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YESSSSSSSS

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when jorge luis borges wrote in a copy of beowulf that he was working on translating, “beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.”

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“Medieval peasants couldn’t handle my Spotify playlist” but could YOU handle a medieval bard relaying the epic of Beowulf over the course of an hour? Humble yourself.

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Accessorising the new cotehardie a little, as a treat. I don’t know why all these turned out so serious 😂

Also holy shit, all of this is entirely handsewn (including the not-visible shift and hose). Reenactor goalpost reached o.o

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wishing i was some kind of creature in a medieval manuscript right now

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Foxes disguised as monks. On the left from Japan and on the right from Denmark.

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The Changing of the Seasons By Saint Hildegard

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"Medieval Christians would have gone nuts for protons, neutrons, and electrons for trinity reasons" sounds like a jokey oversimplification historypost but I cannot really articulate how true that is. They would never shut up about it.

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Give me your Islam trutherism stance. Lay out the whole position. I think I've asked about this before but I forgot. I'm kind of an Islam head. Islam is the only Abrahamic religion I give a shit about. I think the other ones are bullshit. Academically I think critical scholarship on Islam is like just getting off the ground so we barely know anything about it yet. Anyway drop the trutherism. Mohammad was a girl... Mohammad was actually a beautiful anime woman...

well see the thing is. mohammad was almost certainly a real guy, who was some sort of leader of a group of people. POSSIBLY he never lead a large group, and the large group didnt form until afterwards. but it seems like he led at least a large-ish group. he probably had some sort of religious teaching, altho its unclear if he had any original doctrine or was just a passionate judeo-christian monotheist. oh and yknow, he lived and did stuff around arabia (well. some people say syria. probably not syria).

and that's...sort of all we can say for sure about the real muhammad! there's all sorts of other stuff that MIGHT be true about muhammad, especially after they got to medina. but his early life is a blank to us, the same way jesus' life before his ministry is a blank to us. who knows! but people who confidently tell you "mohammad lived in a city of pagans and converted them all" are exceedingly credulous. we have no good evidence that happened

one interesting thing the shwepisode talks about: so, obviously the islamic conquests "happened". in the sense that there wasn't a state there, and then there started being a large state there. but we dont see them archeologically! which is not crazy, they allowed people to surrender. they didnt just raze everything to the ground. but it's unfortunate, it would be nice if we could use archeology to say stuff about early islam. in part, we cant use archeology re: early islam because a huge number of artifacts were destroyed, there's a weirdly small amount of surviving stuff that could tell us about early islam. but it's not clear! posssibly even the *stories* about uthman destroying a whole bunch of alternate qurans aren't true!

its a very weird field. something that is clearly very important to a huge number of people, and yet is in some ways even more poorly evidence than the early history of the christian church, which we have a large number of texts from (i mean, starting in the early 2nd century. but christianity grew much more slowly, so "early christianity" lasted much longer than "early islam")

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Fun fact but according to historians, tamagotchi were a popular commodity for noble ladies in the 14th century

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Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing, ca. 1203-1283 

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There’s certain hobbies and interests that aren’t inherently conservative or regressive but do attract a lot of people who are those things or worse and when you’re a progressive person involved in those hobbies hearing that someone else is interested in your hobby usually has to involve some “But are you normal about it?” conversations before you get too excited

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he does look fun to draw

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Requiem with a marginal dragonfly  book of hours, Bruges or Ghent 15th century.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 287, fol. 161v