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Crossposting this from the ancient history thread because I've asked twice there and not received any answer. It's kind of an edge case whether it would be late classical or super early medieval, so it's worth a shot:Cyrano4747 posted:I'm looking for a few good recommendations on general texts on the areas east of the Rhine and north of the Danube during the classical era and early medieval period. Basically think Germania from about the first century BC through the 7th century or so. Roughly Caesar => Charlemagne.
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May 14, 2014 01:04
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Alpacalips Now posted:There's a stereotype that food across medieval Europe tasted terrible. I find that hard to believe because even in remote, resource-poor regions of the world, people use whatever they have to their meals taste better. Obviously, kings could use expensive imported spices, but what kinds of sauces and seasonings did common people use? Also, I heard that some modern brewers made beer like the monks used to. How did the taste compare to modern European beers? Reconstructing old recipes and cuisine is a giant pain in the dick for two big reasons: one, recipes only began to be written down in the way we're familiar with in the 19th century. Even assuming that you're looking at a literate, elite person recounting a specific dish (we have a few Roman 'cookbooks' for example), they're not going to list precise proportions or measurements the way we're used to. Think more of someone's great grandmother just throwing something together over a stove and less of the carefully measured-and-tabulated way of cooking that many people seem to lean towards today. Needless to say all this presumes literacy and giving a drat about recording what you ate, so even within those limitations there are a lot more descriptions of expensive delights for the elites than whatever porridge and stew the working class was chowing down on. Second, there are a not insubstantial number of ingredients that are either extinct through over-use and climate change, simply unknown, or that we now know are seriously toxic. A recipe might simply be unable to be exactly recreated. Even so, a lot of what we think of as traditional national cuisines are basically poor people food from the medieval-early modern period, especially the vegetable dishes or anything that's designed to preserve the food. A lot of those are really loving delicious, so I think that saying medieval food was across-the-board bland and terrible is stretching things a bit far. I've honestly never heard that stereotype, but I'm not discounting that it may be something some people believe. There's a lot of bad info out there on that period of history in general.
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Jun 4, 2014 20:16
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HEY GAL posted:Edit: Most of the OP of that thread would involve telling people that our period exists. Pretty sure that most of the first five pages would be people arguing over when the gently caress your period even is. I swear, get three early modernists in a bar and you'll end up with four opinions about the temporal and/or theoretical boundaries of the field.
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Jul 22, 2014 14:10
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HEY GAL posted:"Begins with Luther, ends with the French Revolution," is my usual oversimplified answer, hahahahaha, I loving knew it.  Anyone who does anything with Germany/HRE/Mitteleuropa in general anchors the switchover from medieval to early-modern on religious or history of ideas issues. English/French/Spanish/sometimes Italian it's all about the shift from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic-oriented world. I, personally, like to base my explanation on shifts in government types and state organization which leads to different beginning and end dates for pretty much every nation in Europe. edit: wrong thread, but kind of apropos: HEY GAL posted:You'd think that college students can write in their native languages, but experience shows that this is not always the case. I had a student once who was functionally illiterate in English. He was a native speaker from a non-immigrant background. (well, non-recent immigrant . . . he wasn't Native American or anything). Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 18:46
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HEY GAL posted:a popular form of abbreviation in handwriting is to lop the declension endings off and replace them with slashes or squiggles. In complete sympathy with your attempts to wade through German grammatical soup, that actually makes a lot of sense as a way of quickly transcribing small bullshit. Hell, that's pretty similar to the way Germans actually talk. Maybe not as extreme as in notes, but if it's a quick back and forth some word endings are getting swallowed. quote:When I try to use vocabulary I learn at work to talk to real people, I get corrected. Do y'all not say "entleibung" for "killing"? And I know "defense" isn't "defendierung" any more. I used to get laughed at a lot for the same reason. Apparently over-exposure to early Soviet-era internal office correspondence left me with a bad case of bureaucrat-speak, plus using certain SED "key words" to describe various concepts that left me sounding like a caricature of a Marxist flunkey. How much longer are you out there for? Archive time is the best time. I would loving kill to get another year of rolling around in documents.
