Another Welcome :-)

I'd like to welcome another new LJ friend, sybilvonbora, known to most of you as Diana (SCA: Mistress Rose), the proprieter of Renaissance Fabrics. :-)

Heading home

OK, I *tried* to work today, but it is obviously not happening. I can't focus on my current report. All I seem to be good for is LJ and talking to misagillian (who took care of Brandee for me today). No sense in burning a charge number.

I expect to crash hard when I get home. Blah.

Current Book & Possible Discussion Topic?

Now that I seem to have connected with some other 16th C junkies out there in LJ-Land I thought I'd mention my current reading material: Ken Albala's Eating Right in the Renaissance, Univ. of California Press, 2002. Borrowed the copy I'm reading from JIMR, and bought a copy from Amazon with a gift certificate I got for Xmas. My next planned read is another book I ordered under the same gift certificate, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians by Rudolph M. Bell (which I learn about from the V&A At Home in the Renassaince book).

Still in the process of reading the Alaba book. Central to the book is Galen's system of humors, which I also understand will be a theme for the 2007 Wooden Spoon competitions. This all sounds like potential discussion material for the 16th C Slackers Club. Anybody want to do a group read thing? Or we could characterize ourselves by our tendencies and try to come up with the foods we should be eating. Could be silly, could be mind-numbingly dull as a group conversation.

I do find it interesting about the rather "biblical" tendency of trying to find Truth from writings, rather than obervation and experiance. And the older the writing, the better. But Alaba also shows the breakdown of the Galen system by the latter 16th C, and how writers *were* critizing the Galan system for not matching personal experiance.

Since the V&A book is making the rounds, that might work as a book discussion topic as well. There issue there is that many of the essays say, in essence, "Not much work has been done on this topic but more should be done". And material culture is not as suited to getting people to talk as more philosophical topics. But it's a thought.

Aside: Jeeze, I hardly post for the longest time and now I can't shut up. I suppose when I get back into hard-core report writing mode at work (which needs to happen tommorrow or the next day, at the latest), I'll go
back to being incommuticato again. :-P

16th C: There's so much more than just the clothes, folks! ;-)