Cool news

Jay Rubenstein has won a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. That is just so cool! He's medieval scholar at the University of Tennessee! Too cool. Now if we could just get his genius into the SCA. Although he may be, I have no idea, but I like his writings and have followed him for some time.


In other medieval news, the Magna Carta is for sale. Hmmm, I seem to be a few million short to bid on it. NYT has a really cool interactive thingy. I'm trying to figure out the hand. It seems to be a combination of Carolingian miniscule along with a bit of early gothic and maybe something else. I can't make the font bigger to really look at it. I find it interesting that 500+ years ago this was "just a document" and was folded and probably stuffed under other papers for a while and today it is considered one of the most amazing and affirmative documentations we have on human rights. It's the foundation for even our own Declaration of Independence. All for a cool $20-$30 Million.

And this wouldn't be complete without a link to the trailer for Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis' film due out November 16th. Looks quasi fantasy, but then so is the story. It looks interesting and the cast seems well made up. Although I did find this humorous blog on the "fight scene" (You who have read Beowulf know what I'm talking about, you who haven't may need to shield your eyes.) Quod She Blog.

OK, that's all the medieval news that I have for today.