My Word with Douglas E. Welch

We might think we have a general grasp of the period in European history immortalized in theme restaurant form as “Medieval Times.” After all, writes Amy White at Medievalists.net, “from tattoos to video games to Game of Thrones, medieval iconography has long inspired fascination, imitation and veneration.” The market for swordplay, armor, quests, and sorcery has never been so crowded.

But whether the historical period we call medieval (a word derived from medium aevum, or “middle age”) resembled the modern interpretations it inspired presents us with another question entirely—a question independent and professional scholars can now answer with free, easy reference to “high-resolution images of more than 160,000 pages of European medieval and early modern codices”: richly illuminated (and amateurishly illustrated) manuscripts, musical scores, cookbooks, and much more.

 

Make the most of this time.
Nikon’s mission has always been to empower creators. In these uncertain times, we can do that by helping creators stay inspired, engaged and growing. That’s why we’re providing all of our courses free for the entire month of April. Let’s come out of this even better.

Keig, Aberdeenshire. A gaggle of excited children are instructing community archaeologist Colin Shepherd when to drop a china mug on the floor so that they can see how it breaks on impact.

They will use the results of this experiment to better understand an archaeological find: the broken pieces of an old marmalade jar, last used for breakfast around 100 years ago. The children had recently excavated the jar from woodland in which they usually build dens and play hide and seek as part of an archaeological investigation.

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, Evelyn Lambart, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

Stricken with hearing loss from an early age, Lambart flourished at the National Film Board, where she became the first woman animator in Canada. She collaborated with esteemed animator Norman McLaren for many years, notably on the innovative, jazzy Begone Dull Care (1949).

Lambart’s first solo film was The Impossible Map (1947), a quirky, earnest experiment with grapefruit, knives and cartography. Making Movie History: Evelyn Lambart is an excellent 5-minute doc about her career.

Lambart also used her distinctive black-background animation style in The Story of Christmas (1973). Her meticulous cutout process is shown in the NFB documentaries Eleven Moving Moments with Evelyn Lambart (see 32:00) and The Light Fantastick (see 47:00). She died in 1999.

Read “Evelyn Lambart and Animation: “I was always fascinated by cutouts…” via MetaFilter

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An interesting link found among my daily reading

 

The latest London theatre to step up to the plate with free high-quality content is Shakespeare’s Globe. The iconic Elizabethan-style playhouse already had its own public streaming platform in the form of Globe Player, but watching it has always come at a fairly steep rate, with productions rented or purchased at individual prices that usually exceed a month’s full access to many TV streaming platforms. As of next Monday (April 6), that changes.

First up is a full English-language Shakespeare play per fortnight available for free. The line-up kicks off with 2018’s ‘Hamlet’, starring Globe boss Michelle Terry in the title role of the doomed Danish prince.

 Second up, every single production from the 2012 Globe to Globe series will be made available for free, for the whole period. So that’s a Korean ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, a Macedonian ‘Henry VI Part 3’, a Polish ‘Macbeth’, a Hebrew ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and so on and so forth. You can find the full list here.

 

 

In our experience, bird lovers fall into two general categories:

Keenly observant cataloguers like John James Audubon …

And those of us who cannot resist assigning anthropomorphic personalities and behaviors to the 435 stars of Audubon’s The Birds of America, a stunning collection of prints from life-size watercolors he produced between 1827 and 1838.

Our suspicions have little to do with biology, but rather, a certain zestiness of expression, an overemphatic beak, a droll gleam in the eye.

The Audubon Society’s newly redesigned website abounds with treasure for those in either camp:

• Free high res downloads of all 435 plates.
• Mp3s of each specimen’s call.
• And vintage commentary that effectively splits the difference between science and the unintentionally humorous locutions of another age.