#eleventh century

[ardenrosegarden]

For much of the modern historiography on medieval women, any woman who exercised any sort of power or influence was considered in some way “extraordinary.” The idea that a noble-born woman could be powerful and influential without qualification was simply not something that most scholars working before 1990 could digest or, in some cases, even recognize. Hence caveats were applied to account for a woman’s power: she was an heiress; she was from a powerful family; she had an “unusual” relationship with her husband or son; she was a powerful personality; she had influential friends. The operating assumption was that for a woman to have power either she or her situation had to be remarkable or unusual. That it was common and accepted for aristocratic women to hold courts, resolve disputes, mete out punishments, make proclamations, have clients, be patrons, command men, or hold office was something that had yet to be acknowledged or assimilated. Thankfully, recent scholarship on aristocratic and royal women has abandoned the equation of “Powerful Woman = Extraordinary” and has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that elite women regularly, mundanely, routinely, exercised power of all sorts.

Amy Livingstone, Recalculating the Equation: Powerful Woman = Extraordinary

[andiatas]

We stumbled onto Earl Waltheof and Countess Judith of Huntington accidentally.  We randomly searched the Prosapography of Anglo-Saxon England database for a Domesday Book lesson in our medieval English literature and history class.  We don’t even remember exactly what we were searching for, though it was probably a figure or property mentioned in Richard A. Fletcher’s Bloodfeud, which we assigned to our students.  We were astonished to see a woman, Countess Judith, come up repeatedly in the results.  Who was this woman, we wondered, who held lands and titles in her own right, and why had we never heard of her?

[coloursofunison]

The role of the historical fiction writer #histfic #nonfiction

The role of the historical fiction writer

Up-to-date interpretations in nonfiction titles Now, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think historical fiction writers have a duty to portray history as accurately as possible and I think this should be the most up to date interpretations of the past, and not what people were taught in the classroom at school, often quite some time ago, or what’s to be found in popular ‘history’ books…

[hermajestythetrashqueen]

Some costume designs for each arc.

[seaweedstarshine]

Okay so The Star Beast was fun and I'm hyped for Wild Blue Yonder and everything but I am shattered over the new episode of Eleventh Doctor Chronicles.

Broken Hearts is some of the best dark!Doctor Expanded Universe exploration I ever consumed, and that includes The Eleventh Doctor Year Two comics. I am sobbing. I am in tears. I am broken as thoroughly as the Doctor broke Valerie Lockwood.

Me when I can't find any Broken Hearts/Curiosity Shop stan posts to reblog or fic to read to get out the angsty energy...

(fic. I'm writing fic. and yes this is an open request for reading recs)

[dieinct]

stop sending me max miller's garum episode he said it was roman garum and used a recipe out of the geoponika

[ewingstan]

So one of the more popular attempted proofs of God’s existence was formulated by St. Anselm in 1078. The argument goes that we all are able have a concept of God, i.e. the concept of a greatest possible being. According to Anselm, it would be a contradiction to conceive of a being with more positive attributes than God, as God is “the being that which no greater can exist” (Barnes, 1972, quoted. from Stanford Encyclopedia entry “Ontological Arguments”).

Now, existence is obviously an inherently positive attribute, such that a being that exists is greater than a being identical in every way except for being nonexistent. So to go back to our concept of God: if God didn’t exist, then we would have a contradiction, as we could imagine a God that did exist and was therefor greater. But God is the most perfect being, so if we could imagine a being more perfect than our concept of God, than our concept of God is not truly of God at all. Therefore, because we can conceive of God/the greatest possible being, and because existence increases greatness,

As we can all see, there are absolutely no problems with this argument. Theologically useful as this was in the eleventh, in the modern day it has a much more useful purpose: we can use the same proof to show that Amy Dallon canonically did nothing wrong.

It is well established that worm fans have professed an ability to imagine the greatest possible Amy. While these interpretations of Amy tend to differ from each other, the sheer number of fans claiming this means that someone must truly be able to conceptualize the greatest possible Amy. It is of course obvious that an Amy that was canonical to the text of worm would be greater, all things being equal, to an identical Amy that was non-canonical. Given that the perfect Amy would be 1) without sin and 2) canonical to the text, our ability to imagine the greatest possible Amy necessitates that Amy Dallon canonically did nothing wrong. Thanks Anselm!

[joeyclaire]

i love how even after falling in love with him mister 2nd century warlord continues to call him “loser liege lord”

[kraniumet]

he sold all his swag to drop this one-liner

[themarginalthinker]

points at Alfred: my little hoarder son. bookish boy.

one of the people in Elysium literally describing him to another person as 'if you have something that he wants, you don't have that thing anymore. it's already his, you're just keeping it for now'

NERDCHILD

i love you

[ardenrosegarden]

[andiatas]

This article is a study of the life of Gunhild (d. 1087), sister of King Harold, who, together with her mother Gytha, sought exile in Flanders after the Norman Conquest; it is set in the wider context of the fate of high-status elite or royal women in post-Conquest England. Gunhild’s lead burial plaque with inscription (found in her tomb in the church of St Donatian in Bruges) constitutes a unique testimony to the fate of a royal sister in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. Her Latin obituary, the longest known on a lead plaque for an eleventh-century woman, consists of a biographical sketch of her and her family, including her brother’s death, and her itinerary in exile, while the second half is a near-hagiographical account of her as a woman religious; a new edition and English translation are included in an appendix. The article analyses the historical, literary and material aspects of Gunhild’s life, including evidence from the archive of St Donatian as to the considerable wealth she bequeathed to the canons in return for her burial in the church’s wall. It is suggested that as a woman religious she lived a penitential life on foreign soil not least to pay for the sins of the English defeated by the Normans. Comparison with other English royal or high-status elite women (and men) suggests that, defiantly and uniquely, Gunhild and her mother Gytha rejected accommodation with the Conqueror and instead followed the path of exile abroad, more commonly chosen by men.

[coloursofunison]

Saxon Royal Charters from 1006-1013 #TheEarlsofMercia #histfic #nonfiction

Royal charters from 1006-1013 There are only 8 surviving charters for this period in history. They are from 1007, 1009, 1012 and 1013. It’s said that the missing years are due to interruptions caused by invasions of ‘Viking raiders’. This certainly applies to 1010-11 and 1006 when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts tales of Viking incursions. As is so often the case, this lack is frustrating…

[brucedinsman]

Fox's Book of Martyrs

https://www.biblestudytools.com/history/foxs-book-of-martyrs/ Edited by William Byron Forbush This is a book that will never die — one of the great English classics. . . . Reprinted here in its most complete form, it brings to life the days when “a noble army, men and boys, the matron and the maid,” “climbed the steep ascent of heaven, ‘mid peril, toil, and pain.” “After the Bible itself, no…

[annabelle--cane]

harrowhark is five foot nothing and built like a damp worm on a string and feels so strongly about keeping her face and body covered at all times that if she doesn't have access to face paint she will cover her skin with her own dried blood and she has the personality of a deeply traumatized eleventh century orphan getting shipped off to a nunnery after her parents' passing and every eligible bachelorette in the nine houses desires her carnally to such an extent that they will rewrite the course of their lives over it

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I enjoy the flags of Cornwall and Brittany in part because they look so menacing yet are so innocuous