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Oberleutnant posted:Working in a castle day-to-day I can confirm that it is loving freezing all winter even with central heating (installed in a Victorian refit and not especially good). Over the winter we have the radiators (3 in our office), 3 plug-in electric heaters (1 at each desk) and we're all wearing 5 or 6 layers and still completely frozen 24/7. Then July comes around and we all die of heat stroke even up on the fifth floor with all the windows and a side door out on a rampart wall open to get a breeze through. My dad has stories of growing up in the North of Ireland during the 50's. Some people in the country side would basically wear the same long johns for the whole of the winter, at all times. Some people used to use lard (I think) as an extra layer of personal insulation. Bear in mind these were people effectively in the middle of nowhere, living in lovely housing with only a turf fire for warmth. Aside from the quality of the clothing (somewhat) probably not too far off what someone in the early/late modern period would have.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 05:24 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:43 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Everything I was taught about the 30 Years War implied that it was absolute anarchy and hell on earth for the common person. I mean, it went on for decades so there must have been lulls in the fighting, and there must have been times when some popular support was behind this offensive or that one, if only from outrage and desire for vengeance. But the famine, disease, and widespread looting and rape was just a nightmare to the average laborer and certainly many of higher status as well. Yeah, just look at this bit from the beginning of Simplicius Simplicissimus: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen posted:Chap. iv. : HOW SIMPLICISSIMUS’S PALACE WAS STORMED, PLUNDERED, AND RUINATED, AND IN WHAT SORRY FASHION THE SOLDIERS KEPT HOUSE THERE
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 05:39 |
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MrNemo posted:My dad has stories of growing up in the North of Ireland during the 50's. Some people in the country side would basically wear the same long johns for the whole of the winter, at all times. Some people used to use lard (I think) as an extra layer of personal insulation. Bear in mind these were people effectively in the middle of nowhere, living in lovely housing with only a turf fire for warmth. Aside from the quality of the clothing (somewhat) probably not too far off what someone in the early/late modern period would have.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 05:43 |
Yeah, people in the West generally have no idea how loving horrifying it would be to be poor in an old school industrial environment.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 10:27 |
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If the UK and Ireland aren't Western for you, I'm not sure what is.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 15:05 |
Waci posted:If the UK and Ireland aren't Western for you, I'm not sure what is. What? Just imagine I said 'In the West today'.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 15:07 |
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Spiderfist Island posted:My Early Middle Ages professor structured his class as a critique of Gibbon's thesis (Rome fell because of Christian moral degradation and barbarism) and later Henri Pirenne's* (Islam's domination of the Mediterranean and trade therein forced western civilization's "center" to move north and develop into autarkic I was re-reading the thread and saw this; did you go to UMich by chance? My Early Medieval Era course was structured the same. I find it interesting how he took to task even the notion that Islam was what destroyed the Mediterranean trade routes.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 15:41 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Everything I was taught about the 30 Years War implied that it was absolute anarchy and hell on earth for the common person. I mean, it went on for decades so there must have been lulls in the fighting, and there must have been times when some popular support was behind this offensive or that one, if only from outrage and desire for vengeance. But the famine, disease, and widespread looting and rape was just a nightmare to the average laborer and certainly many of higher status as well. Honestly for me the most part of Wedgewood was the letter from an English ambassador late in the war describing how the countryside was entirely destroyed and it was just a miserable place to be and all you can think is "yeah don't get too comfortable back home."
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 15:47 |
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StashAugustine posted:Honestly for me the most part of Wedgewood was the letter from an English ambassador late in the war describing how the countryside was entirely destroyed and it was just a miserable place to be and all you can think is "yeah don't get too comfortable back home." And Halloween Jack, bear in mind that in addition to lulls in the fighting, there are also areas which were untouched by the direct effects of war. They would have suffered from the economic disruption and probably also from illness, but they would have been spared the getting murdered part. The 25-40% figure is an average. (It's also due primarily to illness and financial problems, rather than targeted killings) HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Apr 10, 2015 |
# ? Apr 10, 2015 17:28 |
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Goes up to "Everybody's dead, Hans" in places like Magdeburg.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 17:31 |
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my dad posted:Goes up to "Everybody's dead, Hans" in places like Magdeburg.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 17:34 |
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nvm
my dad fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Apr 10, 2015 |
# ? Apr 10, 2015 17:38 |
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Beamed posted:I was re-reading the thread and saw this; did you go to UMich by chance? My Early Medieval Era course was structured the same. I find it interesting how he took to task even the notion that Islam was what destroyed the Mediterranean trade routes. Was the argument that that Med trade routes were collapsing before Islam, or that there was no actual collapse of trade routes? I knew a Rutgers professor who argued that at least North Africa's sea trade collapsed once the ERE took over after the WRE's collapse, and that the arrival of Islam actually revitalized trade in places like Cyrenaica and Tunis, but I don't know enough about that to know how much merit that has.
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# ? Apr 10, 2015 17:54 |
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SEXMAN, you might appreciate this: the latter half of the 17th century managed to be classier about contributions, but they were still exacted under threat:
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# ? Apr 11, 2015 08:34 |
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The ancien regime was a bit of a mess.
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# ? Apr 11, 2015 13:37 |
HEY GAL posted:Killing 25,000 people in a single day, before industrialization, is a feat. Or as the Mongols would call it: Lazy.
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# ? Apr 11, 2015 18:19 |
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Ok I was in class today and a terrible argument came up. It's possible someone has come across the results here. Did any instances of fights occur between a gorilla and a bear during Ancient Rome?
