The worst way to keep sources organised @medievalsnippets - Tumblr Blog

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I had a really large amount of random snippets from medieval armor books that I thought were interesting and I needed a way to filter them. So I've chosen the worst possible way with tumblrs tagging system.

Main Blog: @dimingwins Tumblr community for arms and armour: https://www.tumblr.com/join/u2-ENBjX

skeletonsonparade

help keep a trans man and his disabled mother off the streets

the landlord said we have 10 days to pay up or we get evicted. me and my mom have been job hunting nonstop with no success as well as trying to file for disability and unemployment. my mom has fibromyalgia which has steadily been getting worse especially since our housing situation has been as unstable as it is. any and all help is desperately appreciated.

my p.yp.l and my ko.fi

$62/$1600

#not a medieval post but this is a very good friend of mine. any support would be so appreciated

mediaeval-muse

Y'all wanna see some medieval mobility aides in manuscripts?

There are clues in the margins of medieval manuscripts to suggest that disabled people in the past made long pilgrimages, and were helped on

armthearmour

A beautiful cavalry armor for King Ferdinand V of Aragon and Sicily, Italian & Spanish, 1490-1500, housed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

#reblog #15th century

wearemercs

Posta di Finestra (The Window Guard) — from Fiore dei Liberi’s treatise by VeiArts

#14th century #art #reblog

fab-bladesmith

A Pollaxe XVth century

Based on a well known example at the @wallacemuseum with a few changes.

All the important parts are high carbon steel, the rest is mild steel. Haft is ash.

Brass highlights, with "tel le soleil" engraved in the hammer part.

About 185 cm overall, point of balance 63 cm from the point of the top dagger.

2746 grams.

#15th century #poleaxe

"Item in Norway we captured a strong castle that is called Älvsborg, which we burned. Of us there were 18 hundred Germans. Then the Swedish peasants, 14,000 strong, fell upon us in the camp in such a manner as here. They formidably attacked us. God gave us victory, and he smote the greater part of them completely dead. We all had backplates and breastplates and helmets and arm braces. And they had crossbows and good spears made of swords. Afterwards the king of Denmark knighted us, and he did us honor, and paid us well and transported us over the sea in the year 1503. There I, Paul von Dolnstain, saw action. Lord Sigmund List was high commander." -Paul Dolnstein's diary, 1502.

#16th century #landshknecht #swordstaff #paul dolnstein

miapcain

armour layer studies on vesna

miapcain

@parsely-bunny that's something I'd love to find out myself, if anyone has information- it's slightly difficult to research this online because of a flood of people trying to sell me belts, and the resources I usually use don't mention it.

It shows up in appropriate period art as a second belt, often worn much lower than seems reasonable, and not slanting upwards at the back in a way that necessarily suggests it attaches to the regular waist belt (which is nearly always present, even on depictions that don't share this sword belt). I'd still write it off as being one double wrapped belt, if it didn't often have a very different style than the top belt:

Note that I'm not 100% sure those actually are belts being depicted on that bust of St. Mauritius, but they seem to generally match these others.

If anyone knows more than me I would love to be educated! 13th century only, crucially, which narrows down research even further

zizibutik

apparently not attached to anything its just not as loose as the pictures

miapcain

Thank you for the addition! That is a single belt, though, and worn at the waist, which is also well represented in the period art:

This mythical secondary belt seems to be made of cloth (making it a sash, as @parsely-bunny points out) and is usually represented as being white and broader than the main belt, and rides further down:

miapcain

Update: finally found two places mentioning this. First, a completely unsourced german language forum user calling attention to a swordbelt (schwertgurt) not being a belt, the latter being used for supporting clothes, pouches and knives, and the former for the sword; they also mention swordbelts made of a vatiety of fabrics, including ropes encased in silk. Progress!

This put me onto a better sourced 2003 blog entry that calls this type of swordbelt the Naumberger Typ Schwertgurt, points out its apparent softness and light colour in art, and mostly discusses the distinct x-shaped pattern the belt makes on the scabbard, visible in several of the images above.

Two modern interpretations, the first by Andreas Bichler, author of that blog post:

Bichler rallies against modern swordbelts of this type that use hard, thick leather, pointing out that this widens out too quickly and can't be tied well in his experience, and instead argues for a soft, supple leather as depicted here. He briefly mentions it being tied without a buckle and fed through two tear shaped openings, though he mostly discusses how the scabbard is fastened.

Not exactly proof positive of anything, but good enough for me to run with for now. Thank you for everyone who participated in this little hunt for info :) any additional finds or opinions absolutely welcome

penguinlordart

The Book im currently reading about the Development of European arms and armor has a section on this including a few illustrations from the author depicting it, it confused me at first from just his description but the illustrations definitely helped

#13th century #art

armthearmour

A lavishly decorated Rapier and Dagger with matching accouterments,

OaL: 50.5 in/128.2 cm

Blade Length: 44.3 in/112.7 cm

Weight: 3 lbs/1.4 kg

Milan, Italy, ca. 1600, housed at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

makingqueerhistory

Do you have any good sources on medieval queer history? I'm a History undergrad and I plan on researching queer history for my thesis; would love some indications of books or articles about queerness in medieval times

Hello, I have had this question in my inbox for a minute waiting until I could find a good answer, and I just did! I found this book while browsing Project Muse:

Definitely might be work checking out!

