The SCA Medieval and Renaissance Dance Facebook group has been discussing reconstruction issues with the Playford dance Maiden Lane. From what I can gather, Chorus 1 has vexed people because it includes the instruction to do “The single Hey on each side” but the music only designates 1 repeat (8 counts) for this process instead of the usual 16 counts. … Read more »
Today on a Discord server I’m part of, I was discussing extant examples of the period Japanese garment dobuku (a jacket) with some other members. One of them expressed that they would like to know the neck opening size of a particular garment in the collection of the Kyoto National Museum (link). While the museum has length and sleeve length… Read more »
Now that I’ve been able to test out my heys theory with real live people (many thanks to Aasa Thorvaldsdottir, Kean de Lacy, Katherine Gotehird, and Linet of Beaumaris for being my guinea pigs) I am picking up work on my heys paper again. I just spent about half an hour hunting down an unusually and annoyingly vague reference from… Read more »
I got asked a while back by one of my apprentice sisters (thanks, Hessa!) about how I go about translating things. After sending her a gazillion messages talking about it, I figured a blog post would make sense in case others were curious. I have absolutely no pretensions to being a professional, but I do have a lot of translation… Read more »
Inspired by some discussions going on lately about the problems with hackhands (those scribal hands that are Roman letters designed to look like a different writing system), I have taken a crack at translating one of Meridies’ standard Award of Arms scroll texts into Hebrew. This is Version 3 from the Meridies scroll wordings site, which also happens to be… Read more »
I recently taught a class on flirting for European Dance at Iris Faire here in Meridies. I taught the same class for Virtual Courtesan College 2020, which resulted in a lot of really good feedback and this iteration of the class. The class originally covered techniques for flirting and how not to make your partner or partners uncomfortable, which were… Read more »
Some months ago I saw a call for teachers for virtual Trimaris Heraldic, Scribal, and Linguistics Symposium. Since I did a lot of linguistics work for my BA, I felt that I might be able to contribute to these classes. I eventually settled on the basics of phonetics as being an area of linguistics relevant to the SCA that I… Read more »
This past Saturday, I taught a class on the beginning steps for SCA research at virtual Black Gryphon. It was fairly well attended and seemed (as far as I could tell) to be helpful. Since I teach Research Methods in my modern life it wasn’t too much of a stretch to apply to SCA research, but I was still a… Read more »
In listening to medieval Christmas music, as I usually do at this time of year, I discovered the Elthin version of En Virgo Parit Filium/Narodil se Kristus Pán. A YouTube link to the song is embedded below. Being cheerful and bouncy, it cried out to me for a dance. So of course I choreographed two. The Song The song is… Read more »
I recently submitted a research paper to Meridies’ Kingdom A&S Faire about heys for four in Playford. It took quite a while but I’m pretty pleased with how it ended up. The gist of the paper is that I think all Playford’s heys for four are linear rather than circular, for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into… Read more »