Letters... we get letters...

A few people in the Shire asked about calligraphy, so we moved our regular Research Night to Sunday afternoon and had a little workshop. I used PowerPoint to demonstrate a little bit of the history of lettering styles in SCA period, and then we tried writing a few lines.  We took the opportunity to write with different instruments (reeds, quills, metal, and nylon  tip).
I didn't know that the word "calligraphy" was coined post 1600.  Guess what, scribes. You need a new job description.
I hope the shire folk have a new appreciation of the work that is put into the scrolls that are presented with their awards.
 

Man's Speech Must Exceed his Grasp, Else What's a Meta For?

Normally, my classes tend to explain some aspect of the medieval mind. Sometimes they are even taught in persona, from the point of view of a 13th-century woman who has no knowledge of the modern world.
In my last class for a Bardic Madness (at least for a while) I broke with that trend, and used cable TV and 1940s radio to encourage bards to more interesting speech. My plan was to demolish trite phrases, cliché expressions, weasel words, and pleonasms by encouraging more engaging metaphors.
Aristotle suggests how to do this in On Poetics XXII, so I'm not making stuff up. He says that the poet must see the scene portrayed with "utmost vividness". Metaphors, which both deviate from normal language (thus being distinctive) and conform partially to normal language (bringing it clarity) aid in that portrayal.
Old time radio programs depended on language alone to draw the scene. For some examples, I recommend listening to "Pat Novak for Hire", a radio program that shot smart similes like a nervous gangster with a tommy gun.
Period examples of metaphoric scene-painting include Norse kennings, Chaucer's Prologue, and even Dante's Divine Comedy.
I brought some objects, pictures, and scenes for the class to describe in metaphor. (Look at the object on your left. Describe it as a skald or a Pat Novak writer might.)

Timey-Wimey Stuff

Thomas More's clock

With Winter Solstice exactly one week away, the Shire of Rokeclif was kind enough to let me pack them into the TARDIS for a look at time in period.  A "day" in Kudrun's time was the time between sunrise and sunset, which was divided into twelve hours. Though there was no period way of measuring the minutes, each hour today was about 45 minutes long. (If I were really in Scotland, each hour would be 35 minutes.)

We read calendars from books of hours, and tracked the names of the days of the week and the months.  We looked at fourteen different dates when "Happy New Year" was an appropriate expression, and decided that May 1 was our favorite.
It was a challenge to describe period timekeeping without resorting to the conventions we're used to -- the 60-minute hour and the 60-second minute. What was it like in period to switch to thinking of time "of the clock"?  (Check Chaucer's Parson's tale prologue for the intersection of two ways of time-telling.)
At least we didn't have to try to reconcile the solar and lunar years, which was a challenge for Julius Caesar, Roger Bacon, and Pope Gregory. And no, we didn't attempt to calculate the date of Easter.
(We did learn that my cursor was as good as a laser pointer for entertaining the cat.)

Maps revisited

I had an opportunity to rerun my class on maps (from April 2013) for the Shire of Rokeclif. We took the whole afternoon (and had a potluck afterward) so there was more time available, but there were kids in a class that was originally intended for adults. So I added some kid-friendly activities, such as using toilet paper tubes and pricked paper to make constellation maps, which the kids could project on the walls of a dark room, and magnetizing a needle to make a compass.   Sam added the directions for our Northshield compass rose.

Medieval Music You Already Know

In preparation for Rokeclif hosting Bardic Madness, I led a class on period music. Many of the songs we sang during the wintertime celebrations have their roots in the middle ages. A few examples:

The tune used for "Good King Wenceslas" was published in a sixteenth-century collection with the words, "Tempus adest Floridum", a carol for spring. These words appear in Carmina Burana, a thirteenth-century collection.

The tune of Greensleeves was used in 1642 as a New Year's carol before it became "What Child is This?"

"Good Christian Folk Rejoice" was sung by a circle of dancing angels in the fourteenth century with the words, "In dulci Jubilo"

The "March of the Three Kings" that Bizet used in L'Arlesienne was a mid-thirteenth century crusaders' hymn.

"Of Parental Love Begotten" may have the oldest pedigree. Its tune is a plainsong melody found in manuscripts as early as the tenth century. The words, "Corde Natus ex Parentis", are from a poem by Prudentius, written in the fourth century.

Food - it's what's for dinner

Rokeclif's A&S Night met at Java Vino, where we discussed which in a list of foods were early period, late period, and modern. By request, I posted a short bibliography of food books on Rokeclif's facebook page.

Herball with a Twist

Kudrun is still working on her herbal, but this time she did a total herbal immersion at Rokeclif's A&S Night. We saw herbs from period herbals and from Kudrun's gardens, and we felt and tasted them as well.  Nature provided oregano and dandelion, mullien and sage. Kudrun cooked up sage-filled pork, thyme-filled meatballs, and a rosemary-infused dipping oil. Sammy liked the mint sample best. Of course, dill seeds were provided to aid digestion.

Vexillology

How many shires can boast a 5-year-old who knows about vexillology. Sammy can tell you all about flags, though he'd rather tell you about Iron Man. The Shire of Rokeclif was thinking about banners and flags, so I prepared an overview of such things in period (and 1000 years before). My research may be skewed, but the gonfanon (commonly called a 'banner' today) wasn't used much in period. I still think I should make one.

Morris

April 30 was the date of Rokeclif's "Games People Played" event. I taught Merells (Mills, Morris... I've seen 29 names for the game.) The picture here is not of Morris, but of a chess set that I adapted. I haven't documented the use of rubber duckies for chess pieces, but this has to fall under the rubric, "if they'd had rubber duckies in the thirteenth century, they'd have played chess with them."

Research Day

The Shire of Rokeclif enjoys occasional trips to the library for research. We met at Murphy Library at UW LaCrosse on Monday, October 4 for some persona research. The question was, "How do you choose a persona?" I provided a sheet of suggestions and some library reference service. Is this a class? Sure.

More heraldry

I fixed up the heraldry class done without electricity at Poor Man's Pennsic and presented it in PowerPoint to the folks at Rokeclif's A&S Night.

ABGs revisited

Rokeclif's chatelaine thought that having classes at our shire meetings would be fun. I got to be the first presenter, with "Now I know my ABGs". It's interesting presenting a formal class to people you know pretty well. Nobody fell asleep.