Rome Reborn: A New 3D Virtual Model Lets You Fly Over the Great Monuments of Ancient Rome

in History, Technology | November 30th, 2023

Thir­teen years ago here on Open Cul­ture, we first fea­tured Rome Reborn 2.2, a dig­i­tal 3D mod­el of the ancient metrop­o­lis at the height of its glo­ry in the fourth cen­tu­ry. And that rebirth has con­tin­ued apace ever since, and just last week bore the fruit of Rome Reborn 4.0, through which you can get a fly­ing tour in the video above. Inter­cut with the com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed recon­struc­tions is footage of the ruins of the very same parts of the city as they exist in Rome today. The oppor­tu­ni­ty for com­par­i­son thus pro­vid­ed allows us to appre­ci­ate not just the upgrades in the lat­est Rome Reborn’s lev­el of detail, but also its degree of real­ism.

With each revi­sion, the fourth-cen­tu­ry Eter­nal City recre­at­ed in Rome Reborn looks more like real­i­ty and less like a video game. But that does­n’t mean you can’t get the same thrill of explor­ing it that you would from a video game, which is part of the appeal of load­ing up the lat­est ver­sion of the mod­el on the vir­tu­al-real­i­ty app Yorescape, a prod­uct of the “vir­tu­al tourism” com­pa­ny Fly­over Zone Pro­duc­tions found­ed by Rome Reborn’s project leader Bernard Frisch­er.

And it is Frisch­er him­self who leads the in-app tour of “sites exem­pli­fy­ing the city’s geog­ra­phy, mar­kets, tem­ples, and much, much more,” enriched by “Time Warps spread around the city that allow you to tog­gle between the view today and the view from the same van­tage point in antiq­ui­ty.”

This is heady stuff indeed for enthu­si­asts of ancient Rome, who will no doubt be eager to see for them­selves the new and improved dig­i­tal mod­els of ancient Roman struc­tures like the Cir­cus Max­imus, the Arch of Titus, the Por­ti­cus Livi­ae, and the Tem­ple of Min­er­va. These and many oth­ers besides appear in the Rome Reborn 4.0 demo reel just above, which shows off the cul­mi­na­tion of 27 years of work so far by Frisch­er and his team. A dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gist at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty, Pro­fes­sor Frisch­er has point­ed out still-absent fea­tures to come, such as “avatars infused with AI” with whom the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry tourist can inter­act. We’ll have to wait for future iter­a­tions to do so, but sure­ly we can sum­mon the patience by remem­ber­ing that Rome isn’t reborn in a day.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Recon­struc­tion of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Vir­tu­al­ly-Recre­at­ed Streets

A Huge Scale Mod­el Show­ing Ancient Rome at Its Archi­tec­tur­al Peak (Built Between 1933 and 1937)

The Chang­ing Land­scape of Ancient Rome: A Free Online Course from Sapien­za Uni­ver­si­ty of Rome

An 8‑Minute Ani­mat­ed Flight Over Ancient Rome

The Old­est Known Pho­tographs of Rome (1841–1871)

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Napoleon’s Kindle: Discover the Miniaturized Traveling Library That the Emperor Took on Military Campaigns

in Books, History | November 29th, 2023

Every piece of tech­nol­o­gy has a prece­dent. Most have sev­er­al dif­fer­ent types of prece­dents. You’ve prob­a­bly used (and may well own) an eBook read­er, for instance, but what would have afford­ed you a selec­tion of read­ing mate­r­i­al two or three cen­turies ago? If you were a Jacobean Eng­lish­man of means, you might have used the kind of trav­el­ing library we fea­tured in 2017, a hand­some portable case cus­tom-made for your books. (If you’re Tom Stop­pard in the 21st cen­tu­ry, you still do.) If you were Napoleon, who seemed to love books as much as he loved mil­i­tary pow­er — he did­n’t just amass a vast col­lec­tion of them, but kept a per­son­al librar­i­an to over­see it — you’d take it a big step fur­ther.