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Aug 13, 2014 14:21
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Max Manus posted:Been reading through this thread and I got a question regarding firearms. The first rifle where supposedly created around 1520 in Germany, but how difficult where the process of rifling? Could rifled firearms have been created even earlier? *shrug* What would have happened if pre-Colombian Indians had discovered iron aged metallurgical techniques and met Cortez et. al. at the waterfront in chain mail and with short swords? What would have happened if Julius Caesar had been run over by an ox cart when he was 10 years old? What would have happened if the Chinese had gotten explore-crazy and colonized S. Africa in the 15th century? Counterfactuals, especially those that propose a technology being invented a few centuries earlier, are kind of impossible to answer because there's painfully little evidence to really base arguments off of. At best you're making guesses that can't really be proven or refuted any more than you can come up with a concrete answer to whether the USS Enterprise or a Star Destroyer wins a space-duel.
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Sep 11, 2014 17:17
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HEY GAL posted:Rifling dates from the 15th century, of course they knew that a spinning projectile flies straighter. Fowling pieces were rifled, prestige weapons were rifled. The problem is that you have to screw the ball into the barrel and soot from the powder fouls the thing, not that they're harder to make than other precision work--if you can make the kinds of weapons and armor Owlkill posted, you can make a rifle. But is a colonel going to pay to outfit a regiment with them, even if you could load them as quickly as you can load a smoothbore musket, even if fouling wasn't a problem? Of course not. Not to mention hammer-forged rifling has been a known thing for a long goddamned time. It's not like regular rifling is "precision work" either, certainly not in the way engraving etc. is. It had a lot more to do with rifling getting fouled much faster. Not so much an issue when you're hunting deer, pretty big goddamned issue if you're in the line. The real genius of the mine ball was that the base expanded to meet the bore, so you could have substantially sub-caliber balls without completely hosing your accuracy and range.
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Sep 11, 2014 20:49
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Minarchist posted:
Ball puller, same as you would a patched ball. Probably a specialty one threaded in the opposite direction from the rifling. People over-emphasize the screwing thing. It's not so much that they're tightly screwing something into the bore, it just has to be guided down in ways that dropping a round ball with a patch on it doesn't. Don't think so much screwing a screw into a board, and more screwing the lid on a bottle of pop.
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Sep 12, 2014 01:41
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Just google image search "matchlock manual of arms." You see images of people both aiming down the barrel and also keeping their heads up and away from that poo poo as much as possible. It was a relatively young technology and there was no single, dominant form yet. Putting sights on it and looking down the barrel has obvious advantages, especially as the technology advances to involve significantly less burning powder and lit matches inches from your nose. That, plus the simple fact that that's the direction firearms use evolved in, argues pretty strongly in favor of that eventually becoming the dominant form, but there was almost certainly a period where they coexisted side by side. Just looking at the dates of the pictures that you find with the afore mentioned GIS, I'd guestimate that period as probably the 15th century. poo poo, just look at modern handgun techniques. Those have evolved a bunch in the last 100 years, even though in some instances they're being preformed with variations on the same design.
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Sep 12, 2014 19:20
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My bad, I thought they were earlier. That was the impression I got from reading a few descriptions. Just ignore that as nonsense, then.
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Sep 13, 2014 15:31
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I'm still a big fan of the dynastic argument. Having one major dynasty at a time (regardless of what family that particular dynasty may actually be) with a solid claim to a royal title that covers a significant chunk of what we consider the modern nation-states goes a long way towards making people think of it all as one big unit. Even during periods when the dynasty is relatively weak (civil war, periods where local nobility manages to claw back some power and rights, etc) the whole argument is still framed in terms of how powerful a specific centralized monarchy is. Having two major dynasties that control territory both inside and outside your linguistic and cultural sphere does a lot to change that dynamic.
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Sep 15, 2014 14:57
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DrSunshine posted:I am mystified by the existence of places like the Teutonic State that existed around the Baltics and Central Europe back in the late Middle Ages. What was it like to be ruled by a military order instead of living under a king or duke? More or less like living under a king or duke. It also wasn't just a strange borderlands of Europe thing - it was really common for there to be significant land holdings associated with Catholic offices all through this period.
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Sep 20, 2014 17:02
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Kopijeger posted:That would likely be a bill. The bill is still a bladed weapon. I think he's looking for just a big rear end hammer on the end of a pole. I'd go with either a Lucerne hammer or a bec de corbin depending on if it had a counter-balancing spike opposite the hammer or not.
