#medieval research

[justaz]

country bumpkin merlin not knowing anything about city life and accidentally courting arthur without knowing

merlin, watching gwen give lancelot her favor: why do you do that

gwen, heart eyes at lance and not paying that much attention to the conversation: so he knows i’m rooting for him

merlin, with an Idea: ah.

gwaine, lover of chaos, pisser offer of nobles and royals alike, ultimate wingman: merlin…you have such lonely lips. shall i introduce them to mine?

merlin, unaware of the game gwaine is playing: so you can steal my breath away? i think not, scoundrel

arthur, crushing his goblet in his hand:

merlin: arthur’s been in a bad mood recently :( i should cheer him up

merlin, remembering when arthur was put out when merlin brought morgana flowers and not him: i know just the thing

merlin, bringing a bouquet of carnations, roses, and tulips and setting them on arthur’s table while he’s eating breakfast: good morning, sire

arthur, trained on flower language in hopes that one day when he was to take a queen he could woo her easily, trying not to audibly choke on his sausage as he reads merlin’s declaration of love sitting in front of him:

arthur, who recently found out about merlin’s magic and was trying to find a way to bring it up, catching him in the act and watching merlin panic to explain himself:

merlin, Freaking: and i swear to you arthur, i have only ever used it for you. my magic is yours. my life is yours. i am yours. i would never do anything to harm you. i have protected you for years and will continue to do so at your side if you’ll have me

arthur, already believing them to be courting, desperately trying to figure out if that was a proposal for marriage or not but tired of being confused and deciding fuck it: here.

merlin, taking it: i…uh…huh?

arthur, watching merlin with hawk eyes and trying to figure out what he’s thinking and feeling: it’s my mothers sigil

merlin, confused as FUCK but is focusing on the fact that arthur is handing him something of his mother rather than a death sentence: my…my lord?

arthur, realizing how scared merlin’s must be about him finding out about his magic and trying to comfort him while also proposing, killing two birds with one stone: i will always keep you at my side, merlin, so long as we both shall live. if you’ll allow me.

merlin, almost collapsing with relief and tearing up, smiling at arthur as if he had parted the storm clouds to allow sun to shine down on them in that moment: of course…of course, arthur. always and forever.

merlin, watching the castle staff rush this way and that: wow. this banquet must be incredibly important

sir leon the long suffering, day one ride or die, one of the original merthur shippers: banquet? merlin, this is for your wedding

merlin, overworked and exhausted: my WHAT? to WHO??

leon, regretting everything he’s ever done in his life that led him to this moment: to…arthur?

merlin, over joyed but also absolutely befuddled: i’m getting married to ARTHUR?????

leon: you two have been courting for the past year or so, have you not?

merlin: i’ve been COURTING ARTHUR?????? FOR A YEAR?????????

[sylvrndoodles]

[jstor]

Apropos of nothing, here is a baker's dozen images of bird-shaped brooches ca. 6th century, from Frankish, Vendel, and Anglo-Saxon artisans. They all come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection on JSTOR, which includes nearly half a million open access images for everyone!

[ineffable-aaaaaaaaaa]

manifesting the lesbians for season three :))))))

[callisteios]

I have a new uquiz for you, go on a pilgrimage with me. discover who you are.

[brother-emperors]

frequently what happens is I'll be drawing a comic and think, huh. I wonder what shoes a 14th/15th century cardinal would wear. I bet they had fancy rules about it, and the answer will be in a 500 page book about the early modern cardinal. I'll think, 'WELLLLLL since I'm already here, I'll check out this other chapter that sounds interesting,' and then I'll find out that the vatican is literally hazardous to your health, but from that point on I'll be locked in for the entire book. I'll start reading through all the citations while checking to see what else some of the contributors have written. the comic has been forgotten entirely because I need to know more about the hats.

[caffeccino]

Steppe heavy cavalry but on a chicken horse 👀

She's here to conquer your heart and steal your girl~

[daisywords]

So annoying when people try to hold alternate-world fantasy to "historical accuracy" standards like. if I wanted historical accuracy I simply would have read/written historical fiction.

The only thing that should matter is if the alt world feels internally consistent/believable. Not "oh but back then" THERE IS NO BACK THEN. IT'S NOT REAL

and just because some aspects of the world (fashion, systems of government, levels of technology) feel consistent with a particular time period in our history doesn't mean that the author is obligated to stick to all other characteristics of that time period. The POINT of alt-world fantasy is to create a world in which the story they want to tell can work, and that's the metric I'm holding things to

[mustasekittens]

🕷️A Mysterious Vigilante and the Sword of the Goblin King⚔️

fantasy(ish) parksborn au that im working on with @eyesack884 💥💥

design notes!

tldr of the story is Pete is a commoner who gains spider-like abilities and becomes a vigilante; Prince Harrold anonymously becomes the right hand to the king. The King is unaware that his son is his prized knight and said knight is unaware his best friend is The Spider >:)

theres more but im tired and didnt even mean to make this fucking au in the first place. like at all so i mean. enjoy!!