“Many of Napoleon’s biog­ra­phers have inci­den­tal­ly men­tioned that he […] used to car­ry about a cer­tain num­ber of favorite books wher­ev­er he went, whether trav­el­ing or camp­ing,” says an 1885 Sacra­men­to Dai­ly Union arti­cle post­ed by Austin Kleon, “but it is not gen­er­al­ly known that he made sev­er­al plans for the con­struc­tion of portable libraries which were to form part of his bag­gage.” The piece’s main source, a Lou­vre librar­i­an who grew up as the son of one of Napoleon’s librar­i­ans, recalls from his father’s sto­ries that “for a long time Napoleon used to car­ry about the books he required in sev­er­al box­es hold­ing about six­ty vol­umes each,” each box first made of mahogany and lat­er of more sol­id leather-cov­ered oak. “The inside was lined with green leather or vel­vet, and the books were bound in moroc­co,” an even soft­er leather most often used for book­bind­ing.

To use this ear­ly trav­el­ing library, Napoleon had his atten­dants con­sult “a cat­a­logue for each case, with a cor­re­spond­ing num­ber upon every vol­ume, so that there was nev­er a moment’s delay in pick­ing out any book that was want­ed.” This worked well enough for a while, but even­tu­al­ly “Napoleon found that many books which he want­ed to con­sult were not includ­ed in the col­lec­tion,” for obvi­ous rea­sons of space. And so, on July 8, 1803, he sent his librar­i­an these orders:

The Emper­or wish­es you to form a trav­el­ing library of one thou­sand vol­umes in small 12mo and print­ed in hand­some type. It is his Majesty’s inten­tion to have these works print­ed for his spe­cial use, and in order to econ­o­mize space there is to be no mar­gin to them. They should con­tain from five hun­dred to six hun­dred pages, and be bound in cov­ers as flex­i­ble as pos­si­ble and with spring backs. There should be forty works on reli­gion, forty dra­mat­ic works, forty vol­umes of epic and six­ty of oth­er poet­ry, one hun­dred nov­els and six­ty vol­umes of his­to­ry, the remain­der being his­tor­i­cal mem­oirs of every peri­od.

In sum: not only did Napoleon pos­sess a trav­el­ing library, but when that trav­el­ing library proved too cum­ber­some for his many and var­ied lit­er­ary demands, he had a whole new set of not just portable book cas­es but even more portable books made for him. (You can see how they looked packed away in the image tweet­ed by Cork Coun­ty Library above.) This pre­fig­ured in a high­ly ana­log man­ner the dig­i­tal-age con­cept of recre­at­ing books in anoth­er for­mat specif­i­cal­ly for com­pact­ness and con­ve­nience — the kind of com­pact­ness and con­ve­nience now increas­ing­ly avail­able to all of us today, and to a degree Napoleon nev­er could have imag­ined, let alone demand­ed. It may be good to be the Emper­or, but in many ways, it’s bet­ter to be a read­er in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Note: This post was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 2017. Giv­en that Napoleon is back in the news, with the new Rid­ley Scott film, we’re bring­ing it back.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

Napoleon’s Eng­lish Lessons: How the Mil­i­tary Leader Stud­ied Eng­lish to Escape the Bore­dom of Life in Exile

Why Is Napoleon’s Hand Always in His Waist­coat?: The Ori­gins of This Dis­tinc­tive Pose Explained

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The New York Public Library Presents an Archive of 860,000 Historical Images: Download Medieval Manuscripts, Japanese Prints, William Blake Illustrations & More

in Archives, History, Libraries | November 28th, 2023

Back when we last fea­tured the New York Pub­lic Library’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions in 2016, they con­tained about 160,000 high-res­o­lu­tion images from var­i­ous his­tor­i­cal peri­ods. This seemed like a fair­ly vast archive at the time, but in the years since, that num­ber has grown to more than 860,000. If it was dif­fi­cult to know where to begin explor­ing it sev­en years ago — when it already con­tained such dig­i­tized trea­sures as the Depres­sion-era Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion pho­tographs tak­en by Dorothea Lange, Walk­er Evans, and Gor­don Parks, Walt Whit­man’s hand­writ­ten pref­ace to Spec­i­men Days, Thomas Jefferson’s list of books for a pri­vate library, and six­teenth-cen­tu­ry illus­tra­tions for The Tale of Gen­ji — it can hard­ly be eas­i­er now.

