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One critical difference: the umpire has a halberd and is willing to use it. The Ghistelles Hours, a Fourteenth Century Flemish devotional manuscript, contains illustrations of people playing something that scholar Carl Pyrdum describes as baseball. But I think that it sounds like cricket:
Though there’s no base in sight, various historians of sport have identified this game as a version of “stool ball” or “stump ball”, which was baseball played with only one base, where the object was for the pitcher to hit a stump or a stool or other handy protrusion with the ball while the batter protected it by batting away the pitcher’s balls. Each player stood on or near what was essentially a “base” If the batter made contact, he was expected to run around the pitcher’s base and back to his own. Various fielders could catch the batted ball and throw the ball at the stool while the batter is occupied running.
Link -via Retronaut | Photo: Walters Art Museum
Christine de Pizan wrote Othea’s Epistle to Hector (the Book of Knighthood) around the beginning of the 15th century. She is considered to be the first female professional writer. In 1460, a manuscript of the Book of Knighthood was commissioned, written in Middle French and illustrated with miniatures. Sixteen of those miniatures are reproduced for your pleasure at BibliOdyssey. Link
Brabant is a province of Belgium. The Brabant Chronicle is a 14th-century manuscript by Jan Van Boendale. The chronicle was published in several updated versions and covers events of the area from around the year 600 to 1350, and is composed of 16,000 rhyming lines and illustrations. The volumes are owned by the Royal Library of Belgium, but 15 marvelous illustrations are posted at BibliOdyssey. Link
Women have been obsessed with hairstyle since, well, for-ev-vuh. As you can see, even women from the Middle Ages liked their hair all done up fancy, as documented by the Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français de l’époque carlovingienne à la Renaissance (Reasoned dictionary of French furniture from the Carolingian era to the Renaissance), vol. 3 by E. Viollet-Le-Duc (1874)
If you’ve got the time, it’s pretty nifty to scan through the book, available at the Internet Archive, for the woodcut illustrations: Link – via TYWKIWDBI
A bottle has been unearthed in Greenwich, England that contains urine and objects believed to have been put there to combat witchcraft. It was completely corked, so the contents were available for analysis, unlike other bottles found from the period.
An Old Bailey court record from 1682 documents that a husband, believing his wife to be afflicted by witchcraft, was advised by a Spitalfields apothecary to “take a quart of your Wive’s urine, the paring of her Nails, some of her Hair, and such like, and boyl them well in a Pipkin.”
The excavated bottle appears to have been made according to those, or similar, instructions.
CT scans and chemical analysis, along with gas chromatography conducted by Richard Cole of the Leicester Royal Infirmary, reveal the contents of the bottle to include human urine, brimstone, 12 iron nails, eight brass pins, hair, possible navel fluff, a piece of heart-shaped leather pierced by a bent nail, and 10 fingernail clippings.
So far, they’ve found the urine was from someone who smoked, and the fingernails were in good shape, indicating a person of high status. Link -via Unique Daily
(image credit: Mike Pitts/British Archaeology)
Just reading this article can be painful. It has descriptions of the horrible treatments that were often the only thing available for what ailed you in the Middle Ages.
It was not a pleasant time to be a patient, but if you valued your life, there was no choice. To relieve the pain, you submitted to more pain, and with any luck, you might get better. Surgeons in the early part of the Middle Ages were often monks because they had access to the best medical literature – often written by Arab scholars. But in 1215, the Pope said monks had to stop practicing surgery, so they instructed peasants to perform various forms of surgery. Farmers, who had little experience other than castrating animals, came into demand to perform anything from removing painful tooth abscesses to performing eye cataract surgery.
Some of the medieval medical graphics may be NSFW. Link -via Gorilla Mask
