Beyond Crusading

A blog dedicated to the academic discussion of the crusades and the Latin East.

[hiveswap]

Everyone say thank you american indigenous people for cultivating corn, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cacao, pumpkin, squash, and anything i missed. Makes life more meaningful globally

[xiaguangmagpie]

Yes actually I will not shut up about how these foods are from the Americas/cultivated by the people there, and did NOT exist in Asia, Africa or Europe before the 1490s, there was an absolute food revolution going on in the 1500s. Whatever you think is traditional food for your country? Check again, you’ve maybe only been using that ingredient for maybe 500 years. Here is the full list of crops, it is very interesting :))

[demonagerie]

Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 291, detail of f. 170v. Rabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis. 1425

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[lesblackwidow]

reminder to visit museums, even if you feel out of place. you feel out of place because there is an established concept of inaccessibility of "high culture" to the masses, purposefully developed to distinguish between social classes.

take up space, read the plaques, get the audioguides. you are just as entitled and right in being there. visit museums, boycott museums, be expressive about your opinions about museums.

a lot of museums are free, or discounted for youth and students. take advantage of that. check your local art museum. check your local history museum. museums are there for you, they are there to educate the public, not to distinguish between class. it isn't a private collection, it's a public exhibit.

GO TO MUSEUMS!!!!!!!

[catilinas]

gandalf palaeography moment

[fluentisonus]

^ tolkien's illustrations of this btw

[consulships]

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

[literaryreference]

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.

When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.

[beyond-crusading]

If you have a computer at work, you must distract yourself from the horrors of capitalist exploitation by playing this text-based rpg when you play as the SFIO leading the French Governement between 1936-1939

I manage to enact a 40 hour work week, 2 weeks of paid leave and a pretty serious social safety net, but I dramatically failed to defend France against the German offensive 😔

[elierlick]

Thirty-year-old Tamara Rees shows us what trans empowerment looked like in 1954. She fought Nazis, taught parachuting, and traveled the world... but her biggest challenge came when the press learned of her identity.

1950s news coverage of Tamera Rees' transition shows a time before the trans moral panic. Most stories regarded her as brave or heroic for her openness. National newspapers even celebrated her wedding in 1955.

The New York Daily News, which now hosts daily anti-trans editorials, ran a shockingly respectful series on trans people in the 1950s. Tamara Rees's narrative was among the longest and most detailed. She thoughtfully implored the public to respect not only her identity, but also other trans people like her.

Tamara wasn't the first famous trans woman of the 1950s, nor was she the best known. However, she had a unique opportunity to share her own story. You can read Tamara's 1955 autobiography, Reborn: A Factual Life Story of a Transition from Male to Female, at transreads.org/reborn 

[upennmanuscripts]

Coffee with a Codex: Italian Book of Hours

An informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each

Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different manuscript and the expertise of one of our curators. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On April 23, Schoenberg Curator of Manuscripts Nick Herman will bring out Ms. Codex 688, a small, delicate book of hours from 16th century Italy.

Register here:

Coffee with a Codex: Italian Book of Hours

An informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each

[handweavers]

having institutional access never stops feeling sort of crazy to me because you can literally type in any country and time period and find at least a handful of peer reviewed articles somewhere that discuss a specific aspect of people's lives in depth and at length like "what was considered pop culture in late imperial russia" or "how did the textile trade work in northern mali in the 1600s" or "children's toys in pre-colonial philippines" and it's just sitting there but the majority of people on planet earth aren't allowed to read any of it

[discardingimages]

facial expressions Luttrell Psalter, England ca. 1325-1340.

British Library, Add 42130, fol. 104r

[upennmanuscripts]

I laughed so hard I woke up my cat

[ancient-rome-au]

My first proper sight-seeing happened on my walk to Ostia Antica through the town immediately outside the archaeological park. A way more enjoyable suburban experience than the equivalent in the USA. Very walkable and they've got a freaking castle!

[ancient-rome-au]

"Fortress of [Pope] Julius II" "Antiquarium of Ostia" If you have watched any of the various television series about the Borgia family, you may know this pope better from his earlier life as Cardinal della Rovere.

The entire time I was thinking to myself "this castle with a village inside is small enough that I could build something like it in Minecraft"

[resismedievalmenagerie]

There's a creature! In a hat! Idk wtf he's supposed to be but I'd die for him. This comes from a Book of Hours from ~1500, possibly owned by a woman named Joan Vaux.

[cuties-in-codices]

calendar pages for december (with people slaughtering a pig and singeing off its bristles)

from a richly illuminated book of hours, flanders, late 15th c.

source: Munich, BSB, Clm 28345, fol. 12v and 13r

[attackfish]

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

[koshercosplay]

[thoodleoo]

ancient dog names, courtesy of ovid

melampus: blackfoot

ichnobates: tracker

pamphagos: glutton

dorceus: gazelle

oribasos: hiker

nebrophonos: deercatcher

laelape: hurricane

theron: hunter

pterelas: wingy boy

agre: hunter 2

hylaeus: woody

nape: valley girl

poemenis: shep

harpyia: snatchy

ladon: bitey

dromas: speedy

canache: loudmouth

sticte: spot

tigris: tiger

alce: strong girl

leucon: whitey

asbolos: soot

lacon: howler

aello: stormy

thoos: fast boy

cyprius: cyprus boy

lycisce: wolfdog

harpalos: snatchy 2

melaneus: blacky

lachne: fuzzy girl

labros: rowdy boy

argiodus: white fang

hylactor: barker

melanchaetes: black-hair

theridamas: killer

orestriphos: mountain boy

[stickfiguregods]

It should be added that these all occur in one short passage as they eat their master Actaeon.

[elucubrare]

Another old element of speaking about the gods is the notion that the gods had a different language from men, such as when Homer(Il. 14.290–1) tells us that an owl is called chalkis by the gods but kumindis by men

Jan N. Brenner, The Gods of Ancient Greece 

1. Oh wow, that is fascinating! Does that mean they thought of the gods as another people? or was the difference just in language? or just in specific words - owls are sacred animals, maybe they had a special name among the gods? 

2. this is the two lines: 

ὄρνιθι λιγυρῇ ἐναλίγκιος, ἥν τ᾽ ἐν ὄρεσσι χαλκίδα κικλήσκουσι θεοί, ἄνδρες δὲ κύμινδιν.

in the likeness of the clear-voiced bird of the mountains,  which the gods call “chalkis”, and men “kumindis.”

AND THAT’S IT 

i am going to invent time travel just to throttle Homer for teasing me with that - okay, so the gods have a different word/language. Why? how do they communicate with humans? do they learn human speech to hear prayers? I have so many questions and this passage does nothing to help.

[endetithei]

<3

[terpsikeraunos]

there’s another example at odyssey 10.305-6, when hermes offers odysseus an herb to counteract circe’s magic:

μῶλυ δέ μιν καλέουσι θεοί: χαλεπὸν δέ τ᾽ ὀρύσσειν ἀνδράσι γε θνητοῖσι, θεοὶ δέ τε πάντα δύνανται.

“the gods call it ‘moly’: and it is difficult to dig for mortal men, but gods are capable of all things.”

[mask131]

I love how people rediscover that the gods are meant to be alien and not just super-powered humans. Sure they are human caricatures in many ways and very humans in many ways, that’s the point, but originally, the older in history and closer to religion you get, the more inhuman the gods are - they look different from humans naturally, they don’t breathe the same air, they don’t eat the same food, they don’t have the same blood, they reproduce differently, they don’t even have the same language…