lonemagpie

Nice little vid about how everything you think you know about Ninjas is wrong, and now historians are just starting to really study the matter.

OK, I am so going to have to try that rabbit recipe from Richard II's kitchens. Rabbit pieces, seasoned with salt, black pepper, ginger, cinnamon, currants and chopped red onions. All that seasoning mixed a bowl, the rabbit pieces dipped in, and then fried up a little first, before the contents of the bowl are tipped into the pan and simmer for 30-35 minutes.

BBC Four's "How To Get Ahead In A Medieval Court" just had Clarissa Dickson-Wright do that, and now I know I want to try it for Easter...

Politics in Ancient Greece-

http://www.ancient.eu.com/article/631/

This one's more fun though-

http://www.medievalists.net/2010/11/24/%E2%80%98i-have-traveled-a-good-deal-in-norfolk%E2%80%99-reconsidering-women%E2%80%99s-literacy-in-late-medieval-england/

Long story short, back in the day, "literate" and "illiterate" didn't mean you could or couldn't read and write - it meant you could or couldn't read and write *Latin*.

If you could read and write, but not in Latin, and were a woman, the word used was "lewed".

From which, interestingly, we get the totally-different-in-meaning word "lewd"...

The old English word Laewed originally meant non-clerical, you see, then came to mean coarse and vulgar later in the Middle Ages. So then the clergy managed to cast women who could read and write non-Latin into lewd women, deceptive with their non-clerical writings... You can see where that was going to lead...

Well, I would, on HMS Trincomalee last month...