Wooly Mittens

My mother and I quilt, and we were working on some charity quilts, which prompted me to think about what fabric-work was like in the Middle Ages.  When I was writing The Last Pendragon, I wondered about winter hats, since it is cold and snowy in Wales in February.  Knitting,  however, was developed in the Middle East and not brought to Britain until the late thirteenth century.  Even though wool was spun and turned into thread, clothing was woven on looms.   Crochet work was developed later, not until the 1800s. “The history of knitting is mostly a big mystery, guessed at from fragments kept in museums around the world. Knitting is made of wool, silk, and other fibers that decay rapidly, even under perfect conditions; knitting needles are essentially sharpened sticks, and hard to identify as knitting needles beyond a Read more…

The Nature of Knowledge

To humans, learning is like breathing–it comes naturally.  What a human learns, however, is not natural and depends on the needs of the individual, the time she lives in, and what is available for her to learn. A thousand years ago, ‘book’ knowledge was the province of the Church and of the elite (usually male).   Over the next two hundred years, formal education became more widespread.  Cambridge University, for example, was founded in 1209 by a group of men dissatisfied with Oxford. When a man went to the university, his education began with the seven liberal arts:  Latin grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.   After he received his Master of Arts, he could choose to study law, medicine, philosophy, or theology, upon which he would receive his doctorate. Knowledge, however, is not necessarily just ‘book learning’.  While this afternoon my Read more…