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Platystemon posted:Let’s talk about printing.
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Sep 21, 2019 22:51
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HEY GUNS posted:in paris i am p sure you'd be crammed into a lovely apartment though? i don't know about altdorf (wallenstein's alma mater, until he was kicked out) Probably. Oxford and Cambridge held a royal monopoly on university education in England till the 19th century, so they developed infrastructure of student residences in colleges since every rich son moved to Oxbridge and they had vague standards. Provincial universities popped up everywhere in Europe however, so local rich didn't move as far and such less explicit infrastructure existed to house students. You'd probably be a lodger in someone elses house/lovely apartment aswell.
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Sep 22, 2019 01:12
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Probably. Oxford and Cambridge held a royal monopoly on university education in England till the 19th century, so they developed infrastructure of student residences in colleges since every rich son moved to Oxbridge and they had vague standards. Provincial universities popped up everywhere in Europe however, so local rich didn't move as far and such less explicit infrastructure existed to house students. You'd probably be a lodger in someone elses house/lovely apartment aswell.
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Sep 22, 2019 01:31
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Grevling posted:Does anyone know anywhere online I could find the Prester John letter to emperor Manuel I in Latin or Greek (any version as long as it's medieval)? All I'm finding is translations. Was it even in Medieval Greek? I thought it was made up in Italy.
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Sep 22, 2019 05:48
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Jack2142 posted:Was it even in Medieval Greek? I thought it was made up in Italy. No idea, I just assumed the actual letter was intended for the Byzantine emperor and so probably in Greek. But since it was only claimed to be for the Byzantine emperor I guess there's no reason why it would be.
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Sep 22, 2019 07:08
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Grevling posted:Does anyone know anywhere online I could find the Prester John letter to emperor Manuel I in Latin or Greek (any version as long as it's medieval)? All I'm finding is translations. Well that was surprisingly difficult. I think this german book has a latin text of the letter (it's an appendix starting of page 165, or ctrlF for "Presbyter Joannes potentia Dei et virtute domini Jesu Christi". https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_VYN90ZzQavcC/bub_gb_VYN90ZzQavcC_djvu.txt I don't know much german, or latin, so perhaps it's actually medieval shopping list. Also as I think the author got the text from this 16th century travel book, so it might not actually be a medieval text at all. https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Itinerarius_Joannis_de_Hese_presbyt_a_Hi.html?id=a8aPGwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
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Sep 22, 2019 09:08
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Jazerus posted:so, uh, about that frasier episode... I have no idea, somebody gave me this av and I've never got an explanation 
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Sep 22, 2019 09:52
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Mr Enderby posted:Well that was surprisingly difficult. I think this german book has a latin text of the letter (it's an appendix starting of page 165, or ctrlF for "Presbyter Joannes potentia Dei et virtute domini Jesu Christi". That's a lot more than I've been able to dig up, thanks a bunch!
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Sep 22, 2019 09:58
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HEY GUNS posted:in paris i am p sure you'd be crammed into a lovely apartment though? i don't know about altdorf (wallenstein's alma mater, until he was kicked out) Paris developed a system of 'colleges' too, precisely because of people getting tired of the lovely apartment thing - not the Oxbridge kind where the academics lived there too, but just shared accomodation with other students from your 'nation'. That's how the Sorbonne started off. In general because of the whole town/gown violence thing you're gonna prefer to live with other students if you can, and if they also share a language with you that isn't Latin that's a bonus. (Note that everyone studying at a mediaeval university spoke Latin as a living language btw; it was the language of instruction. You also get stuff like this when the students are feeling more recreational.
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Sep 22, 2019 15:55
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feedmegin posted:Paris developed a system of 'colleges' too, precisely because of people getting tired of the lovely apartment thing - not the Oxbridge kind where the academics lived there too, but just shared accomodation with other students from your 'nation'. That's how the Sorbonne started off. In general because of the whole town/gown violence thing you're gonna prefer to live with other students if you can, and if they also share a language with you that isn't Latin that's a bonus.
