Continuing my delving into medieval Italian literature, I came across this gem. Il Novellino is a collection of short anecdotes and popular stories written around 1250-1300. Most (semi-?)educated people of the time knew these tales and would recognise them if heard told. Many are familiar to us as forming the basis of the stories of Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc. As there’s no easily obtainable copy of this public domain text, I’ve formatted the text into ePub and PDF formats.
Il Novellino is one of the first works extant in the developing Italian language. Latin at this time is slowing losing its dominance as the language of public and academic life in favour of the vernacular. The tales in the book have a wide variety of possible origins. Some are definitely from the more traditional Latin-based classical or monastic part of the culture while as many tales are likely to come from a common everyday urban and rural settings. Some tales have obviously been transmitted to Italy from the near east, likely by crusaders returning home. Several tales are local or popular re-tellings of familiar Bible stories or Italian adaptations of current French or Provençal tales.
Edward Storer published his translation of this mid-sixteenth century version of the tales in 1925. He was part of a literary circle meeting in London before World War I and is known for both his own poetry and his translations into English from the Italian.
Here’s the book:
![<p>This is a translation of the section concerning how to draw the sword in Henri de Sainct Didier‘s Secrets of the Single Sword (1573). More sections of the text will be translated as time allows.</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="line-height: 13px;">Secrets of the Single Sword – Drawing the Sword </span></li>
</ul>
<p>The translation is based on the transcription of the copy in the Library of the city of Blois (available at Bibliotheque Virtuelles Humanistes) made in 2010 by Olivier Depuis for l’Association pour la Recherche et le Développement des Arts Martiaux Historiques Européens. All amendments to the text made in the transcription have been assumed and are not noted here.</p>
<p>Translating Sainct Didier is […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/category-fencing1-195x110.jpg "Translation of Sainct Didier’s Drawing the Sword")
![<p>I’m back from my Xmas and New Year break for a new year. Yay me!</p>
<p>This post is a collection of rather stream of consciousness notes I made during my cruise around New Caledonia and Vanuatu. I’m not promising any depth or profundity – just a bunch of thoughts that struck me at the time and were recorded thanks to the portability of tablet PCs.</p>
<p>Links to photos will be edited in as soon as I can knock them into some kind of shape.</p>
Day One – Leaving Brisbane
<p>Crowds, crowds, customs officers, crowds. I hate crowds. A crowd is a slow-moving, […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/POCruises_logo-195x110.jpg "Pacific Dawn Cruise (5-12 Jan 2013)"){kind=logo}
![<p><strong>Title</strong>: The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100-c.1300<br />
<strong>Author</strong>: Linda M Paterson<br />
<strong>Paperback</strong>: 384 pages<br />
<strong>Publisher</strong>: Cambridge University Press, 1995<br />
<strong>Language</strong>: English</p>
<p>This is a book of lists which concentrates on the topics of:</p>
<ul>
<li>the nature of feudalism and vassalage in Languedoc and Provence</li>
<li>medieval medicine and surgery and their Arabic influences</li>
<li>the place and role of women in society which contrasts sharply to the north of France</li>
<li>religion and heresy, especially the reasonably well-known Albigensian Crusade and the Gregorian Reforms</li>
</ul>
<p>Scholarship in English on the south of France in the high medieval period […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/book_troubadours-195x110.jpg "The World of the Troubadours")
![<p><strong>Title</strong>: A Canticle for Leibowitz<br />
<strong>Author</strong>: Walter M Miller, Jr <br />
<strong>Paperback</strong>: 368 pages</p>
<p>A wholly remarkable book but not for the reasons usually trotted out by its fans:</p>
<ul>
<li>it is not about Catholicism or the benefits bestowed by religion,</li>
<li>it is not about trite clichés such as ‘those who do not listen to history are doomed to repeat it’ or ‘with great power comes great responsibility’,</li>
<li>it is not about power of faith in the face of destruction.</li>
</ul>
<p>The novel outlines a thesis which describes humanity as fundamentally and irredeemably broken. Humanity, after global nuclear war brought it to […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/canticle_cover.jpg "Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz")
![<p></p>
<p>Imagine this. It’s sometime early in the ninth century and you’re a scribe. Louis the Pious, King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor, has just given you the task of making a copy of the bible in Old Saxon to convert to Christianity the pagan tribes on the other side of the River Elbe. How do you translate the Gospel’s message of peace and salvation in terms those battle-loving barbarians will understand?</p>
<p>One answer is the Heliand, a wacky paraphrase rather than translation of the Gospel in the form of a Norse or Germanic saga written around AD 825. Here’s the scene […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121118-115904-195x110.jpg "The Schwarzeneggar Bible")
![<p>The dusack is a remarkable weapon. It’s traditionally made of wood or leather (although some metal examples are known) and was used as a training weapon the the German schools of swordsmanship and the town guard in Eastern Europe to quell hordes of drunken revelers. The dusack fighting system outlined in Joachim Meyer’s Art of Combat (1570, tr. J. Forgeng) is bone-breakingly fast.</p>
<p>My question has always been where on earth did such an unusally shaped weapon come from? Then I stumbled across this.</p>
<p>Dusacks in Pennsylvania? Gangs of militant Amish keeping the law with quaintly decorated wooden swords?</p>
<p>The […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/meyer_dusack_b_small-195x110.jpg "The Dusack’s Agricultural Origins")
![<p>I saw a great French coming-of-age movie called MaRock over the weekend. It’s the story of a teenage Moroccan Arab girl who falls deeply in love with a Jewish boy and although it was billed as a Romeo and Juliet story it really isn’t.</p>
<p>It has plenty to recommend it as a version of the classic star-crossed lovers: Jews versus Arabs, street car racing through Casablanca instead of public duelling, a radicalised Muslim brother who would make a very good Tybalt, nightclubs, a guy whose homosexuality is an open secret who makes a perfect Friar Lawrence and post-sundown family feasting during […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/marock-195x110.jpg "MaRock the Casbah")