Or rather, it can hard­ly be eas­i­er unless you start with the NYPL dig­i­tal col­lec­tions’ pub­lic domain picks, a sec­tion of the site that, as of this writ­ing, orga­nizes thou­sands and thou­sands of its hold­ings into thir­teen brows­able and intrigu­ing cat­e­gories.

These include the FSA pho­tos, but also book illus­tra­tions by William Blake, edi­tions of The Negro Trav­el­er’s Green Book (as pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), the music and lyrics for Amer­i­can pop­u­lar songs, the papers of Walt Whit­man, and the more than 42,000 stereo­scop­ic prints of the Robert N. Den­nis col­lec­tion, which cap­ture an ear­ly form of 3D views of a fast-devel­op­ing (and, often, now-unrec­og­niz­able) Amer­i­can con­ti­nent.

Enthu­si­asts of New York City itself will no doubt make straight for sec­tions like “chang­ing New York,” “pho­tographs of Ellis Island, 1902–1913,” and “album de la con­struc­tion de la Stat­ue de la Lib­erté.” Soon after after its ded­i­ca­tion in 1886, the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty came to sym­bol­ize not just a city, and not just a coun­try, but the very con­cept of Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion and the grand cul­tur­al exchange it had already begun to con­duct with the rest of the world. 137 years lat­er, you can spend a lit­tle time in the NYPL’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions and turn up every­thing from illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts from medieval and Renais­sance Europe to Japan­ese wood­block prints to col­or draw­ings of Indi­an life in the eigh­teenth and nine­teenth cen­turies — and you don’t have to be any­where near New York to do so. Enter the NYPL dig­i­tal col­lec­tions here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Food­ie Alert: New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restau­rant Menus (1851–2008)

100,000+ Won­der­ful Pieces of The­ater Ephemera Dig­i­tized by The New York Pub­lic Library

The “Weird Objects” in the New York Pub­lic Library’s Col­lec­tions: Vir­ginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dick­ens’ Let­ter Open­er, Walt Whitman’s Hair & More

John Cage Unbound: A New Dig­i­tal Archive Pre­sent­ed by The New York Pub­lic Library

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Behold Ancient Egyptian, Greek & Roman Sculptures in Their Original Color

in Art, History, Museums | November 28th, 2023

There was a time when we imag­ined that most ancient sculp­ture nev­er had any col­or except for that of the stone from which it was hewed. Doubt fell upon that notion as long ago as the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, when archae­o­log­i­cal dig­ging in Pom­peii and Her­cu­la­neum brought up stat­ues whose col­or had been pre­served, but only in recent years has it come to be pre­sent­ed as an explod­ed myth. Though some of the cov­er­age of the false “white­ness” of ancient Egypt­ian, Greek, and Roman sculp­ture has divid­ed along drea­ri­ly pre­dictable twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry cul­tur­al bat­tle lines, this moment has also pre­sent­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty to stage fas­ci­nat­ing, even ground­break­ing exhi­bi­tions.

Take Chro­ma: Ancient Sculp­ture in Col­or, which ran from the sum­mer of last year to the spring of this year at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. You can still see some of its dis­plays in the Smarthis­to­ry video at the top of the post, in which art his­to­ri­ans Eliz­a­beth Macaulay and Beth Har­ris dis­cuss the “world of Tech­ni­col­or” that was antiq­ui­ty, the Renais­sance ori­gins of the “idea that ancient sculp­ture was not paint­ed,” and the mod­ern attempts to recon­struct the sculp­tur­al col­or schemes almost total­ly lost to time.

