It's been pretty busy lately, what with midterms and working 3 jobs and all sorts of other road blocks. Now I'm finally on downhill track for spring break, which is always a good feeling. I know I write a lot about the rare materials and manuscripts I work with up here, and I do that because I think it's the coolest thing about studying something like history up here. It's no wonder we have the #1 history department in the nation/world... It's due to the strength of our faculty, but also heavily due to our collections that allow for extensive primary document research on campus.

Today I had access to some of our restricted collections, including among other things an original Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, written in Middle English longhand around the year 1400. Think you can read Middle English? It's a bit more difficult than one would think.
I also used a document that I am writing my term paper for my Vikings class on - a scroll from 1275 CE on the Chronicles of the Kings of England...essentially the English monarchy's early family tree. In the early 1400s it was added to and updated, that time in Middle English. The original script from 1275 is in vulgar Latin. Just below is all Middle English. Not quite as foreign as Old English, but the difficult script may make it seem like a foreign language to most modern English speakers. It takes a lot of patience to read Middle English script.

You can see below where someone saw the text was fading, and (in what appears to be a 1500s-1600s script) decided to write over the original work. Not the best idea.

And below is the Kings of England Chronicles:

The very top circle in the picture below doesn't seem like a big deal, but it is. It's Cnut the Great...son of Sveyn the Forkbeard...the Danish viking kings who conquered and ruled over England for about a hundred years. That's why the bottom circle isn't connected to any more circles below. After a few rulers, the English House of Wessex took the throne back from the House of Denmark (the Danish vikings). Interestingly enough, Sveyn the Forkbeard is not listed on this scroll. There is another discrepancy on this scroll... the lack of a certain ruler. Perhaps one of the most famous rulers of all time, William the Conqueror, victor of the Battle of Hastings, was a Norman noble who crossed the English Channel and conquered England in 1066. Why so important? It's the last time England was successfully invaded. And William the Conqueror is conveniently missing from his rightful place, yet his son appears on the scroll. Apparently the scribe of this scroll either hated William the Conqueror, or decided he wasn't actually a monarch of England and decided to leave him off the scroll. Fascinating historical document, but even more fascinating are the historical implications of the discrepancies. 

Harold the Harefoot is below:

Below is King Richard, but also "Johannes Rex," or King John...the English king who was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Pretty neat stuff to quite literally see history unfold before your eyes on these old scrolls. This is what it's all about when you study History.

Below you see "Ricardus Rex"... Latin for King Richard...that is, Richard the Lionhearted, who fought Saladin and lead the Crusades against the Islamic Caliphate during his reign.

Probably one of the funniest things I saw is below: obviously the scribe hated King Edward...look how he depicted Edward...and he made that depiction to be the "E" in Edward's name!

"Henry Quartus," or Henry IV

This is all some pretty insane stuff if you know much about medieval history. I know, I probably find it much more cool than the average joe, though.

Today I took some time in between my classes to do some fun research at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where I work. I had the privilege of viewing and doing personal research on a very famous bible in European history: The King Christian III Bible. It was the first bible ever translated into the Danish language, and this bible was not just for the people of Denmark, but also for the people of Norway, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands. Whether you're interested in Northern European history or not, it's a fascinating (and famous) specimen of Medieval religious literature. I very much enjoy reading the medieval fraktur style of print. So the first picture is the beginning of Genesis.

Of course the pic below is Noah's Ark. 

I always find it fascinating how they depicted biblical scenes in the Middle Ages...they depicted them as knights in Western Europe.

Here is where it gets interesting. Up until the late Middle Ages, the Bible was believed to say (through the Vulgar Latin that Europeans originally read it in) in Exodus 34 verse 35 that 'Moses had horns on his forehead.' This was an inaccurate translation, and later it was corrected to the actual meaning that 'Moses' face shone while he talked with God.'

In Bibles this old (1550), the pictures in the Bible still depict Moses with horns. The picture below actually depicts Moses with horns. Moses is in the top right corner, receiving the tablets from God. Check it out. 

So the crisis with ISIS in the Middle East has been getting a lot of publicity over the past year or so, and the wounds were opened up this week as they brutally burned a young Jordanian pilot to death. These people are, quite frankly, unimaginably brutal. I know I'm not alone when I say those sorts of things make me physically sick to read about.
The medievalist within me has recently had me comparing the acts of terror in the Middle East to a different kind "Middle"... the Middle Ages.
Groups of people have been committing murder as far back as Cain and Able go, but for some reason there's a romantic association with violence in the Middle Ages.

From a historical perspective, the brutal events occurring in the Middle East give people today an absolutely exceptional window into the past. It may be an unwelcome and unsettling window to the past, but for historical purposes it is exceptional. And mind you, I don't mean to belittle any of the modern events in the Middle East or elsewhere by making comparisons out of them.

I think it's safe to say any red-blooded American (or normal human, for that matter) abhors the acts of ISIS in the Middle East. I sure do. We often think to ourselves "What kind of person would do such a thing? They must be monsters!" Yeah, well, they are.

But don't speak too soon. Who would do things like that? Your ancestors. Your great great (x20) grandfather would do such a thing. In fact, I'll argue that things were more brutal in the Middle Ages. Nowadays we're just so detached from those times that it is discussed without any care.

In October of 782 AD, the Charles the Great, or Charlemagne, brutally murdered (most contemporaries agree it was by beheading) over 4,500 Saxon prisoners in one day. 4,500 men beheaded in one day. And you thought ISIS was the most brutal group in history.

The massacre in October of 782 is just one of countless examples of extreme brutality in history. It has existed since the dawn of humanity. But, if you're willing to use your imagination for a minute or two, and think about the feelings of dread, sorrow and sickness that befell you when you read the ISIS beheading or burning headlines and when you saw the pictures, you can have a raw glimpse into how some events unfolded in the Middle Ages in Europe and across the world. You can not just read about, but also feel how the people of the world felt when swift brutality came to town...whether it was at the heels of Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, or the Emperor of Japan.
When we think about the context of historical events, I think it's incredibly important to analyze your sources and take every detail from the primary sources. Most of the time it involves putting yourself in the shoes of the subjects, and the widely publicized brutal events in the Middle East give us the opportunity to potentially feel what it was like to be a Muslim in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition, or to be a Saxon in the days of Charlemagne.

When you get the chance, take a couple to minutes to put today's events into the context of history, and then do the reverse - think of historical events as if they happened today, complete with widespread global media, social networks and the internet. It's pretty fascinating to think about.



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It has been pretty snowy recently, so here's some pictures of the (not-so-fun) snow. There's also a picture of a pretty cool/weird snow sculpture my roommate and I saw in the town square (the New Haven Green).

Also, at work this week I came across a couple neat things. First, this is telegraph to one of our professors in the 1800s from the Prince of Wales in the UK. I had never seen what a telegraph message looked like (obviously someone transcribed the message onto paper), so I thought it was cool. Also, this is an acceptance letter from that same guy that would become a professor at Yale someday. It's his acceptance letter to Yale in the 1800s. The funny thing is, room and board is only $3.50 per term.