Category: Early Middle

700-1250

How Emperor Charles V ended up talking German to his horse (1)

Domain-based code-switching from Daniel Bomberg’s Jerusalem Talmud to Hieronymus Fabricius’ De locutione. Featuring the wit and wisdom of Rabbi Jonathan of Beth Gubrin, Padua’s medical school and Jewry, and the Polish utopian Jan Zamoyski. With excerpts from Fellini’s I Clowns and a bodice-ripper by Kent M Chater, whose Agent Alighieri claims that “Like the great Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain I speak Spanish with God, French with men, German to my horse, and Italian to the ladies.”

Charles V and his horse discussing sociolinguistics before the Battle of Mühlberg (Titian <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carlos_V_en_M%C3%BChlberg,_by_Titian,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg'>@Prado</a>).

Castells, for real

A mad, mad Japanese video, and a human ladder at the Muslim siege of Aleppo in 637.

Roman double testudo, from Potter <em>Archaeologia graeca</em>. I'm told that the optimal shagging angle for turtles is 30º, so this counts as deviant.

“Islamic bridge of civilisation to the West over-rated”

Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs,…

French saw Spanish property crash coming

Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room: To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne. It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish…

Ancient circular enclosures in northern Spain

Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei. What was news to…