Medieval History Roundup

.
Emma Sykes, "History buffs who know their stuff: Re-enacting history," ABC Brisbane, June 8, 2011

It's the closest you'll ever come to Knights, Roman Legionaries, and Napoleon's men in the 21st century, and its big business in Queensland. Each year thousands of people in Queensland alone transport themselves back to their century of choice to re-enact history.>>>

Liam Sloan, "Latin dictionary is a lifetime career," Oxford Mail, June 8, 2011

FOR 32 years, Dr David Howlett has been scouring medieval Latin texts, picking out unusual words and compiling them in one of the world’s most extraordinary dictionaries.

But, if that sounds like a lifetime’s work, it’s just a fraction of the time spent by scholars on a monumental effort to record the definitions of every Latin word used in Britain for more than 1,000 years.>>>

Karen Rosenberg, "Medieval Style Files: Tailored Artistry," NYT, May 26, 2011

Can you judge a hunter by his houpeland, or a prince by his pouleines? You certainly can in “Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands” at the Morgan Library & Museum. This lively show will teach you to scrutinize centuries-old manuscripts as you would a style magazine. (For the uninitiated: a houpeland is a high-waisted, drapey gown; pouleines are shoes with long, pointy toes.)>>>

Tom Payne, "Dante in Love by A N Wilson: review," Telegraph, June 6, 2011

Let me confess immediately that I haven’t read The Divine Comedy. Not much of it, anyway. I feel terrible about it, and should be punished, but, as Lucifer says somewhere, it comforts the wretched to have companions in their pain. And what companions there are. In Small World, David Lodge gives us Philip Swallow, who has had a copy of the poem with him on trips “for the last 30 years without ever having made much progress in it”.>>>