I started blogging in about May 2004, near the end of the early phase of the history of blogging, although the history blogosphere and academic blogging was very much in its infancy. The very first blog carnival (begun 2002, I think) was the Carnival of the Vanities, a weekly US-oriented political blogs roundup. It spawned various imitators; I found none of them very interesting. But by summer 2004 carnivals for scholarly subjects were beginning to emerge, and these did grab my attention.
My primary inspiration was the Philosophers’ Carnival (which is still going strong too, I’m pleased to say). Carnivalesque began as an early modernists’ carnival, and widened out to take in the medieval and ancient worlds a bit later. Some of the blogs of the first edition in September 2004 are long gone now, although nearly all of the posts mentioned there can still be located. Even where the blogs no longer exist or are inactive, many of those bloggers are still to be found blogging away, somewhere.
Digital and Physical Media, Medieval+Modern
Dorothy Kim wrote at the group blog In the Middle about being a medievalist on Twitter and live-tweeting conferences
As a manuscript specialist, I spend a lot of time looking, reading, transcribing, and thinking about the physical manuscript medium. I am obsessed with the marginal and interlinear glosses and commentary as I am with the main text in a manuscript. If the medieval manuscript is a recording medium that allows scholar now to see the conversations and connected marginal glosses of individual readers, then twitter is the digital medium that replicates this practice the most but with comments all the time and in real time for individual thinkers.
At the Folger’s group blog The Collation, Goran Proot traced the mysteries of a 17th-century pamphlet.
The text is a response to another pamphlet and it indicates neither a place of publication nor a printer. But the flyleaves used by the binder of this little book tell a nice little story about the bookseller’s scene in Mechelen in the beginning of the 19th century.
Erik Kwakkel asks: What is the Oldest Book in the World? But first, what is a “book”?
Zachary Fisher of Shaping Sense chronicles his developing experiments in making woodcuts.
Laura Sangha has a mini-series of posts at The Many-headed Monster on an Exeter exhibition of ‘the spirit of adventure and enterprise of south west people’ during the Elizabethan period.
New and Old Worlds
I think my favourite new discovery for this edition was Medieval POC (Tumblr) and its slightly more sedate companion Medieval POC.
The focus of this blog is to showcase works of art from European history that feature People of Color… to address common misconceptions that People of Color did not exist in Europe before the Enlightenment
It’s almost impossible to choose one post from the tumbling cornucopeia, but I loved this late-16th-century Italian Portrait of a Young Black Man.
The consistently brilliant British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts blog brought us an Old World View of the New World. This 16th-century Spanish manuscript includes among its vividly detailed miniature an illustration of a Spanish expedition to America in 1530, with the unsettling text, referring to Indian cannibalism (trans.): ‘The Indians, who until now had gorged themselves on human flesh like wild and untamed beings, by the virtue and sovereign power of Charles have been domesticated’. A follow-up post took an even older view of the new world in images of the edges of the known world and unknown world in earlier medieval manuscripts.
Samir S. Patel explores the archaeology of the Stone Towns of the Swahili Coast .
S.J. Pearce strikingly juxtaposes Convivencia, the Medieval Mediterranean and the San Francisco Unified School District at Notes from the Life of a Medievalist.
And an old early modern blogging friend, the Historianess, brought us up to date with her shiny new Atlantic World syllabus.
Science and Technology
A much loved old online friend, the Renaissance Mathematicus, also reached a milestone this month with 500 posts, including this Christmas post about Kepler’s thoughts on snowflakes.
The Corning Museum of Glass’s blog Behind The Glass had a post on Antonio Neri, the 17th-century Alchemist, glassmaker and priest by Paul Engle, who also blogs about Neri’s life and times at Conciatore.
Neri is famously known as the author of the first book devoted to the subject of making glass—L’Arte Vetraria, 1612.2 He has often been considered a mysterious figure, steeped in the intrigues of alchemy and transmutation.
Rohit Gupta of Kali & The Kaleidoscope posts about The Age Of Re:discovery and an upcoming online workshop in the history of science, exploring ancient and pre-modern navigational techniques.