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Sep 23, 2014 23:15
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HEY GAL posted:Oberwehr and Unterwehr/Seitenwehr. Just my half-awake 2 pfenning, but could these be very literal directional distinctions? Think about the location of the weapon on a soldier's body relative to the clothes. I'm going to guess that most guys would keep their dagger secured about themselves somehow, perhaps even under their top layer of clothing. Think about the distinction between "open" and "concealed" carry with modern handguns if that is a reference that works for you. Meanwhile you can't really stick a musket or gently caress off huge pike up your sleeve or in your belt or whatnot, can you? Another English example that just came to mind. Consider the difference between the words "underwear" and "overcoat" and what they imply about the item of dress. I'm a bit hazy but this kind of makes sense to me right now, maybe someone else wants to flesh it out more as an idea. edit: meanwhile your sword you can strap to your side. It's not some gently caress-off huge stick that can be clearly observed from half a mile off, but it's also not some sneaky little gently caress dagger that could be anywhere from in a boot to strapped to an arm. Only one real place to carry one of those and it's. . . strapped to your side, on your belt. edit x2: a person can also easily be separated from his "over-weapon" to use the class as I'm interpreting it. If you want the pikeman to stop being a pikeman for a moment all he has to do is let go of his pike. That poo poo needs to be carried, and if he's not carrying it he needs to set it down somewhere. A sword is both less of a hassle to move around while carrying on the side and more of a hassle to temporarily get rid of. Still, if need be, you can tell a guy to take his belt off or at the very least walk around with an empty sheath. The dagger he's got hidden in his puffy sleeve or in his boot is yet more convenient to walk around with and even more problematic to divest a person of without getting fairly intrusive (doing poo poo like pat-downs and weapons searches and the like). Again, consider the differences between the amount of effort involved in someone removing their overcoat vs. removing their underwear. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 23:05
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The most dangerous warrior is the one that brought a buddy. 
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Nov 20, 2014 19:59
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Frostwerks posted:I've heard that the M1A1 carbine would be stopped at range by sufficiently thick overcoats. This is an old myth that has been tested to hell and back by both history and gun geeks. Every single time the conclusion is ".30 carbine is completely capable of going through a goddamned poo poo ton of cloth." The round is in the same ballpark as .44 magnum in terms of performance.
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Feb 4, 2015 23:37
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deadking posted:There's a reference in the Annals of Bertin to a group of the "ordinary people" between the Loire and the Seine coming together to fight off a Viking incursion which ends with the aristocracy suppressing their association because they hadn't gone through the proper channels. I bring this example up to suggest both that non-elites seem to have been capable of organizing their own defense and that elites violently disapproved of them doing so. The latter point seems to suggest that elites, whose identity and social prestige rested in large part on a claim to an exclusive ability to practice violence, may be inclined to suppress (and subsequently leave out of historical records) non-elite military activity. Be careful not to read too much into a single event. There is more to fighting than just picking up a stick and taking a swing and more to fighting as a group than just getting together a bunch of the village boys with bigger balls than brains. Your average nomadic warband or society with a strong tradition of peasant levies has to have some way of passing on basic martial skills on the individual level and the group methods by which those skills are best leveraged on the battlefield. Even a break of a generation or two can pose a major problem due to the loss of what we'd call institutional knowledge in any other context today. History is replete with examples that illustrate this, both in the sense of rulers trying to foster and maintain those skills and the systems for passing them on as well as trying to suppress them. I would say it's painting with far too broad a brush to suggest that elites disapproved of these sorts of martial activities on general principle. Just drawing on English history, for example, you can look at the laws mandating regular longbow training and practice on the one hand and later laws forbidding weapons ownership and training in Ireland on the other. I would also point out that while there are certainly examples here and there of plucky peasant uprisings winning battles - many of which become enshrined in later nationalist histories - there are tons of others where they just get the poo poo kicked out of them by the local feudal lord. Finally, and this is a much more subjective view based on a gut assessment that could very well be wrong so don't take it too seriously, I strongly suspect that if you look at these kinds of issues over time the successful instances of peasants rising up against elites are probably clustered earlier and peter out as the middle ages wear on into the early modern period. Europe is a very different place in 1400 than it is in 800, and I don't think it's too big a jump to say that much as royal power generally consolidated during this period, so too rural populations were probably more and more domesticated by the local nobles.