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Sep 22, 2019 22:59
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You can't fool me, Altdorf is from Warhammer.  this is a joke i know it's just german for "old town"
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Sep 22, 2019 23:19
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I'm really glad I'm reading this book on early Roman history (The Beginnings of Rome by T.J. Cornell), I just hit the beginnings of the conflict of the orders and it's insanely badass. I'm still only at the first secession but already so much cool poo poo has happened that I feel compelled to post it for anybody who doesn't know about it. Fair warning, pretty much all the ancient historians assumed that the Roman legal system/constitution worked the same in the early republic as it did in the much better documented middle republic. There's enough inconsistencies to decisively decide this isn't the case (and the ancient historians noticed some of these and proposed various solutions). The story I'm about to tell is a plausible reconstruction of what really happened--one that this author thinks is the most likely reconstruction, but I'm sure just about every word I post could have an asterisk next to it. Maybe someone who has read more than one book on the topic can post some counterpoints to this reconstruction. The 5th century BC was a bad time, economically, for Rome. Rather than having an influx of money from conquest, they were consistently on the defensive. There also seems to have been generally worse economic conditions across Italy evident in the archaeological record, but this author doesn't even try to speculate on what caused it. Food shortages were common (not true famines; apparently those were rare in the ancient world for reasons I don't fully understand). Debt was rampant in the lower classes, and debt bondage (i.e. functionally enslaving people who default on their debts) was probably commonplace and full of abuses. The public land, which seemingly composed most of Rome's arable land, was originally intended to be distributed among all farmers (families would typically only own 20-50% of the acreage necessary to feed themselves and would work public land to make up the difference), but had been snapped up by the rich. You may notice that pretty much this exact set of complaints, slightly remixed, were still the primary social issues of the late republic 300 years later (and, while I'm not as familiar with other societies, probably the core complaints of the poor in every pre-modern society before wage laborers started to outnumber small farmers, which didn't really fix anything so much as shuffle the complaints around) In response to this, the plebeians (the word at that time probably meant the poor, rather than literally everybody who isn't a member of a hereditary noble family, and then the meaning shifted over time) instituted a general strike, moved en masse to the Aventine hill, and set up a government in exile. This government ended up being wildly influential on the patrician government back on the Capitoline, and by the end of the century almost all of the governmental reforms they instituted were either acknowledged to be legitimate or consciously imitated. The plebeian government elected Tribunes of the Plebs (and there were very briefly only two of them, before the number was increased to five--almost certainly a conscious answer to the consuls of the patrician government). Their primary powers seemed to be running the plebeian government (again, like consuls) and that they were sacrosanct. This is a term with a lot of religious significance, but after stripping away the supernatural elements, what it meant was that the plebeians agreed, as a group, to lynch anybody who harmed a tribune of the plebs. The origin of the tribunal veto (which wouldn't emerge as a formal legal power for quite a long time) was that a tribune would physically block the patrician with their body, and dare them to risk the mob's wrath. The plebeian government needed a public assembly but couldn't just use the centuriate assembly (the only public assembly of the patrician government at the time), because the centuriate assembly gave votes to tax brackets and all the plebeians fell in the bottom bracket. So instead they reverted briefly to the curiate assembly (which was the assembly used in the early regal period) before switching to an assembly where each tribe (essentially, a geographic region) got a single vote. This felt like a step backwards at first blush, but was probably more representative because it gave equal voice to rural voters even if fewer of them showed up. Giving an equal vote to geographic units of roughly equal population is basically what the US does today with the House of Representatives. In any case, the patrician government eventually adopted an almost-identical assembly called the tribal assembly in parallel to the centuriate assembly. The plebeian government was the first to introduce aediles, to handle day-to-day government business like distributing government-bought food. These plebeian aediles were eventually acknowledged as legitimate by the patrician government, and their number expanded with additional slots (patricians were forbidden from running for the original plebeian aedileships but were allowed to run for the additional ones). The patrician government also thought that having elected officials whose job is to assist your executives so they don't get bogged down in day-to-day stuff was a great idea, and instituted quaestors. All we really know about the goals of this government come in the form of legislative accomplishments that the patrician government later acknowledged as legitimate. So there might have been a big push for abolishment of debt, but if so it was never accomplished so we have no record of it. The sanctity of tribunes seems to have gone a long way towards curbing the worst abuses of debt bondage by giving the plebeians defenders backed by threat of violence. Rural land reform wasn't accomplished but urban land reform was, with the plebeian assembly passing a bill distributing publicly-owned urban land to the poor for housing later being acknowledged as legitimate by the patrician government. The notion of the poor getting so fed up that they not only institute a general strike, but make their own government in direct competition with the existing government is just such a great story I felt like I had to share it. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Sep 24, 2019 |
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Sep 24, 2019 20:33
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I thought the part about state land was especially interesting. I wonder if in practice "state" land at some point existed as a kind of common, before being gradually appropriated into private estates.
