Author: Martha

Weaving the Nation in the Feriby Counter-Roll and Medieval Romance

by Nick McKelvie

As I mentioned in my previous post, the final documented step of the textiles listed in the Feriby counter-roll (Kew, The National Archives, E 101/383/6) was their distribution to Edward III’s subjects; what I did not mention is that this gesture echoed a practice of the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, who, according to Marco Polo, “gives rich clothing to [his] 12,000 barons and knights 13 times a year; he dresses them all in the same clothes— like his own, and very worthy.”

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Crowned with Cloth: A 1327 Counter-Roll Listing the Expenses of the Coronation of Edward III

by Nick McKelvie

The recent coronation of King Charles III has brought new attention to English coronation traditions, including the use of a “coronation roll” to document the details of the accession. The National Archives of the United Kingdom recently announced an exhibit, for example, titled “Happy & Glorious: Coronation Commissions from the Government Art Collection,” which displays the earliest coronation roll still in existence (produced for Edward II in 1308) paired with the recent coronation roll created for King Charles III.1 Edward II’s roll is only two feet long, whereas Charles III’s is twenty-one meters; more scandalously, while Charles III’s features Queen Camilla quite prominently, Edward II’s makes no mention of Queen Isabella, although it does reference Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall, who was rumored to be the king’s lover.

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All his Money, In a Word

“Scene in a New York Faro Bank,” Harper’s Weekly, 23 February 1867: 120.

by Leslie Myrick

Charles Godfrey Leland, (1824-1903),[1] Philadelphia-born journalist, folklorist, translator of German poetry, and writer on the Romani and the occult, is best remembered as the creator of the humorous balladeer “Hans Breitmann,” who made his first appearance in “Hans Breitmann’s Barty” in the June 1857 issue of Graham’s Magazine. As a lexicographer of slang as a sub-category of folk language,[2] Leland was also a creator and a connoisseur of lists. This post will examine a list of slang words for “money,” which he published in two different formats while working as a journalist in Philadelphia in1855 and 1857. Continue reading “All his Money, In a Word” →

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An interview with the author of “The Names of All Manner of Hounds,” David Scott-Macnab

Gaston Phébus, Livre de la Chasse, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Fr. 616, f.40v. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

Few scholarly articles on medieval topics become internet sensations, but Professor David Scott-Macnab’s “The Names of All Manner of Hounds: A Unique Inventory in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript,” published in 2013, was that one in a million.[1] The article features a list of no fewer than 1065 names for hounds–alphabetically ordered from “Argente” to “Yonkir”–prefaced by a discussion of the great affection medieval hunters felt for their hounds.[2] Many bloggers picked up the article; it has been the topic of several Reddit conversations, and one fan even used its list of names to create a dog-name generator. Continue reading “An interview with the author of “The Names of All Manner of Hounds,” David Scott-Macnab” →

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A Cabinet of Conundrums: An 1846 List of Proposed “Curiosities” for the Smithsonian Institution

by Leslie Myrick and Martha Rust

In July 1836 the United States Congress was the contingent beneficiary of a $500,000 bequest made by English scientist James Smithson (1765-1829) for the establishment of a new National Museum in Washington, D. C. to be known as the Smithsonian Institution. Smithson, the illegitimate son of Hugh Percy, the first Duke of Northumberland, never married and named a nephew as heir to his considerable fortune. When the nephew died without issue six years after Smithson’s death in Genoa in 1829, the bequest was duly transferred to Congress for the foundation of an American National Museum. A museum, as noted in our recent post “L’allure de liste,” can be a site that both contains list-like arrangements of objects and inspires written lists of the same. In the case of the Smithsonian museum, a curious list of proposed objects suggests that the list form itself could be the subject of a museum exhibition.

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“Just” a list: Ingredients for a toxic brew

Just in time for the annual appearance of children dressed up as ghosts, goblins, wizards, and witches, this “‘Just’ a list” post is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act IV, scene 1), in which the three witches cook up a stew for conjuring apparitions of the dead. Suggesting the idea of a list as a container, the First Witch begins by mentioning the container for the brew; its ingredients follow.[1]

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“Every Variety of Professions”: Ships’ Passenger Lists from Two New England Gold Mining Companies in 1849

Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection of Early California and Western American Pictorial Material, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California

by Leslie Myrick

In honor of Labor Day this post takes a look at what a couple of member lists of mining and trading companies that left for the California gold rush early in 1849 can tell us about the exodus of skilled tradesmen from Eastern cities and towns and the economic impact of that exodus. An estimated 50,000 people, primarily young men, traveled by land and sea from the Eastern states to seek new opportunities in California in the year 1849 alone.

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“Just” a list: from Robert Herrick’s Hesperides

English poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674) is best known for his single, yet voluminous book of poems, Hesperides (1648), which includes such perennial favorites as “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” beginning with “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”; and  “Delight in Disorder.” The collection is less well known for being, according to the Poetry Foundation, “the only major collection of poetry in English to open with a versified table of contents”: that is, with a list. Herrick gives this list the title “The Argument of His Book”: Continue reading ““Just” a list: from Robert Herrick’s Hesperides” →

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“Just” a list: Ovid’s gathering of trees

This post inaugurates a new Listology series entitled “’Just’ a list.” Each of the posts in this series will offer a list without commentary or analysis, just the list, which will be drawn from (or be added to) our list of literary lists. The quotation marks around “just” in the series’ title is meant to register our opinion that a list is never “just” or “merely” a list, as our posts that comment on lists always show. Timed to celebrate the grand leafing out of trees in the northeast of the US and in other regions of a similar latitude, our selection for this inaugural post in the “’Just’ a list” series is the list of trees that concludes Ovid’s story of Orpheus in his Metamorphoses.

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