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Feb 25, 2015 04:31
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Lol this is basically the opposite of what happens. Like I said, just a complete stab based on a general impression I'd gotten. Thanks for the correction
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Feb 25, 2015 16:27
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EvanSchenck posted:It costs money to put on the conference, nobody is stepping up to pay, so they charge the attendees. If you're hooked up with a school you can soak money from your department to pay for it, otherwise you're out of pocket. It sucks, and in an ideal world the host would eat the cost and attendance would be free. But we live in the real world, where donors vomit millions of dollars into stupid poo poo like athletics instead of funding research and basic university functions like conferences. To expand on this it's the same basic problem as academic publishing. Cheap paperbacks are cheap because of economies of scale. You can sell 50 shades of gray for $10 because millions of suburban soccer moms want to read it. Guess how many people want to read about visigothic warfare and culture or go to a conference on public history?
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May 10, 2015 15:58
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Sorry, it sucks.
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Yes that is exactly what we need to do. Stigmatize offenders even more so they have absolutely zero chance of reintegrating into society rather than the narrow chance they have now.
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May 31, 2015 17:51
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Quick question, since we don't really have a general medieval thread. Does anyone have a good suggestion on a book on medieval Germany (or at least the medieval German-speaking world - HRE and the like)? Nothing too focused or specific, the kind of book that you'd throw a undergrad or junior grad student doing coursework. A good synthetic work that actually makes some interesting general points. Readable would be nice, but that isn't a hard requirement. I'm also really open to a series of 2-3 books if they're good - I suspect that's going to be necessary anyway. I've got a vacation coming up and need some beach reading and I've been trying to fill in some of the blind spots in my knowledge of German history (i.e. basically everything before the 16th century).
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Jun 13, 2015 15:56
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Disinterested posted:Any specific time period or concepts? Thanks a bunch.
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Jun 13, 2015 22:22
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I love how beat up and dented it looks. I'll bet it's much more realistic in that regard for what your people would have worn than that shiny museum piece b
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Sep 19, 2015 18:18
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HEY GAL posted:these guys are dutch tho, from near friesland I just noticed the clogs. Amazing.
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Oct 28, 2015 13:38
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JaucheCharly posted:It should be a painting, also there's a dude with jeans. Not enough significant gesturing and showing off banging calves either.
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Oct 28, 2015 17:43
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It should also be remembered that mail and plate wasn't an either/or kind of thing. A lot of "plate" armors had significant chunks that were made of mail, either to cover areas where joints etc made the wearer more vulnerable or as a cost saving.
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Nov 13, 2015 16:24
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MikeCrotch posted:It turns out that, under the cold light of day, guns do kill people! The only thing that can stop a bad man with a pike square is a good man with a pike square.
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Jan 20, 2016 15:41
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Fuschia tude posted:Clearly this thread should be named Axe me about Medieval History & Combat. This is raw supposition so I eagerly await someone that actually knows what the gently caress correcting me. That said, I suspect it is because swords are a purpose-made weapon and axes are a weaponized tool. Metal tools and weapons are fairly expensive things in this period and just having enough money to afford a purpose made metal weapon is a pretty big signifier of class and status. A sword is a fairly precious item. On the other hand every farmer in the land is going to have an axe of one sort or another, or at least a few axes scattered around that multiple farmers can share out between them. One of the things that occurs to me is that most of the "barbarian" societies that are associated with axes have a far blurrier delineation between warriors and farmers (peasants, "civilians," third estate whatever you want to call them). A viking longboat is going to be full of guys who are out for plunder in order to supplement their day jobs. A Germanic tribe that is trying to migrate the gently caress away from whatever is boiling out of the steppes this year is moving EVERYBODY, and from what I read those cultures had inter-tribe raiding and warrior societies as a thing that most males participated in. Basically you end up with richer societies that can afford armies and purpose-built weapons squaring off against the poorer fringes and people who don't have the luxury of large number of single-use weapons and so rely on things that are both weapon and tool. edit: thinking back on what i've seen in museums, I also think that the higher ranks of those "barbarian" societies were pretty fond of swords as well, and those are the guys who would have both the money to afford them and the leisure to train with them. Again, I think it's mostly an economic divide by the time you get into the medieval era with readily available iron and steel. Like I said though, this is all semi-educated supposition so take it as such. edit x2: everyone knows that axes get a bonus against armored opponents, while swords get a plus to-hit. Barbarians don't have the proficiencies for heavy armor, so obviously swords are the optimal counter to them, as it's all about landing as many blows as possible. Meanwhile the barbarians need to make up for this deficiency with something with enough punch to get through the heavy armor favored by civilized militaries. Note that the only barbarians using swords are your extremely buff Conan-types who have enough strength that their to-hit and damage bonuses simply roll over the benefits of heavy armor. In this case swords are a better choice due to the increased variety in base weapons and, frankly, the more care given to making interesting uniques with the various magical properties that you will need down the road. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Jan 20, 2016 |
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Jan 20, 2016 16:23
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HEY GAL posted:huge sleeves held together with tiny ribbons: check I've always taken your love affair with your subjects' dress as simply a symptom of the usual enthusiasm for one's subject, but this picture has won me over. Your people were the best dressed people in the history of clothes. It's the half pants/half short-shorts that did it.