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Sep 24, 2019 23:28
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Squalid posted:I thought the part about state land was especially interesting. I wonder if in practice "state" land at some point existed as a kind of common, before being gradually appropriated into private estates. That seems to have existed as far back as the historical record goes and ancient historians attribute it to one of the kings who is of dubious historicity iirc. One of the big pushes of the Gracchus-era reformers was putting a maximum on the amount of public land one person could control. They did eventually pass a bill to this effect. To implement it, they used government funds to buy back theoretically public land that rich assholes had grown too accustomed to to part with willingly, and then distribute it to the rural poor and veterans. These new small farmers would be forbidden from selling the land, as a protection against it just being rebought by the same landowners who just gave it up. This had some early success but hit legal quagmires over what counted as public land when non-Roman Italians were involved, got defunded a few years later when the other party was ascendant in politics, and the ban on selling was so unpopular with the farmers it was supposed to help that it got repealed wholesale, and land reform was still the main goal of reformers a century later. You may notice in this story that not a goddamn thing has changed in the last 2000 years
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Sep 25, 2019 00:03
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now it has me thinking how land titles were handled in Rome. Managing that kind of record can be complicated and nightmarish even today with a modern bureaucracy. The Republic didn't have anywhere near that kind of infrastructure though, I doubt they had any extensive surveys. Presumably who owned what would have been defined and established by communities at the local level, which is also how powerful men would be able to gradually encroach on state assets. I wonder how distribution and management of state land functioned when it was worked by small holding tenants? I also wonder if woodlands and swamps and stuff made up a lot of the state land, areas that weren't cultivated but were still important assets used by livestock and fishing/hunting/gathering. From the middle Republic forward it's theorized Italy underwent large scale deforestation, so a there was probably a lot of land opening up for agriculture and pasture that might not have previously had title. Some of the evidence for deforestation is that flooding become dramatically by the beginning of the imperial period, presumably because the forest cover was being lost in the upper reaches of the Tiber.
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Sep 25, 2019 00:41
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Re the guy talking about early republic politics I think rescent research is showing that many many more consuls were plebes in the early part of the republic.
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Sep 25, 2019 00:44
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Do we have genuine data about Julian the Apostates' Frankenreligion?
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Sep 25, 2019 00:45
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euphronius posted:Re the guy talking about early republic politics I don't think you even need recent research for that, unless you mean that the plebeian consuls outnumbered the patrician consuls (this 25-year-old-book puts it at around 25% non-patricians in the early years of the consulship). Many of the names of the earliest consuls, from official state records, are not patrician names. However, Patricians start having exclusive control over the consulship a few decades later. Whether this was de facto or de jure is probably lost to history. The ancient historians think it was a legal requirement, but they also thought it existed from the beginning. Though to be fair, there's also a lot of disagreement amongst historians (or was 25 years ago when the book I'm reading was written) about whether the consuls might not precede the republic. Eponymous magistrates with little actual power existed in some Greek cities with much less murky historical records around the same time. There's also a thought that the consuls being elected by the centuriate assembly, rather than by their patrician peers in the senate (which is what you'd expect in the aristocratic takeover of government from a populist dictator) is because of an existing tradition that the kings would submit their choices for officers to approval by the army. Sorry if I'm telling you stuff you already know but I find all of this super fascinating and can't help but post about it to anybody reading who might not know.
