#british studies

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Rearranged my favorite bookcase the other day! Definitely not looking forwards to packing up my collection for the move this January~

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09.25.17: Amazing finds at my library's used book sale yesterday afternoon; I got all these for $7 total and they're so gorgeous! Look at that King Arthur book set 😍

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Another great find at my library’s used book sale, only $2 for this pretty hardback! 🖤 I do wish it included more entries on medieval women (I could count how many were included on one hand - how do you not highlight the Empress Matilda, or Eleanor of Aquitaine, at least?) but it was published in 1970, so I guess I’m not all that surprised.

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Another read I'm hoping to start sometime soon! I'm missing being in school, so hopefully reading about one of my academic interests will do the trick. What's nice is this particular edition is easy to read and has beautiful illustrations as well, so I won't be giving myself a headache between shifts trying to put myself back into the mindset to read Medieval Lit (as I would be had I bought the Le Morte d'Arthur)

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My newest additions to my personal library; so excited to read these! The Book of English Magic looks especially interesting~

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"Although there are many more things we could say about fourteenth-century England, probably enough has been said for you to have an idea of what it is like, prior to setting out. Only one question remains to be answered. Why should you want to set out in the first place? Or, to put it more bluntly, why should you actually want to see the living past? Is the fourteenth-century not better left for dead, a pile of parchments, monastic ruins, and museum artifacts? ... History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past - to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes." 

 - Ian Mortimer, "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century"

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Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present.

Russell A. Peck,  Preface to John Gower’s Confessio Amantis

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Although there are many more things we could say about fourteenth-century England, probably enough has been said for you to have an idea of what it is like, prior to setting out. Only one question remains to be answered. Why should you want to set out in the first place? Or, to put it more bluntly, why should you actually want to see the living past? Is the fourteenth-century not better left for dead, a pile of parchments, monastic ruins, and museum artifacts? … History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past - to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.

Ian Mortimer, "The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century”