Porridge lover Nation

The other day I was chatting with a friend that recently moved from sunny California to Utah, and, in order to tease her, I asked if she moved over there because she was a Mormon, you know the cliche that everybody living in Utah are Mormons. She said no, and I began to apologize in case that she may have felt offended. However, I was wrong, she was laughing heartily - she typed "HAHAHAHA", which in internet chatting rooms means a heartily laugh, I guess-, and told me that she is asked that question frequently.


That's how people typecast other people, regions, events, whole nations, and even historic periods. I believe that stereotypes exist since the Creation, when God Himself began to label every thing created. Yet, we are specialists in putting people in a pigeonhole, classifying and categorizing that that we find in our path.


For instance, around 1583 Philip Stubbes on "The Anatomie of Abuses", described, or deprecated I should have said, the game of football - here in America we call it soccer-, which he portrayed as a criminal activity. The Puritan Stubbes explained about the game:
".... Hereof growth envy, malice, rancor, choler, hatred, displeasure, enmity and what not else: and sometimes fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of blood, as experience daily teacheth"
Sport or felony?, it's like Stubbes could be called the Chronicler of Hooliganism in Sixteenth Century England.


We tend to view, or better put, to categorize events, places, people and so forth, in accordance with our principles and costume; therefore, anything different of whatever we might find acceptable or not by our standards, will be ridiculed, laughed at, scorned, and typecast as belonging to a certain kind of people, usually inferior to us.


The Scottish, for example, are a cabbage eating nation, porridge lovers, who don't know anything about the art of cooking, vulgarly eat oat cakes, and, of course, heavy drinkers of wine and ale. That's the impression of a Fynes Moryson, on his travels around Scotland, circa Sixteenth Century. Moreover, according to Fynes, the English are a little more refined because they "...hold all excesse blameworthy and drunkenesse a reproachfull vice."


Moryson traveled for ten years, and in that span he visited Germany, Bohemia, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland.; his observations were compiled and published on 1617, while the events, places and people that he so colorful describes, happened on the first three years of the century.


The more distanced the people were from each other, the more differences would be appreciated and the more crude the stereotype would be. For an English of the Sixteenth Century, an Italian would be considered a papist, whether he followed the teachings of Christ or not, it didn't matter; by the same token the French were sissy and the Spaniards were a race of brutes. The point of view of the French with regard to the English might have been similar, and that would have happened with the rest of the world :
contempt, ridicule, and in some cases even admiration, are the regular features of the stereotypes.


So, the next time that someone implies that because you live in Utah you are a Mormon, or because your name is Hadrian you are building a wall, take a good laugh and type "HAHAHAHA" or just say "yeah , right".

The Mailbag

Publishing a blog is fun but also kind of hard. The word publish comes from the Middle English "publicen", "publishen", to make known publicly, which is an alteration of Old French "publier", which comes from the Latin "publicare". To publish is to advertise, broadcast, declare, proclaim, but no-where is found the word hard. Hard as difficult, implying that you must have skill to do it ( I'm not very skillful in that deparment), and hard as arduous, which implies that a spiritual effort is needed (well, at least I have the guts to do it anyway).
However, don't take me wrong, blogging is fun but to do it right takes time to learn. For me, I think that it will take like forever.
Moreover, one of the things with blogging is that you have the obligation to reply to those that took their time to read any of your postings.
Therefore, although this blog is still under construction, today I'm starting this section, "The Mailbag", where I will try to acknowledge all the comments and/or suggestions received during the week. So, help me God.
After posting a group of sites on April 19, I received a suggestion by Lisa Spangeberg, a fellow blogger with Digital Medievalist Scela- she could be reached @ http://www.digitalmedievalist.com - bringing the attention to "Medievalist Blogs", which is maintained by Shana Worthen. (http://www.fishpond.owlfish.com/medievallogs.html ).
The reason that I didn't include the webpage of Ms. Worthen is because I found that some of the blogs listed didn't deal with that thematic at all. Nevertheless, I contacted Ms. Worthen explaining what I found and she very kindly answered that Medievalist Weblogs is focused on occupation, not content. The webpage is a list of Medievalist who run weblogs. In addition, there is a column included in the list under the title of "Frequency of Content", which gives an indication of what percentage of content is related to the Middle Ages for any given blog, and in case that any of them is labeled "rarely" , it means that it will be unlikely that you might find any material at all covering and/or related to that historic period.
Thanks Lisa and Shana.
Finally, Rightland, another fellow blogger who publishes "From the Rightland", suggested "Authenticity-oriented Medieval and Renaissance Reenactment/Living History Groups". As its name indicates different activities are held, all in the UK, through out the year. One of the main events will be held from April 30 thru May 2 at Fritton Lake Country Park, where a cross-section of life in England (950 - 1066 AD) could be experienced. Check it out @ http://www.regia.org, and @ http://moas.atlantia.sca.org/topics/groups.html . Thanks Rightland.
Your comments and suggestions are appreciated, they make the blogging experience satisfying. So, bring 'em on. Thanks.