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Jan 25, 2016 19:19
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HEY GAL posted:And like men, women have to release seed to produce a child: conception doesn't happen unless both partners come, preferably simultaneously. (Even then it might not work, of course.) What was their take on pregnancy as a result of rape? Was there an accepted mechanism for conception if the woman didn't orgasm, or was a pregnancy considered evidence that the woman was actually into it, so it wasn't rape in the first place?
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Jan 26, 2016 01:45
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HEY GAL posted:hahahahaaaaaaaa Yeah, I kind of figured but I was sorta hoping you'd have some explanation beyond victim blaming. I dunno, divine intervention or whatever.
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Jan 26, 2016 03:13
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I love the guy on the far right who's all "what the gently caress dude?"
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Feb 1, 2016 17:40
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ACW reeenactors are also a bit notorious for hurting and killing people. I know a lot of the local ones don't allow rifles to have their ramrods (no I don't know how they load) because of people forgetting it was in there and shooting it at the other line.
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Feb 19, 2016 21:38
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HEY GAL posted:If there's one thing I could tell the non-specialists about what you and I study, it's that the stereotype in movies and TV shows where everyone wears drab brown clothing is very wrong. Fair point, but what is clothing like for your average dude? Looking at that jacket I'm guessing that's not the sort of thing that is affordable for most of society.
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Feb 25, 2016 21:58
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Baron Porkface posted:Why did the early modern French nobles put up with their king spending bazillion dollars and making them his domestic servants and dressing as a non-warrior. Because for the majority of the period you're talking about he a) was really loving successful at solidifying royal power and consolidating what we consider France today and b) didn't bother to call the estates to raise taxes for him. Feudal relationships are very complex and have a whole net of duties and responsibilities oneach side.
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May 8, 2016 22:46
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There is a theory tgat the growing complexity of administration, taxes, and military affairs has a strong centralizing effect.
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May 9, 2016 19:15
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I'm the guy idly stabbing the wall
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Jul 2, 2016 04:53
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You can oil wood. A lot of purpose made gun oils aren't great for that since they are designed to wick and penetrate into small parts and get into screws etc. If you really want to go possibly period correct nuts use lanolin. A TFR goon sent me a jar to try on a old pistol that wouldn't stop rusting and it works like a charm. Since it's closer to a grease than oil I imagine it would work better for coating a blade. As a bonus it makes your hands super soft. Google tells me people use it on leather which is kind of unsurprising given how nice it makes living skin.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:33
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You're a grad student living in Germany. Please don't burn down the "communal residence" that you and your friends call the abandoned building you are squatting in.
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Jul 25, 2016 19:39
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"CLP" is a term that gets used a bit too generically and which has undergone a few different revisions to the recipe over the decades. IIRC the vietnam-90s era stuff had something in it that got removed in the 00s, but I'm fuzzy on the details. I wouldn't drink or bathe in it, but I also wouldn't get overly concerned about incidental, occasional exposure. Chances are you get worse from living near automobiles on city streets.
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Jul 25, 2016 21:46
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