In previous posts on this blog I have outlined my thoughts on the ‘Middle Ages’ and on what the words ‘medieval’ and ‘Middle Ages’ can usefully be made to mean. …
This post is just a little add-on to the previous one on nutmeg and the Holy Grail. You may remember from that post that we looked at two early grail stories — Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes (1181–1190) and Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach (1200–1210) — and specifically at the…
There are many stereotypes of the Middle Ages in Europe — so many, in fact, that there are several competing typologies of the various medievalisms found in modern media. Some of these medievalisms, including the ones perhaps most familiar to TV audiences in 2021, emphasise barbarity and dirt, with gruff…
This post is the fourth in a series on the Old Sundanese language. For earlier posts in the series, see: · PART I · PART II · PART III ·
You may remember from the last post that the scripts used to write Old Sundanese are based on signs for…
For Part IV, go here.
In the last post in this series, I said we would look at the first line of text in the Old Sundanese narrative poem Bujangga Manik, a lovely and interesting story written in the late fifteenth century. Here is that line (Figure 1):
As I…
In the first post in this series I introduced you to the Sunda kingdom (c.850?–1579), based in what is now West Java, Indonesia, and to some of the history of Old Sundanese, the language that was used for writing poetry and inscriptions there. In this post we’re going to look…
This is the first part in a series on the Old Sundanese language, which will provide the rudiments of a course in reading Old Sundanese texts. This post gives some necessary historical and geographical background; in the next post we’ll start looking at manuscripts.
