Soon!

( @historyextra.bsky.social on IG )

Literally in line to pick up my Hildegard latte

It’s just so exciting to find some random text written by someone a thousand years ago and be able to read it. The great woman humanists of 15th c. Italy? Wrote in Latin. Augustine, Gregory, Ambrose? Latin. Hildegard? Hrotsvit of Gandersheim? Latin! One key unlocks them all!

Old English will always be my favorite language, but Latin man … How cool is it to be able to read, in the same language, the writings of figures as far apart in space and time as Plautus, Cicero, Boethius, Bede, Aquinas, Petrarch, Isabella I, Isaac Newton, and J.R.R. Tolkien?

Ēala Romeo! Romeo! For hwȳ eart ðū Romeo? Wiðsac þīnne fæder and forwiern þīnne naman!

My parents are always telling me to save up for unplanned expenses. By this I assume they mean “what if you walk into the used book store and find five new Loebs that you don’t have” Well, I didn’t save up for this, but I’m buying them anyway

I googled this expression to see if a friend had gotten it from a website, and was unfortunately greeted by an ‘Old English’ response from the unsolicited AI overview. AI is still so so bad at Old English. Most of this is incorrect in some way. Please don’t use AI for OE.

The students at Mearcstapan were posting about the event throughout, and from what I saw it looked like a huge success. Congratulations!

Though the Welsh king Cadwallon gets quite the nasty description in Bede (barbarus pagano saevior - a barbarian, more savage than a pagan), I can't help but feel like he looks like a really friendly guy in this picture. Are those bunny ears on his helmet? And his rosy cheeks!

That is, in Cicero’s letters and in Plautus, ‘etiam’ seems to be an informal ‘yes.’ Impossible to know if Bede would have thought about it that way, though, and ‘etiam’ is the most common affirmative in the dialogue of HEGA.

“Yeah” is one of the oldest attested words in the English language. Bede records in the HEGA that a bishop healed a mute man by making the sign of the cross over his tongue and commanding him: “say something, say ‘ġǣ.’” Was it already informal? Bede’s translation, “etiam,” might suggest yes..?

Local tradition says that Bede was born in Jarrow. But his Old English translator tells us that the monk was born in <sunderlonde> … does this mean Sunderland (i.e., Wearmouth)? Or does it mean “private property” (a common meaning of the OE word ‘sunderland’), i.e., Jarrow??

So. You're off to the Holy Land. Bags are packed. Sword is sharpened. But have you given away your eels? In 1190 a man in Flanders named Eustace did just that. Before leaving for Jerusalem, he gave the "catch of eels" from his properties to his local church in perpetuity. 1/3 🗃️🧪

Bede tells us that when Bishop Wilfred brought Christianity to Bosham (in West Sussex), he also brought fishing. Apparently the local population only knew how to catch eels! “piscandi peritia genti nulla nisi ad anguillas tantum inerat.” (HEGA 3, 13)

Woman, drawn in eleventh-century England, peeping through holes natural to the membrane of this densely inhabited manuscript (Oxf., Bodleian Library, MS Barlow 4)