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Sep 25, 2019 00:55
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I mean recent as in post ww2
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Sep 25, 2019 00:57
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euphronius posted:I mean recent as in post ww2 that is pretty recent for classics
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Sep 25, 2019 00:58
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cheetah7071 posted:(not true famines; apparently those were rare in the ancient world for reasons I don't fully understand) This was a great and really interesting post! This part I find tantalising -- does anyone know anything about the topic of famine in the ancient world, and where I might do some more reading on it?
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Sep 25, 2019 05:14
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professor metis posted:This was a great and really interesting post! This part I find tantalising -- does anyone know anything about the topic of famine in the ancient world, and where I might do some more reading on it? I don't know of any books specifically on the topic, but it was mostly a trade thing. If the crops failed in one region you could just buy from another and ship it easily given the Mediterranean trade routes. It was routine--Athens got its food from Crimea, Rome from North Africa/Egypt, etc. The Romans didn't really have major famine because of the efficiency of empire-wide logistics. Famines tend to either happen because everything is local so if the local conditions suck you're all screwed, or because of massive government mismanagement. Rome never had a Mao so it didn't see mass starvation. The lower population numbers couldn't have hurt either. And during the high period of the classical Roman era the climate was pretty favorable. Also, there probably was more famine than we think but the lack of records gives us a skewed view. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Sep 25, 2019 |
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Sep 25, 2019 05:36
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The book I'm reading cited Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis by Peter Garnsey
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Sep 25, 2019 05:42
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That sounds like the trade/good climate period then. I don't know of any non-war related Mediterranean famine in what I'm presuming the time period would be for a Graeco-Roman book.
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Sep 25, 2019 05:51
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Grand Fromage posted:Rome never had a Mao so it didn't see mass starvation. On one level this seems surprising, given how many Roman Emperors have a reputation for being mad and bad, but I guess it makes sense given the logistical difficulties of interfering much with agriculture, shipping, etc. even if the Emperor wanted to.
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Sep 25, 2019 05:51
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cheetah7071 posted:The book I'm reading cited Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis by Peter Garnsey From the excerpts I skimmed of this on Google Books, his argument seems to be that famine was uncommon but food shortages were not. Couldn't find his conclusions as to why that was, exactly. Strong trade routes & logistics makes a lot of sense though, given that being unable to get food to the right places is a major component of famines today.
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Sep 25, 2019 05:56
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Silver2195 posted:On one level this seems surprising, given how many Roman Emperors have a reputation for being mad and bad, but I guess it makes sense given the logistical difficulties of interfering much with agriculture, shipping, etc. even if the Emperor wanted to. If you want a deep dive read Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter and compare the political environments. No emperor ever had the sort of control over his subjects as a modern cult of personality dictator can pull off. If Elagabalus or whatever sent a letter to Hispania Inferior telling them to stop farming and start making steel instead the governor would've just said "lol sure" and ignored it. It's not like Roman emperors were running secret police and concentration camps for political prisoners and poo poo. They could kill political enemies but it was far more limited.
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Sep 25, 2019 05:59
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Arglebargle III posted:Eyebrows go up Really when you think about it, North Africans, middle Easterners, and the Welsh are all technically just Italians.
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Sep 25, 2019 09:03
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know of any non-war related Mediterranean famine in what I'm presuming the time period would be for a Graeco-Roman book. the crisis
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Sep 25, 2019 11:53
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Interesting question from another thread: when in history have political norms and behavior broken down and been repaired without interstitial violence?
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Sep 25, 2019 12:45
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What do you mean “repaired”.
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Sep 25, 2019 12:46
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Jazerus posted:the crisis My mental period was ending before then. The crisis is the transition period from classical to late antiquity in my mind and to me "Graeco-Roman" doesn't include late antiquity. Roughly 500 BC to 200 AD. The crisis is the earliest Roman period I can think of with natural famines though. Plague and climate change with a bonus plague only a couple generations later is Bad Times.
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Sep 25, 2019 18:10
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Arglebargle III posted:Interesting question from another thread: when in history have political norms and behavior broken down and been repaired without interstitial violence? I’m assuming this is about you know who and will have answers that fall outside the scope of this thread, such as watergate, so it might be better suited elsewhere.
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Sep 25, 2019 19:16
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Baron Porkface posted:Do we have genuine data about Julian the Apostates' Frankenreligion? I'd like to know this too. Julian has always been my favorite emperor.