Sex, Sexuality and Marriage
Notches is a new group blog on the history of sexuality. A cracking inaugural post is from Katherine Harvey on Bedsharing and Sexuality in Medieval Europe:
One of the biggest challenges facing medieval historians, and perhaps especially historians of medieval sexuality, is interpreting the actions of individuals at a remove of several centuries… For many modern readers, the fact that the two men shared a bed can mean only one thing: they were having a sexual relationship.
At Irish History Podcast blog there is a guest post by Finbar Dwyer, using a 1306 court case as a starting point for a discussion of prostitution in medieval Ireland.
Judith Weingarten of Zenobia: Empress of the East explores a remarkable series of sensuous golden pendants in Sex Play in Ancient Canaan (part 2, part 3).
Perfume and gold … and the image of a woman (left) reduced to her simplest female essences: face, breasts, navel, and a decidedly hairy pubic triangle.
The Scribe Unbound has a look at Marriage in the Margins of manuscripts from the wonderful collections of the Walters Art Museum.
Classical Wisdom Weekly delves into The Dirty World of Ancient Graffiti.
what sort of thing lined the walls of the shops, houses, brothels and public buildings of these ancient towns before they were paradoxically destroyed – and preserved – from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD?
Pain, Life and Death
At Early Modern Medicine Sara Read discusses Lady Elizabeth Hervey’s experiences of Rheumatism and Joint Pain, while Jennifer Evans has a post at the Perceptions of Pregnancy blog on the pain relief options for a woman in labour in the early modern period.
Sam Thomas guest posts at Susanna Calkins’ blog on death and the seventeenth-century midwife.
While we (rightly) associate midwives with bringing life in to the world, for several centuries midwives also sent people out. Most obviously, thanks to comparatively high infant and maternal mortality rates, midwives saw their share of death in the delivery room. But this is just the start, for midwives were key players in England’s legal and judicial system, and when a woman came into contact with the law, whether as a victim or a suspect, a midwife often was on the scene.
Samantha Sandassie at the newish blog Panacea explores the importance of networking and patronage to early modern medical practitioners.
At the beginning of the 17th century, the College was faced with a troublesome surgeon who proved that even frequent and flagrant flouting of College strictures could be attenuated by patron power.
David Meadows, the Rogue Classicist, looks at a recent story on Head-Hunting Romans.
Food (and Festive Gluttony)
At Research Fragments, Jonathan Green discusses prophecies discovered inside herring caught by fishermen in the Baltic or North Sea in 1587, which also inspired an anonymous parody a year later.
Ask The Past has advice from 1687 on How to Make Fake Bacon, while 18thC. Cuisine has a recipe for Royal Saucissons.
For those waking up after the Christmas and New Year festivities, Dr Alun had a post on the early modern history of “detoxing”.
Postscript: Then and Now
Another Damned Medievalist (Cesque #1 post) has been blogcrastinating. (Hang on, wasn’t she doing that in 2004 as well?)
Brandon Watson (Cesque #1) is still posting regularly at Siris and recently started a series on Prayers written by early modern philosophers, starting with the French Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715).
Konrad Lawson (Cesque #1) and George Williams (Cesque #1) can both be found at the group blog ProfHacker (for ‘Teaching, tech, and productivity’) these days. Konrad recently posted on Open Access publishing; George has some tips for 2014.
Henry Farrell (Cesque #1) is still an active member of Crooked Timber.
Miriam Jones (Cesque #1) occasionally surfaces at scribblingwoman2 and blogs more often in her role as President of the Association of University of New Brunswick Teachers (AUNBT) .
Natalie Bennett (Cesque #1) still blogs at Philobiblon from time to time, including posts about early modern women, when she isn’t too busy being the leader of the Green Party.
Many thanks to the people who sent nominations, and to all the bloggers who make it possible!
The next Carnivalesque will be at Anchora on or about 8 March.
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy…
- The Giants’ Shoulders (history of science)
- The History Carnival
This could have been a much, much longer carnival. Blogging isn’t dead yet, whatever you might have read somewhere recently (though commenting on blogs might, sadly, be on its last legs…). Just like the people who do it, it continues to grow and evolve. So here’s to the next 100 Carnivalesques, whatever they may look like…
Early Modern Notes 