Final Exam: Mon., Dec. 10
- The final exam will be from 2:30 - 4:20, in our normal classroom
- Please bring a blue book or a green book or some type of blank paper to write on
- There will be two sections:
- Identifications: you will be given some terms, and will be asked to write a sentence or two defining the term and explaining its significance. These will be terms that are quite familiar to you from this course.
- Essay: you will be asked to read some documents and discuss them, based on what you have leared in class this quarter.
- The six themes that I asked you to examine for Friday's class were:
- Community
- Identity: National and Class identity
- Chivalry
- Development and uses of literacy
- Status and display
- Development of government
- Optional but highly appreciated: Take this brief survey about the best and worst lecture in this class. All the questions are optional, so answer as many or as few as you like.
Posted 12/7/07, 4:40 pm
Manuscripts
Here are the notes from the lecture I gave today on manuscripts:
Posted 12/3/07, 8:20 pm
Research on Plague and HIV connections
There is a brief article in the current issue of Archaeology about research into medieval DNA and the connections researchers might be able to find between the Plague and HIV. The article is short and provides more questions than answers, but is relevant to our class discussion yesterday.
Posted 11/8/07, 1:40 pm
The Onion Reports on Jousting
Gotta love the Onion
Posted 11/5/07, 8:50 pm
French cutting off English fingers
In Friday's class, someone asked if it is true that the gesture of holding up two fingers was a sign of defiance made by English archers to French soldiers in the Hundred Years' War, because the French would capture English archers and cut off their two fingers. I didn't have an answer to the question, but have always thought that story to be a little bit fishy. Well, I looked it up on Snopes.com (The Urban Legends Reference Pages), which is an excellent resource for questions like this. According to their version of the story, it isn't two fingers, but just the middle finger, which leads to another modern-day offensive gesture. They pretty thoroughly debunk this myth, and a lot of their debunking applies equally well to the gesture of two fingers. Just the fact that the story is used to describe two very different gestures is a pretty good indication that it's false.
Posted 11/3/07, 5:00 pm
Luttrell Psalter Movie
A British film company is making a film based on images in the Luttrell Psalter. This looks like a pretty nifty re-enactment exercise. They've decided to take the visual evidence of the manuscript very literally, but the film is apparently accompanied by documentaries discussing the possible innaccuracies of the images in the manuscript. You can watch some clips from the film online.
Posted 11/1/07, 9:00 am
Trebuchets
I mentioned in class today that trebuchets are pretty amazing machines, and that people who are interested in trebuchets tend to be fanatics. Here are some links to trebuchet websites:
- NOVA: When the PBS show NOVA did a show on trebuchets (which is really nifty and well worth watching), they created a companion website with all sorts of trebuchet information, including a fun game you can play, called "Destroy the Castle."
- Ripcord: There are a zillion trebuchet sites out there, but this one does a decent job of explaining how they work and how to build one yourself.
- Rich English Guy and his Trebuchet: If you go to YouTube and search for "trebuchet", you'll find lots of videos. It's pretty amazing to watch them in action - they are very strange machines. This video is of a huge trebuchet that some rich guy in England built for the fun of it. He uses it to hurl cars and flaming pianos.
Posted 10/24/07, 6:45 pm
Bayeux Tapestry Video
Posted 9/28/07, 4:05 pm
Website still under construction
I'll probably tinker with this website all semester long. I was experimenting with a box on the side of the page with the current reading assignment in it, but Internet Explorer wasn't displaying it right (although it looked fine in Firefox). So the box is gone, but the current assignment is still posted on this page. I have also made some changes to the course schedule, including adding the topics we will cover in each class. Thanks to those of you who have alerted me to problems with the website - it's a constant work in progress, and I'm happy to follow your suggestions.
Posted 10/10/07, 6:05 pm
Welcome!
Welcome to Professor Kay's course on Medieval England!
This page will have announcements, the reading assignment for the upcoming class, and other important information. Please explore the rest of the site, where you will find the syllabus, the textbook reading assignments for the entire semester, important files such as handouts distributed in class, and a wide array of resources on Medieval England.
The image which forms the background to these pages shows an a woman teaching geometry to a group of students.