40 Days of Lent

One of my favorite books on Medieval History is Clifford Backman's The Worlds of Medieval Europe. He wrote about fasting for Lent: 
" A fellow named Macarius of Alexandria, for example, once tried to stand upright in prayer, nonstop throughout the entire forty day season of Lent, while eating nothing but cabbage leaves (Presumably the gas he produced helped keep him aloft.)" 
Love a historian with a sense of humor.

A Pair of Good Links

Since I pointed out that error in the TEAMS text, you might think that I would not recommend them but I do. They still publish some great books that no one else publishes in Middle English. It is but one little error and I am sure it is a rarity. As well, they have placed most of their published work online for free. I like a printed book but if I just need a glimpse at something, an online version is nice too and you could cite these ones in an essay.

They offer The Book of Margery Kempe, many of Gower's works and John Lydgate, The Pearl, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, Charlemagne, Canterbury Tales and so many other texts all in Middle English but including a glossary. I recommend it highly.

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/catalog.htm

The other link is to a gardening site. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased some architectural elements of a Cistercian cloister from Bonnefort, France among others and reassembled them in New York. Sounds like it is worth a little visit. Here is the visitors page: http://www.metmuseum.org/cloisters/ But the link that I really wanted to post is for the medieval garden at the Cloisters. It is rare to find a blog on medieval gardens and it has photos as well. Here is a link: http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/

I think you should bookmark it.

Royal Botanical Gardens

I have been busy this last week, weeding and mulching my garden so I thought I would add this post about the Medieval Garden at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario which I visited last summer. At left is a photo. It is rather small and is not meant to represent how a medieval garden was laid out by ordinary people; it shows the types of plants that people grew and the purposes for some of them.

I have some of this growing in my garden. It is good for basilisk attacks too.

This photo is a close but not so close view of the bed. I love summer. It is far too short here. The Royal Botanical Gardens at Burlington are lovely. I recommend a visit. And they have tea houses throughout so you can sit, have tea or beer and enjoy the view.