Pictures from a recent joust in San Diego

The Tournament of the Phoenix is an annual event in California; the most recent was last weekend.  Julie Buchta-Davis took some excellent pictures and posted them on Facebook.  Here's the link, for those who have access.

Illustrations of knighting ceremonies for the class of October 26

Some easy links:

Thirteenth century.

Fourteenth century.

Fifteenth century.

Jousting in San Diego

A video on training and equipment, and an article on making armor.

Model NATO

Prof Gendron writes:

I'm in the process again of organising this years' Nipissing University student Model NATO team.  As part of the team, a group of 5 or 6 Nipissing students take part in a conference in Ottawa early in 2011 during which they will be part of a simulated NATO meeting.  The conference includes teams from other universities across Ontario and sometimes outside the province and is a great opportunity for students with an interest in international diplomacy/debate/crisis management and the like to get involved in a very enjoyable conference and to represent NipU outside the university, while interacting with their peers from other universities.

 

An organisational meeting for the 2010-11 Model NATO team is being held tomorrow, Oct 6 from 11-11:30 in room H304.

 

Weird Medieval History Contest

At Got Medieval?

Canadian residents can't actually win, but it might be fun for honorable mention.

Watch out for that word!

I have been looking over the short papers handed in last Tuesday about what knights did.  One quite reasonable  piece caught my attention by its assumption in several places that we all know what chivalry means. One point that was made more than once is that the actual knights depicted in our readings did not measure up to some standard of chivalry that was not specified.

Watch out for this trap! We have already seen, and will see repeatedly in times to come, that "chivalry" is a tricky word that means different things to different people, even back in the Middle Ages. If you are going to praise or criticize some person or group on the basis of their "chivalry," you better be clear what you mean by that word and where you are deriving that meaning from.

If you are interested in different concepts of chivalry, I suggest that you go to Scott Ferrell's Chivalry Ttoday website and listen to some of the podcasts there. They are free, interesting, and sometimes even brilliant. Now that you  have had a good look at Charny, you might want to listen to Richard Kaeuper or even me.