Barbara's Blog

Happy Birthday, John Lennon (Still miss you).  

  More research in the slave-trade and slavery. An EXCELLENT article by Marley Brown in this month's Archaeology Magazine about the excavations at Christiansborg Castle in Ghana - about what life was like in the sixteenth century, in a slave-trade depot run by European slavers who traded with the local Africans who actually captured and brought in captive fellow-Africans to sell. The evidence of a small but thriving mixed-race community around the castle walls - and the fact that the (Danish, in this case) slavers would often send their mixed-race sons to be educated in Denmark - was absolutely not something I expected to find. And it brought up - as slave-trade research always does for me - the shocking contrast of the "business-as-usual" images of the people involved in the trade who weren't its victims, but its perpetrators. When I read about the accounting procedures on plantations, or the fact that plantation owners could purchase PRE-PRINTED FORMS to catalog sl...

  More trolling around the net when I should be working on the notes the editor sent me... First: because I did some Grail research in grad school, I was pretty sure at least one member of Monty Python was a medievalist - and I think the culprit is Terry Jones, who has written an EXCELLENT book on the so-called "barbarian" civilizations, and co-authored another which posits that Geoffrey Chaucer (who drops out of any historical record rather abruptly in 1400) was murdered. I recognized a number of Grail legend tropes in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (like the Castle of Maidens, which one finds in at least a couple of the different versions of the tale). I didn't realize, however, that THIS was a medieval thing, but it shows up in several illuminated manuscripts: So evidently The Boys weren't making it up! And then I found, in a friend's FB, a horrifying modern confirmation of all those snail illuminations I posted a few days ago! (The man in the pict...