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Sep 25, 2019 19:48
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Baron Porkface posted:Do we have genuine data about Julian the Apostates' Frankenreligion? Just off the top of my head, check out James O'Donnells "Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity". He talks a little about there and the way that Julian, who was raised Christian and had a Christian understanding of religion, took his understanding of NeoPlatoniam and forced it into a Christian model.
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Sep 25, 2019 20:05
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Arglebargle III posted:Interesting question from another thread: when in history have political norms and behavior broken down and been repaired without interstitial violence? Without delving into fairly recent history, I'm not sure you'd find many good examples. Violence and politics have traditionally gone hand in hand. It's also going to depend on what you count as sufficient violence, because there's always some. Events that come to mind would be the English Restoration, or the establishment of France's Bourbon Restoration after Napoleon, or the Reconstruction Era after the American Civil War. But all of them followed the path of massive fighting that exhausted the populace, followed by a strong military basically offering peace or the sword. The overall lesson is that broad pardons are generally seen as fundamental requirements for peace, as the alternative creates generations of resentment on the part of the losers. The classic example of this sort of thing is Rome's Marius and Sulla who collectively trashed most of the norms of the Roman Republic, and thus inspired future generations of leaders to also use violence and autocracy in order to achieve political goals. Mike Duncan talks a bit about this topic in his book "The Storm Before the Storm". In short he argued that the breakdown of "mos maiorum" (or traditional mores and decorum) ended up being incredibly destructive and permanent, in spite of efforts by the leadership to discourage emulation of their behavior. Once others saw that those paths to power were achievable, the temptation was ultimately irresistible. In particular there's a couple different podcasts that I'd point you to: A DC bookstore reading which occasionally veers into present-day politics: https://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2017/10/politics-prose-event-recording-posting-soon.html A book epilogue that breaks down the failures in efforts to repair the Roman Republic: https://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2018/10/sbts-epilogue-the-failure-of-the-sullan-constitution.html Kaal fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Sep 25, 2019 |
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Sep 25, 2019 21:43
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The Reunification of Germany, maybe? Although the norms only broke down in one half of the country... Got to admit it's a pretty chilling question.
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Sep 25, 2019 21:48
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Grand Fromage posted:If you want a deep dive read Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter and compare the political environments. No emperor ever had the sort of control over his subjects as a modern cult of personality dictator can pull off. If Elagabalus or whatever sent a letter to Hispania Inferior telling them to stop farming and start making steel instead the governor would've just said "lol sure" and ignored it. It's not like Roman emperors were running secret police and concentration camps for political prisoners and poo poo. They could kill political enemies but it was far more limited. YES. This is a thing that people can forget when it comes to the Principate. The number one obstacle for every would-be Roman god emperor was the Romano-Italians. It's hard to overstate the level of "go gently caress yourself" operating in the heart of the average Roman citizen (or soldier) on any given day. Their social psychology never had a problem with separating love of the fatherland from feelings about the rear end in a top hat that happened to be in charge of it at the moment.
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Sep 25, 2019 21:59
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It's worth keeping in mind that there's a bit of a selection bias of history. Times when things didn't totally go to poo poo despite the disruption of norms aren't often thought as notable as times when wars hit. It's also up for debate what being "repaired" means, since norms tend to be shifting things and after they're broken there's not so much to force people to return to old norms as opposed to forming new ones, or even forming new norms that try to pass themselves off as a continuation of old norms without a real direct relation. I've read that the civil unrest that led to Solon's reforms of the Athenian government didn't totally devolve into violence, and you could say that after his reforms, norms returned, but they were decidedly new norms afterwards. With monarchic governments things get even more nebulous, since from what I know, it really seems like there's a pattern of decaying systems with deteriorating norms to save a lot of grievances for after the monarch dies so that they can use leverage over a new monarch to get reforms passed.
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Sep 25, 2019 22:19
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Arglebargle III posted:Interesting question from another thread: when in history have political norms and behavior broken down and been repaired without interstitial violence? The Carnation Revolution, maybe? Depends on if regime collapse counts.
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Sep 25, 2019 22:43
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