Archi­tect Vinzenz Brinkmann goes deep­er into these sub­jects in the video from the Met itself just above, pay­ing spe­cial atten­tion to the muse­um’s bust of Caligu­la — not the finest emper­or Rome ever had, to put it mild­ly, but one whose face has become a promis­ing can­vas for the restora­tion of col­or.

You can see much more of Chro­ma in the Art Trip tour video just above. Its won­ders include not just gen­uine pieces of ancient sculp­ture, but strik­ing­ly col­or­ful recon­struc­tions of a finial in the form of a sphinx, a Pom­pei­ian stat­ue of the god­dess Artemis, a bat­tle-depict­ing side of the Alexan­der Sar­coph­a­gus, and “a mar­ble archer in the cos­tume of a horse­man of the peo­ples to the north and east of Greece,” to name just a few. You may pre­fer these his­tor­i­cal­ly edu­cat­ed col­oriza­tions to the aus­tere mono­chrome fig­ures you grew up see­ing in text­books, or you may appre­ci­ate after all the kind of ele­gance that only cen­turies of ruin can bestow. Either way, your rela­tion­ship to the ancient world will nev­er be quite the same.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Restores the Orig­i­nal Col­ors to Ancient Stat­ues

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

Roman Stat­ues Weren’t White; They Were Once Paint­ed in Vivid, Bright Col­ors

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

The Mak­ing of a Mar­ble Sculp­ture: See Every Stage of the Process, from the Quar­ry to the Stu­dio

Why Most Ancient Civ­i­liza­tions Had No Word for the Col­or Blue

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Discover the Mikiphone, the World’s First Portable Record Player: “Fits a Jacket Pocket; Goes into a Lady’s Handbag” (1924)

in Design, History, Music, Technology | November 27th, 2023

The iPod shuf­fle recent­ly enjoyed a bit of a come­back on Tik­Tok.

Can the Mikiphone be far behind?

The inven­tion of sib­lings Mik­lós and Éti­enne Vadász, the world’s first pock­et record play­er caused a stir when it was intro­duced a cen­tu­ry ago, nab­bing first prize at an inter­na­tion­al music exhi­bi­tion and find­ing favor with mod­ernist archi­tect Le Cor­busier, who hailed it for embody­ing the “essence of the esprit nou­veau.”

Unlike more recent portable audio inno­va­tions, some assem­bly was required.

It’s fair to assume that the Stan­ford Archive of Record­ed Sound staffer deft­ly unpack­ing antique Mikiphone com­po­nents from its cun­ning Sony Dis­c­man-sized case, above, has more prac­tice putting the thing togeth­er than a ner­vous young fel­la eager to woo his gal al fres­co with his just pur­chased, cut­ting edge 1924 tech­nol­o­gy.

A peri­od adver­tise­ment extols the Mikiphone’s porta­bil­i­ty …

Fits in a jack­et pock­et

Goes in a lady’s hand­bag

Will hang on a cycle frame

Goes in a car door pock­et

Ide­al for pic­nics, car jaunts, riv­er trips

…but fails to men­tion that in order to enjoy it, you’d also have to schlep along a fair amount of 78 RPM records, whose 10-inch diam­e­ters aren’t near­ly so pock­et and purse-com­pat­i­ble.

Mai­son Pail­lard pro­duced approx­i­mate­ly 180,000 of these hand-cranked won­ders over the course of three years. When sales dropped in 1927, the remain­ing stock was sold off at a dis­count or giv­en away to con­test win­ners.

These days, an authen­tic Mik­phone can fetch $500 and upward at auc­tion. (Beware of Miki­phonies!)

