My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning

stickyskin:

Almost all medieval feast foods were conveyed to the mouth by elaborate, and often elegant, finger choreography…However, both pinky fingers were extended, never touching food or gravy or sauce, reserved as spice fingers. Dipped into the salt, sweet basil, cinnamoned sugar, or ground mustard seed, then raised to the tongue, the spice fingers displayed a feaster’s digital finesse while adding another sensual pleasure: touch of food’s texture.

Some modern polite extensions of pinky fingers, serving no physical pur­pose, are cultural remembrances of medieval spice fingers. In fact, a medieval clerical encouragement for use of the fork was to eliminate the pleasure of touch. The fork was generally ignored until the late 16th century as a super­fluous and foppish metallic intrusion between sensual food and willing mouth. 

-Historian Madeleine Pelner Cosman

image: The Marriage Feast At Cana, traditionally attributed to Hieronymus Bosch

(via unseeliequeen)

mediumaevum:

The Stećci [stetɕtsi] (singular: Stećak), are monumental medieval tombstones that lie scattered across Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the border parts of Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, although almost exclusively following the borders of medieval Bosnian state. An estimated 60,000 are found within the borders of modern Bosnia and Herzegovina and the rest of 10,000 are found in what are today Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. 

Appearing in the 11th century, the Stećci reached their peak in the 14th and 15th century, before disappearing during the Ottoman occupation.

image: This particular one is in the city I currently live in (Belgrade, Serbia) and is in a pretty good condition, as you can tell. But why it’s in the street, next to one of the busiest streets will never stop to baffle me. And it’s in front of the Ethnographic Museum.  

vwcampervan-aldridge:

Lichfield Cathedral, the only Medieval Cathedral in England with three spires it was built between 1086 AD and 1220 AD. The main central spire is 230ft high.

(via caledonian-vapour)

darkvelvetcorpse:

Medieval Narcissim 5 by *L-Olenska

(via ronwheezyrox)

regndoft:

The Middle Ages was a very exciting time in Europe.

(Source: gallifreyan-gallimaufry, via modernfoppery)

cercleproudhon:

An Introduction to the Social Theories of the Middle Ages

We are currently in the midst of many troubles. We seem to go from crisis to crisis, and have few ways to deal with the complexity of our social systems. So is this a time to be looking backwards at the Middle Ages? Is this not an exercise in pure nostalgia, an escape from the problems of the moment? It is certainly appropriate to ask such questions on the occasion of republishing Dom Bede Jarrett’s Social Theories of the Middle Ages, but I would like to assert that this is indeed the perfect time for the republication of this important work. For our problem is that, having no grounds for comparison, we have no way to critique our society. We have only the vocabulary our age provides, that is, the sort of thinking that arises from the very system we are trying to critique.

jothelibrarian:

Pretty medieval manuscript of the day is an illustration of a vision of the apocalypse. I thought the drawing of the dragon was fabulous, with it’s twisted, knotted tail, and gnarled claws.

Image source: New York Public Library, MA 15. Image believed to be in the public domain.

missfolly:

Stained glass of Chess Players from the Hotel de la Bessée (Villefranche sur Saône) (1430-1440)

‘The game of chess as a metaphor for love ritual, permeates the culture of the late Middle Ages in literature as in the figurative arts. One of the most attractive examples of this craze is offered by the stained glass of the fifteenth century. 

As one of the oldest civil stained glass preserved, it recreates the lifestyle of a cultured elite. Both players wear stylish clothes and extravagant hats, as was fashionable in the fifteenth century. The lady wears a long robe of cloth lined with fur. She shaved the top of the forehead, as elegant women usually did in the early fifteenth century, and wears a horned headdress, so-called “split roll”. Her partner is wearing a beautiful chaperone that forms a turban on his head. The gray and yellow - two favorite techniques of painting on glass - are employed on a very pure glass, of varying thickness, sometimes very thin. Its remarkable quality of execution is also one of the best artworks of the Lyons area from the mid-fifteenth century.’