[anglerflsh]

All the hate coming out from a generation Who got everything and nothing guided by temptation - Savages, Marina

[ackee]

kamdeuce medieval/princess and her knight au is so fun because their personalities are a little different due to the time period

kam (named princess kendra) is a fiesty princess who loves her independence and freedom and sneaks away from the castle a lot to go read and practice fighting and whatnot. she's still blind but refuses to wear her glasses, opting to just use a stick to guide her. she'll wear the glasses if she needs to, like with reading. very sexually forward.

deuce (named knight dominik) is a knight that came from a poor family who rose the ranks and became the king's bodyguard. the king trusts him so much that he is usually kam's bodyguard. i wouldn't say he's shy, but he's very focused on doing what's right and doing his job well. kam, however, asks to sleep with him, and he immediately folds.

doodle i did of her for funsies. (just imagine deuce is a sexy knight in armor that hides his tail and NEVER takes his helmet off. cause i dont wanna draw it <3)

[ivqks159]

my entry for @hermithorrors zine!! I had a lot of fun drawing this piece, thanks for having me :D

[finnlongman]

Tfw when you fall down an extremely specific rabbithole again (and you have academic library access so nobody is going to stop you)

[werewolf-transgenderism]

ok so I said I’d do a post on the heart-shaped manuscript from The Green Knight and here it is:

when Gawain is in the library at Castle Hautdesert, he comes across this heart-shaped manuscript that’s full of love poems:

this manuscript is clearly based on the manuscript Kongelige Bibliotek, Thott 1510 (below), the Hjertebogen (heart book), the oldest known Danish ballad manuscript.

obviously, the text isn’t the same: the manuscript in The Green Knight is in Middle English since Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English poem, while KB Thott 1510 is in Danish, but the film clearly cared about reproducing real medieval texts for the film (even though KB Thott 1510 is a far later text than SGGK.

even though the text shows up for mere seconds in the film, I think it’s really fucking neat that there was clearly research that went into this and that they went to such care to reproduce a similar manuscript while adapting it to Middle English, just for it to briefly show up on the screen

[cuties-in-codices]

crowded hellmouths

in jacobus de theramo's "belial", german illuminated manuscript, late 15th c.

source: Hannover, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek, Ms I 57, fol. 61r and 4v

[tanadrin]

on reflection, i think there's a symmetry to, say, doctors who are willing to refer patients to osteopaths or other ""holistic"" healthcare providers and the susceptibility of engineers to certain kinds of crankdom (of the "i-disproved-relativity-in-my-garage" type). both are forms of scientific training of a sort, but they're heavily outcome-focused and not theoretically focused. in large part, this is good! you do not as a doctor need to have a robust theoretical defense of every treatment you provide to patients, and it would be impossible to do so, because medicine is a huge and complicated subject. you do not, as an engineer, need to have a subtle grasp of theoretical physics to build a bridge; you just need to know what the latest developments in bridge-building are.

but it means in both cases you can have people who are skilled in their field, or who even excel, but who don't understand very well why certain techniques work. and in the case of alt medicine, where there has been considerable work to try to obfuscate or deceive people on how shaky the theoretical basis for their techniques are (stuff that literally if you remember your high-school physics and biology at all will make you go, "wait, there is no plausible mechanism for this, that's not how any of this works"), doctors who do not have time to read studies on RCT trials of every type of medicine they have ever heard of will blithely recommend stuff to patients that's actually complete horseshit, especially if the culture around them has been normalizing that woo as part of "holistic" therapy for the last hundred years, spurred on by alternative medicine practitioners and a public with a fear of needles and ~chemicals~ that medical practitioners have not done enough to allay.

it does not help that medicine only emerged very recently from being about 99% bullshit. like maybe at the end of the 19th century at best medicine was starting to be put on a broad-based empirical and theoretical footing--before that it's truly insane the stuff that wasn't just considered perfectly normal medical practice, but was considered serious Science. i mean, this is why we developed double-blind studies in the first place--because theoretical explanations of medical treatments are still necessarily often secondary to the process of finding ones that actually work, so we need really robust mechanisms to avoid confirmation bias or outright charlatanry. and while mainstream medicine is far from perfect in this respect, "alternative medicine" is all far, far worse.