Relat­ed Con­tent

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study Sev­er­al Books at Once (1588)

Behold the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Fore­run­ner to the Kin­dle

The Walk­man Turns 40: See Every Gen­er­a­tion of Sony’s Icon­ic Per­son­al Stereo in One Minute

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

 

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Oculi Mundi: A Beautiful Online Archive of 130 Ancient Maps, Atlases & Globes

in History, Maps | November 21st, 2023


When it comes to maps, your first hit is always free. For you, maybe it was a Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion of the world hung on the wall of an ele­men­tary-school class­room; maybe it was a road atlas in the glove box of your par­ents’ car. For Neil Sun­der­land, the ear­li­est car­to­graph­ic high seems to have come in child­hood, from a hum­ble map of Lan­cashire. When he found suc­cess in finance, his addic­tion grew in pro­por­tion to his means, and today his mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar map col­lec­tion includes the work of renowned six­teenth-cen­tu­ry artists like Albrecht Dür­er, Hans Hol­bein, and Gio­van­ni Cimer­li­no, who in 1566 depict­ed the known world in the shape of a heart.

Cimer­li­no’s cordi­form Earth (bot­tom) is just one of the 130 his­toric “world maps, celes­tial maps, atlases, books of knowl­edge and globes” now avail­able for your perusal at Oculi Mun­di, an elab­o­rate web site with the dig­i­tized hold­ings of the Sun­der­land Col­lec­tion. “A plat­form to explore high-res­o­lu­tion images of these beau­ti­ful objects, to peek inside the books, and to dis­cov­er infor­ma­tion and sto­ries,” it offers both a chrono­log­i­cal­ly ordered “research” mode and a more free-form “explore” mode for brows­ing.

Either way, with its old­est arti­fact dat­ing to the ear­ly thir­teenth cen­tu­ry and its newest to the ear­ly nine­teenth, it con­tains a great swath of car­to­graph­ic his­to­ry to behold.

The New York Times’ Susanne Fowler quotes Sun­der­land’s daugh­ter Helen Sun­der­land-Cohen, who over­sees the Oculi Mun­di project, describ­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly ven­er­a­ble atlas by fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry human­ist schol­ar Francesco Berlinghieri as “one of the ear­li­est uses of cop­per plate, in atlases and in print. You can see how fine­ly engraved the lines are, and how they’re learn­ing to use cop­per plate.” All art may be insep­a­ra­ble from the state of tech­nol­o­gy of its time, but maps — the mak­ers of which have always been dri­ven to visu­al­ize and orga­nize as much knowl­edge of the world as pos­si­ble — reflect it with a spe­cial clar­i­ty.

Explor­ing the Sun­der­land Col­lec­tion through Oculi Mun­di, you can also trace changes in what sort of knowl­edge belongs on maps in the first place. Sun­der­land-Cohen names as a per­son­al favorite the “Rudi­men­tum Novi­tio­rum” from 1475 (above), “an illus­trat­ed chron­i­cle in Latin used by monks as a teach­ing aid for novices.” Besides maps, it includes “Bib­li­cal his­to­ry that is illus­trat­ed with lots of won­der­ful wood­block draw­ings, and everybody’s wear­ing cloth­ing of the day, and in the hous­es of the day”; the con­nois­seur will notice tech­niques import­ed from illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts. As for what such a work costs today, well, if you have to ask, you’re not ful­ly hooked on maps yet. Enter Oculi Mun­di here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

40,000 Ear­ly Mod­ern Maps Are Now Freely Avail­able Online (Cour­tesy of the British Library)

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

How Did Car­tog­ra­phers Cre­ate World Maps before Air­planes and Satel­lites? An Intro­duc­tion

