneath the blue. One of the
most famous images in the show, making its first visit to the
United States from the Louvre in Paris, is a Pastoral Concert now
generally attributed to Titian. Many critics consider him the
greatest of the Venetians. It depicts two well-dressed young men
of the 1500s, one playing a lute, with a nude woman on either
side of the group. The women may be nymphs or muses. One is
seated, a flute in hand, looking toward the men. The other woman
leans on the side of a well, her head turned toward it, away from
the men. An X-ray study of the nude at the well revealed a drawing
underneath that shows her "face turned toward her companions,"
says a note in the exhibition catalog. "Bellini, Giorgione, Titian
and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting" will be at the National
Gallery through Sept. 17. Admission is free. Afterward, the
collection will go to the Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum
in Vienna, which joined with the gallery in organizing the exhibit,
Oct. 18, 2006 to Jan. 7, 2007.

Modern Day
International Congress on Medieval Studies.
Papers by Re-enactors Sought for 42nd International Congress
on Medieval Studies (May 10-13, 2007). Call for Papers.
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/
The organizers of the 42nd International Congress on Medieval
Studies, which takes place May 10-13, 2007 at Western
Michigan University in Kalamazoo, have announced that they are
seeking papers from re-enactors for this year's conference. Can
These Bones Come to Life? Insights from Re-construction,
Re-enactment, and Re-creation. "We invite dance historians,
musicians and musicologists, historical fencers, armorers,
brewers, theater historians and performers, textile researchers,
and scholars in other fields to submit papers for a unique
interdisciplinary session on the insights into history that can be
gained from attempts to reconstruct medieval arts, as well as
the historiographical issues involved in such work. Proposals
for papers should discuss insights gained by practical, hands-on
attempts to arts, how these insights modify existing scholarship
or solve a question, and the historiographical issues involved
therein, i.e., to what extent can we hope to play music, ride horses,
weave textiles, brew mead, or wield swords as medieval people
did and why." Deadline for proposals is September 15, 2006.
Visit the website for more information.

August 9th:
Modern Day
England  Time Period  1101 - 1200
England's Doomsady Book Online. The British National Archives
has an entire section of their website devoted to the Doomsday
Book including downloadable images. The site includes history
information, quizzes, games, activities for educators and an
online search engine. Website address:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/

Modern Day
England  Time Period  Roman Empire Before 601
Recreating Roman Cosmetics. A Roman reenactor and museum
manager gave a demonstration of Roman cosmetics at a
Roman "military spectacular" in Wales earlier this month.
Sally Pointer produced face creams and make-up from
authentic ingredients, but made substitutions from toxic
substances such as lead. Other ingredients the Romans
used for beautifying themselves were olive oil, beeswax,
saffron and rosewater.

August 10th:
Modern Day
England  Time Period
Janet Arnold Award Provides Research Funds for Costumers.
The Society of Antiquaries of London sponsors yearly awards of up
to UK£4000 "to further in-depth study of Western dress." The
Janet Arnold Award is presented in honor of the historical costume
expert who died in 1998. The award was established by Janet
Arnold herself to assure that funds would be available for in depth,
original research in the field of historical clothing. According to
the website: "Janet Arnold (1932 - 1998) made provision for the
establishment of this award in order to further in-depth study of
Western dress. Applicants must be able to demonstrate that they
wish to pursue a particular piece of original research based on
items of dress or their remains, with a view to eventually
disseminating knowledge gained with the award through
publication, display, cataloguing, teaching or through practical
use in conservation or accurate reproduction. The amount of
money for distribution in any one year will not exceed £4000."
Additional Information can be found online at the website:
http://www.sal.org.uk/grants/janetarnold.php

Modern Day
Istanbul  Byzantine Port Found. "Like Romans, Athenians and
other residents of the world's great historic cities, the residents
of Istanbul can hardly put a shovel in the ground without digging up
something important." Archaelogists working on the site of a new
subway station believe they have found a port from Byzantine times.
They are calling their find "the port of Theodosius" after the
Emperor of Rome and Byzantium who died in the year 395. They
are saying the items they're digging up here could shed
significant light on the commercial life of this ancient city, but so
far the find is not dated to a specific reign. The site includes a
number of sunken ships that appear to have been destroyed in
port by a storm. Archaeologists find what they think might be a
church, an old gate to the city and eight sunken ships, which
archaeologist Cemal Pulak says he believes were all wiped
out by a giant storm more than 1,000 years ago. Meanwhile,
wall sections that are believed to be part of the Constantine Wall
were unearthed in the western part of the excavation site,
said Karamut. He added that underground graves dating to
the fourth century were also unearthed in the same region.

August 11th:
Modern Day
Cosmologists Find Truth in Medieval World.
In The View from the Center of the Universe, Joel R. Primack and
Nancy Ellen Abrams point out the similarities between ancient beliefs
about a terracentric universe and recent discoveries about the results
of the Big Bang. The last time Western culture shared a coherent
understanding of the universe as a comforting cosmic dwelling place
was in the Middle Ages. For a thousand years, Christians, Jews,
and Muslims believed that the earth was the immovable center of
the universe and all the planets and stars revolved on crystal
spheres around it. The idea that God had created a place for
every person, animal, and thing in the Great Chain of Being made
sense of the rigid medieval social hierarchy. But this picture was
destroyed by early scientists like Galileo, who discovered about four
hundred years ago that the earth is not the center of the universe
after all. The idea of the cosmic hierarchy lost its credibility as the
organizing principle of the universe and was replaced with the
Newtonian picture: a universe of endless emptiness randomly
scattered with stars, with our solar system in no special place.
This picture was not based on evidence but was an extrapolation
from Newtonian physics, which explains accurately the motions
of the solar system but not the entire universe. But the modern world
has so deeply absorbed this bleak picture that it seems like reality
itself. Most of us have grown up thinking that there is no basis for
feeling central or even important to the cosmos. But with the new
evidence it turns out that this perspective is nothing but a
prejudice. There is no geographic center to an expanding
universe, but we are central in several unexpected ways that
derive directly from physics and cosmology. We are at the center
of all possible sizes in the universe, we are made of the rarest
material - stardust - and we are living at the midpoint of time for
both the universe and the earth. These and other forms of centrality
have each been a scientific discovery, not an anthropocentric
way of reading the data. Prescientific people always saw
themselves at the center of the world, whatever their world was.
They were wrong on the details, but they were right on a deep
level: the human instinct to experience ourselves as central
reflects something real about the universe, something
independent of our viewpoint.

August 12th:
Modern Day
England  Law and Real Estates
Obscure Medieval Law Frustrates Britons
A law dating back to the Middle Ages is causing mayhem in the
British real estate market. According to the article: "Chancel
repair liability is a legal leftover from the Middle Ages that enables
some parishes to call upon owners of properties on former
church or glebe land to fund repairs to church buildings." Up to
a half-million properties may fall under this law. Chancel repair
liability languished in legal obscurity until 2003, when the parish
church of Aston Cantlow, Warwickshire, demanded £95,260 for
repair work from the owner of a house that had a long-known
chancel repair liability. The owners fought the case to the House
of Lords, where the Church of England won on appeal. The
problem prompted a typical British compromise -- the
Government gave churches until 2013 to register chancel repair
rights with the Land Registry. After that date, any unregistered
right will cease to exist after the house has changed hands. The
Church of England was unable to clarify matters. "It's not the
national Church of England doing this, it's the local Church of
England," says a spokesman. "The national Church has no
overview of what individual parishes decide."


YIS,
Lord Michael Kettering