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# ? Apr 16, 2015 18:22 |
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Depends on your definition of "bear"
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# ? Apr 16, 2015 18:24 |
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Gorillas weren't known in Europe before like the 1800s. So no.
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# ? Apr 16, 2015 18:28 |
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Gorilla is a Carthaginian word, so they definitely knew about them, although the Carthaginians thought they were basically really hairy people and not a species of ape. I highly doubt the Romans had any fight in the arena though.
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# ? Apr 16, 2015 18:33 |
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It is a Carthaginian word but it was basically like sasquatch. People saw them and stories grew up (except gorillas actually existed). They weren't known as a real genuine animal species until the 1800s, and the dude who discovered them decided to use that old Carthaginian word as the name.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 02:04 |
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I'll play devil's advocate and say that contacts between the classical Roman Empire and sub-saharan Africa are not well-documented, but the Romans were avaricious facilitators of international trade and big buyers of animals to die for their own amusement. So... maybe?
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 05:53 |
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I mean if you were a time traveler and you had enough gold and you were on the East African coast in 100 AD, you could probably figure out how to get a live gorilla. And they had direct trade routes to areas of the Roman Empire.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 05:55 |
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For all we know there was an eyewitness account of a fight between a bear and a gorilla, the last copy of which was scraped over by an 11th century French monk to make room for his copy of the apocryphal gospel, The Farts of the Apostle Doug.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 05:58 |
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If I don't read Latin and wanted to read something like the Iliad or Aeneid with a commentary by a Greek or Roman writer, what would be a good book to start looking for at my bookstore? I'm interested in reading how different commentators interpreted their classics. I'm not looking for like an omnibus, just any particular example people would recommend.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 06:40 |
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Flipped to Olympus on scifi. Literally the first thing I see is a mention that a goddess is symbolized by an 'ear of corn'. I'm not sure what else I was expecting.,
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 07:38 |
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cheerfullydrab posted:For all we know there was an eyewitness account of a fight between a bear and a gorilla, the last copy of which was scraped over by an 11th century French monk to make room for his copy of the apocryphal gospel, The Farts of the Apostle Doug. I mean, it's possible but there's no evidence.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 10:13 |
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Grand Fromage posted:It is a Carthaginian word but it was basically like sasquatch. People saw them and stories grew up (except gorillas actually existed). They weren't known as a real genuine animal species until the 1800s, and the dude who discovered them decided to use that old Carthaginian word as the name. The Carthaginians claim to have skinned a couple of gorillas during their voyages South, but I'm puzzled by how they describe gorillas as furry, ill-tempered humans.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 10:21 |
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Carthaginians claim to have skinned a couple of gorillas during their voyages South, but I'm puzzled by how they describe gorillas as furry, ill-tempered humans. They actually took bodysuits off a tribe of ill-tempered furries.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 11:04 |
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Carthaginians claim to have skinned a couple of gorillas during their voyages South, but I'm puzzled by how they describe gorillas as furry, ill-tempered humans. And you know some idiot tried to have sex with one. Because humans.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 11:18 |
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Tunicate posted:Flipped to Olympus on scifi. Could be they were referring to wheat. In some places 'corn' just refers to grain in general, not just American corn.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 13:32 |
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Mad Hamish posted:Could be they were referring to wheat. In some places 'corn' just refers to grain in general, not just American corn. I don't know of any wheat that has ears, though. vvv Well, I stand corrected. brocretin fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Apr 17, 2015 |
# ? Apr 17, 2015 13:34 |
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brocretin posted:I don't know of any wheat that has ears, though. The ear is the part of the plant that contains the grain. So yeah, wheat plants have ears.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 13:48 |
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Maybe it was imported from Crete? After all, the Minoans were famous for their maze.
Rockopolis fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Apr 17, 2015 |
# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:02 |
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Rockopolis posted:Maybe it was imported from Crete? The Minoans were famous for their maze, after all. No.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:05 |
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Rockopolis posted:Maybe it was imported from Crete? After all, the Minoans were famous for their maze.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:06 |
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Rockopolis posted:Maybe it was imported from Crete? After all, the Minoans were famous for their maze. Yes.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:08 |
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Kellsterik posted:If I don't read Latin and wanted to read something like the Iliad or Aeneid with a commentary by a Greek or Roman writer, what would be a good book to start looking for at my bookstore? I'm interested in reading how different commentators interpreted their classics. I'm not looking for like an omnibus, just any particular example people would recommend. Leaving aside the argument of when "Rome fell", we don't have commentaries on the Iliad by Greek or Roman writers, unless you count the Aeneid as commentary on the Iliad. What we have is stuff like this, much later. The scholia alluded to are mostly untranslated (but digitized, if you want to come back to them once you know Greek) (just kidding don't do that) and mostly kind of sucky, if I recall, though there are some really interesting ones. For the Aeneid, there is Servius, but I am not sure there is a full English translation.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:24 |
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LingcodKilla posted:And you know some idiot tried to have sex with one. Because humans. If they actually got far south enough to see gorillas, I imagine that after months at sea anything that looked vaguely human and female would have been remarkably tempting.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:33 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:43 |
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Tomn posted:If they actually got far south enough to see gorillas, I imagine that after months at sea anything that looked vaguely human and female would have been remarkably tempting. You do realise that there's quite a lot of people in Africa? In fact, there's so much people in Africa that it's in every way much simpler to try to have sex with one of them than with a gorilla.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:43 |