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Pro­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Shape Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Advice for Time Traveling to Medieval Europe: How to Staying Healthy & Safe, and Avoiding Charges of Witchcraft

in History | November 14th, 2023

Gen­er­a­tions of for­eign tourists in Europe have heard advice about trav­el­ing in groups, hag­gling prices, avoid­ing pick­pock­ets, and being able to com­mu­ni­cate in, if not the local lan­guage, then at least the lin­gua fran­ca. It turns out that very sim­i­lar guid­ance applies to time trav­el in Europe, or at least specif­i­cal­ly to the region of Eng­land, France, Ger­many, and north­ern Italy in the cen­tral Mid­dle Ages, rough­ly between the years 1000 and 1400. In the new video above, his­to­ry Youtu­ber Pre­mod­ernist pro­vides an hour’s worth of advice to the mod­ern prepar­ing to trav­el back in time to medieval Europe — begin­ning with the dec­la­ra­tion that “you will very like­ly get sick.”

The gas­troin­testi­nal dis­tress posed by the “native bio­me” of medieval Euro­pean food and drink is one thing; the threat of rob­bery or worse by its rov­ing packs of out­laws is quite anoth­er. “Crime is ram­pant” where you’re going, so “car­ry a dag­ger” and “learn how to use it.” In soci­eties of the Mid­dle Ages, peo­ple could only pro­tect them­selves by being “enmeshed in social webs with each oth­er. No one was an indi­vid­ual.” And so, as a trav­el­er, you must — to put it in Dun­geons-and-Drag­ons terms — belong to some leg­i­ble class. Though you’ll have no choice but to present your­self as hav­ing come from a dis­tant land, you can feel free to pick one of two guis­es that will suit your obvi­ous for­eign­ness: “you’re either a mer­chant or a pil­grim.”

Unlike mod­ern-day Europe, through which you trav­el for weeks bare­ly speak­ing to any­one, the Europe of the Mid­dle Ages offers numer­ous oppor­tu­ni­ties for con­ver­sa­tion, whether you want them or not. With­out any media as we know it today, medievals had to “make their own enter­tain­ment by talk­ing to each oth­er,” and if they could talk to a stranger from an exot­ic land, so much the more enter­tain­ing. But hav­ing none of our rel­a­tive­ly nov­el ideas that “every­body’s on an equal foot­ing, that every­body’s equal to each oth­er, nobody’s bet­ter or worse than any­body else, nobody gets any spe­cial treat­ment,” they’ll guess your social rank and treat you accord­ing­ly; you, in turn, would do well to act the part.

Imag­in­ing them­selves in medieval Europe, many of our con­tem­po­raries say things like, “If I go there, they’ll hang me as a witch, or they’ll burn me at the stake as a witch, because I’m wear­ing mod­ern clothes and because I talk fun­ny.” But that fear (not untaint­ed, per­haps, by a cer­tain self-regard) is unfound­ed, since medievals “were not scared of peo­ple just because they were dif­fer­ent. They were scared of peo­ple who were dif­fer­ent in a way that chal­lenged the social order or threat­ened social chaos.” Their world­view put reli­gious affil­i­a­tion above all, with­out con­sid­er­a­tion for even the most hot­ly debat­ed twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry polit­i­cal or racial bat­tle lines. But then, as we nev­er need­ed time trav­el to under­stand, the past is a for­eign coun­try; they do things dif­fer­ent­ly there.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Free Yale Course on Medieval His­to­ry: 700 Years in 22 Lec­tures

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

How to Make a Medieval Man­u­script: An Intro­duc­tion in 7 Videos

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: His­to­ri­ans Look at How Peo­ple Got It On in the Dark Ages

Behold a 21st-Cen­tu­ry Medieval Cas­tle Being Built with Only Tools & Mate­ri­als from the Mid­dle Ages