an-ruraiocht

this book is good, and it provides a useful glossary which is great to cite when you're working in subfields where other academics are less familiar with queer terminology and you need a quick way to explain it. it's available open-access. the editors and contributors have largely published other things too, so follow up on them and you'll find more of the recent stuff -- the list below is trending older, but here are a few other useful resources and books:

the medieval history lgbtq internet sourcebooks page. this is an older resource so it doesn't have much in the way of recently-published stuff but it does collect together some primary sources as well as older (mostly 90s) scholarship, particularly looking at the christian medieval dimension, and the site is broadly up-to-date in terms of archive links to now-defunct sites. i will note however that queer history is one area where medieval history has moved on since the 1990s, on which note:

and the john boswell page at the same site. boswell's work on "same-sex unions" from 1994 was pretty foundational to the field, but it has been developed on and it's worth reading some of those follow-ups and critiques rather than just reading him in isolation, because he was wrong about some stuff (even if maybe less wrong than his early homophobic critics thought). this page shows a lot of the earlier scholarship responding to boswell. of the cited follow-up books, halsall identifies claudia rapp's 2016 book on adelphopoiesis as the best one, and i can confirm it's a non-homophobic response to boswell that pushes back against his central thesis about the purpose of brother-making ceremonies (with extensive evidence for doing so) without denying the possibility of queer people and how they might have expressed those relationships using systems not built for them

doing unto others: sexuality in medieval europe by ruth mazo karras and katherine pierpont got a new edition in 2023, i read an older one when i started doing queer history in undergrad. probably a good starting point

constructing medieval sexuality eds. karma lochrie, peggy mccracken and james a. schultz is another one i read as an undergrad -- it's from 1997 but i remember it being pretty useful, as are other works by these people

though he's notably not great at the actual medieval history part i do think it's worth having read foucault before embarking on queer histories because so many other people will be engaging with his work and methodologies. for the same reason i think it's worth reading judith butler early on, though perhaps don't start with gender trouble -- undoing gender is more recent and more readable, and bodies that matter is also a good follow-up

here's a really useful-looking reading list with primary and secondary sources for teaching queer medieval stuff

on that list i see also bill burgwinkle's sodomy, masculinity and law in medieval literature: france and england 1050-1230, which is more literature than pure history (a lot of this stuff will be -- a lot of our sources for this kind of social/emotional history in the medieval period are literary sources) but was very useful to me when i started doing queer readings and had mostly encountered terrible scholarship from the 80s

book series like the "new queer medievalisms" series may be of interest. there are also several volumes in the "new middle ages" series that focus on queer histories, gender, etc, such as constructing gender in medieval ireland; homoeroticism and chivalry; queer love in the middle ages, etc etc

journals like journal of the history of sexuality are, unsurprisingly given the name, likely to publish relevant material

medieval lit journals like arthuriana tend to be pretty strong on the literary side of this. my own subfield of medieval celtic studies is weaker on this topic, but studia celtica fennica has a forthcoming special volume about gender and theory in celtic studies, to which some of my friends are contributing, so this is shifting

the most recent work will generally be more topic-specific and in journals, so this list is focused more on broader overviews and general interest medieval queer history stuff. the medieval period is long (1000 years) and geographically diverse, and also things like gender variance and identity vs sexual behaviour would be handled pretty differently, so it might be possible to give more detailed recommendations if you have more specific areas you want to focus on

i've been out of the queer theory game for a bit now and my background was mostly in medieval literature, so most of the recs i have are (a) a few years old and (b) more about how these ideas are represented in literature than their historical dimension, but there's some history in there -- and some of my mutuals also work on these kinds of topics, so they may have more recs to offer, particularly if you have any particular directions in mind

finnlongman

Hello, I am one of the people contributing to the Studia Celtica Fennica volume mentioned (and as a result of that article, have literally just been down a Boswell-Rapp-Bray-Tulchin rabbithole in the past couple of weeks, so if you want to know about brotherhood rituals or shared graves specifically, I can probably provide some recs).

I actually work on friendship in late medieval and early modern Irish literature, but I do so from a queer theory background and with a very expansive definition of "friendship". I previously worked more directly on gender so if you'd like to talk about genderweirds in medieval Irish literature then definitely hit me up. More about my research here.

An extremely non-exhaustive list of friends, colleagues, and Bluesky mutuals whose publications may be of interest (some Celtic Studies, some other areas of medieval lit and history):

François·e Charmaille (I'm linking their Bluesky because they do not keep their publication lists up-to-date on orcID etc and they've got some new ones)

Tess Wingard

Blake Gutt (of the above book)

Roan Runge (I can't find a publication page for Roan, but here's their thesis on interspecies transformation in medieval Irish lit)

Emmet Taylor (also contributing to the SCF volume)

Joanne Findon (editor of the SCF volume; writes on gender in medieval Irish lit)

Meg Hyland, whose "Women of 1000" art/research project includes discussion of trans and queer women living around the year 1000

Here's an episode of the Celtic Students Podcast about "Queerness, medieval Irish literature, and Celtic Studies" featuring Roan talking to Nina Cnockaert-Guillou.

Here's an episode of Motherfoclóir featuring me talking about queer approaches to the Ulster Cycle (please note it's from 2021 and I'm scared to listen back to it, it's likely I've changed my mind about some of this since then!)

viktor-sbor

Tombstone with a sculptural portrait of Edward Woodstock.

Edward of Woodstock (1330 –1376), known to history as the Black Prince, was a one of the most successful English commanders during the Hundred Years' War, being regarded by his English contemporaries as a model of chivalry and one of the greatest knights of his age.Edward was buried with great state in Canterbury Cathedral.His epitaph inscribed around his effigy reads:

Such as thou art, sometime was I.

Such as I am, such shalt thou be.

I thought little on th'our of Death

So long as I enjoyed breath.

On earth I had great riches

Land, houses, great treasure, horses, money and gold.

But now a wretched captive am I,

Deep in the ground, lo here I lie.

My beauty great, is all quite gone,

My flesh is wasted to the bone

#reblog #14th century