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Random book from our home library.

A) I'm begging for a translation from Middle English quotes. I realize this is a textbook, but you can't assume everyone is a full-fledged medievalist already. I read Latin easier than thisse boulleshet.
B) 85F (30°c) in the shade doesn't help.

I actually still like the book a lot. just fucking. translate the Middle English.

Lots of illustrations, actually in colour too despite being in-line rather than those glossy sheafs of inserted images. I didn't love the snippets of fiction introducing each chapter; I understand their utility for some, but ugh, just get to the facts!

Most interesting fact: we don't think there really was an individual “scriptorium“ in most institutions. Book production probably just happened in cloisters.

Pre-exam brain is not making much headway with this right now, even though I find non-fiction soothing. Lots of history of Christianity, so far, which is pretty inevitable.

It's fascinating to read about the amount and variety of medieval graffiti in churches, and the fact that it seems clear some of it at least was sanctioned and even had a devotional purpose. The author concludes little, which is unsatisfying, but he isn't wrong that in many of these cases we simply cannot know.

This is interesting so far, but mostly... we don't really know how to explain a lot of the graffiti, so there are few conclusions we can come to. Every chapter ends with a kind of “but really, we don't know“, which is fair, I just wish we did know!

Recent home library acquisition:

📖 The Anglo-Saxon State by James Campbell

Which will win, my distaste for history of science or my love for medieval shit? Medieval shit, it turns out. A concise little summary of how it's wrong to label the medieval era as stagnant, with lots of interesting bits about engineering, astronomy, clockwork, but more importantly their impact on society. That said, Gimpel is VERY based in the mid-1970s and draw some far fetched (we've seen) conclusions about the fate of the western world.

Random book from our home library:

📖 Life in the Castle in Medieval England by John Burke

"... That christianity, by destroying classical animism, brought about a basic change in the attitude towards natural objects and opened the way for their rational and unabashed use for human ends..."