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

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Explore the Florentine Codex: A Brilliant 16th Century Manuscript Documenting Aztec Culture Is Now Digitized & Available Online

in Books, History | November 14th, 2023


The Span­ish con­quista of the Amer­i­c­as hap­pened long enough ago — and left behind a spot­ty enough body of his­tor­i­cal records — that we tend to per­ceive it as much through sim­pli­fi­ca­tions, exag­ger­a­tions, and dis­tor­tions as we do through facts. What we now call Mex­i­co under­went “essen­tial­ly an inter­nal con­flict between dif­fer­ent indige­nous groups who saw the arrival of strangers as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to resist hav­ing to pay trib­ute to the Aztec Empire,” says Uni­ver­si­dad Nacional Autóno­ma de Mex­i­co his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Berenice Alcán­tara Rojas. “When the Spaniards ini­tial­ly attacked the Mex­i­ca cap­i­tal, they were swift­ly dri­ven out.”

“Only when aid­ed by var­i­ous groups of Indige­nous allies, as well as by the spread of a ter­ri­ble small­pox epi­dem­ic, did they man­age to force the ruler Cuauhte­moc and oth­er Mex­i­ca lead­ers to capit­u­late,” Rojas con­tin­ues, draw­ing upon details pro­vid­ed in the ver­sion of the events laid out in the Flo­ren­tine Codex.

That ency­clo­pe­dic series of twelve 16th-cen­tu­ry illus­trat­ed man­u­scripts lav­ish­ly doc­u­ments the known soci­ety and nature of that land at the time — and has now, near­ly 450 years lat­er, been acknowl­edged as “the most reli­able source of infor­ma­tion about Mex­i­ca cul­ture, the Aztec Empire, and the con­quest of Mex­i­co.”

“In 1547, Bernardi­no de Sahagún, a Span­ish Fran­cis­can fri­ar who com­mit­ted most of his life to work­ing close­ly with the Indige­nous peo­ples of Mex­i­co, began col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion about cen­tral Mex­i­can Nahua cul­ture, life, peo­ple, his­to­ry, astron­o­my, flo­ra, fau­na, and the Nahu­atl lan­guage, among oth­er top­ics,” says the Get­ty Research Insti­tute. “Nahua elders, gram­mar­i­ans, scribes, and artists worked with Sahagún to com­pile a three-vol­ume, 12-book, 2500-page illus­trat­ed man­u­script, mod­el­ing its con­tent on Euro­pean ency­clo­pe­dias, espe­cial­ly Pliny the Elder’s Nat­ur­al His­to­ry,” all of which has been dig­i­tized, trans­lat­ed, and made avail­able at the Get­ty’s web site.

A thor­ough­ly mul­ti­cul­tur­al project avant la let­tre, the Flo­ren­tine Codex (named for the Medici fam­i­ly library in Flo­rence, where it was sent upon its com­ple­tion) has only just become acces­si­ble to a wide online read­er­ship. Though it’s “been dig­i­tal­ly avail­able via the World Dig­i­tal Library since 2012, for most users it remained impen­e­tra­ble because read­ing it requires knowl­edge of six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Nahu­atl and Span­ish, and of pre-His­pan­ic and ear­ly mod­ern Euro­pean art tra­di­tions.” By offer­ing search­able text in mod­ern ver­sions of both those lan­guages as well as Eng­lish — to say noth­ing of its brows­able sec­tions orga­nized by peo­ple, ani­mals, deities, and even by Nahu­atl terms like coy­ote and tor­tilla — the Dig­i­tal Flo­ren­tine Codex re-illu­mi­nates an entire civ­i­liza­tion.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Codex Quet­za­le­catzin, an Extreme­ly Rare Col­ored Mesoamer­i­can Man­u­script, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Explore the Codex Zouche-Nut­tall: A Rare, Accor­dion-Fold­ed Pre-Columbian Man­u­script

How the Ancient Mayans Used Choco­late as Mon­ey

Peru­vian Schol­ar Writes & Defends the First The­sis Writ­ten in Quechua, the Main Lan­guage of the Incan Empire

How the Inca Used Intri­cate­ly-Knot­ted Cords, Called Khipu, to Write Their His­to­ries, Send Mes­sages & Keep Records

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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