I Wish I Knew That Yesterday

You’re right, I forgot that we arranged our continents by mountain ranges, I had to look at my world map again

Thanks!

Well, my first piece of advice would definitely be to start with whatever topic you find the most interesting, because that will be your “beginning”. Chronological order usually doesn’t make much sense, unless you really want to start at the beginning of like, human history. Starting with something you enjoy makes sense, because your interest will fuel you to look carefully and with real enthusiasm, and will lend your perspective toward the material. Diversity of perspective is what I think research today really needs, and you should remember that your lived experience, preferences, and sense of aesthetics is what will make what YOU have to offer a topic truly valuable.

Another bit of advice is to find out what kind of sources are most suited to your learning style and level of engagement. Do you prefer online articles or print sources? Do you like PDFs, ebooks, or files for your phone? Do you like images, databases, timelines, or academic journals?

Here are a few ideas for starting points. The Walters Museum offers a full PDF catalog/book to accompany the Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe exhibit, and you can view the entire thing online for free here. 147 pages with a lot of images of artworks, and a little bit of information about them. If something piques your interest, you can always try and track down more sources about it.

Another fabulous resource for those who might not be 100% sure where they want to start is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. You can start by searching out something like “The Silk Road” which will start all the way back in antiquity, or just click here. An important part of using this resource is here on the right:

that menu can lead you to clicking and reading for hours, trust me! And you’ll learn a lot, with your own interests and aesthetics guiding you.

Now, if you’re really interested in Illuminated Manuscripts, what you want is the British Library’s Digitized Manuscripts Database. There, you can use their viewer to flip through books from the middle ages as if you held them in your own hands!

Now, if just trying to randomly search out manuscripts is intimidating to start with, never fear-they have a blog! And a Twitter account! You can browse for topics or images you find interesting, and then go back and check out the entire books on the website later. Or don’t! It’s entirely up to you.

Are you interested in explorers and adventure stories? There’s a lot more out there than Marco Polo. My suggestions are to look up Ibn Fadlan, Ching Shih, Zheng He, Ibn Battuta, Hasekura Tsunenaga, and Mai (Omai).

If none of these options is doing it for you, then you can always check out my Static Resources Page and just start clicking things until you find something you like! 

And if a list of text links isn’t your style, just click this blog’s Archive View and you’ll see something like this:

You can browse the 6,000+ posts on this blog quickly and easily that way, sort them by type (image, text, quote, link, et cet.), and see posts by month going back three years.

Laura

The Wicked + The Divine

YOU HAVE BEEN VISITED BY A BAT

A couple weeks ago The Mary Sue announced they weren’t going to cover “Game of Thrones” any more after yet another female character being brutally raped. The thread is still being invaded by trolls periodically, and there are more than 12,000 comments on the article, which is a site record and probably an internet record. (12K comments because a single website said “We’re not going to recap or promote this show any more.” Baffling.)

Tons of trolls have thrown out the “but THINGS WERE JUST LIKE THAT BACK THEN!” argument ad nauseum. Which is total bullshit, of course. Now with the season finale of “Outlander” (which, spoiler, also included rape) the trolls are coming back.

I just want to ask, why is it whenever producers/directors/writers want to demonstrate “gritty historic realism” it’s ALWAYS RAPE? It’s always sexual violence toward women/girls.

You know what would be gritty historic realism? Dysentery. GoT has battles and armies marching all over the place. You want to show “what things were like back then”? Why aren’t we seeing 500 guys by the side of a road puking and shitting their guts out from drinking contaminated water while the rest of the army straggles along trying to keep going? Or a village getting wiped out by cholera? Or typhus, polio or plague epidemics? 

You want to show what it was like back then for women? Show a woman dying of sepsis from an infection she caught while giving birth. Show a woman coping with ruptured ovarian cysts with nobody know what it is. Breast cancer that the audience will recognize immediately but the characters think is some mark of the devil or some shit.

And you know what, I’m not even gonna insist on the dysentery.  Just this: if you’re going to include rape on the basis of historical accuracy, none of your female characters are allowed to have shaved legs or armpits.  And all of your characters have to have terrible teeth – yellowed and worn and crooked, because nobody’s getting braces or regular visits to the dentist – with at least a few teeth blackened or missing for every character over the age of thirty.

Accounts from Vikings’ contemporaries recount a lot of raiding, but not a single case of rape. Viking law didn’t treat rape as a property crime, and the penalty for it was outlawry, which was essentially a death sentence. Medieval English law prescribed that rapists be castrated and blinded. And the sagas contain vanishingly few references to rape (and violence against women is usually followed with comeuppance–often death–for the perpetrator). 

TL;DR: History wasn’t one giant rape-fest, and in fact, members of the cultures high fantasy is usually based on may have actually been more disapproving of rape than we are today (imagine trying to pass a bill making rape a capital offense today!).