Lost Medieval Legends

An analysis estimates that written copies of medieval European adventure and romance tales survived better in countries such as Ireland than in others like England. Recycling of those documents, such as using fragments of a manuscript to stiffen a bishop’s headgear (shown), contributed to losses.
CC-BY SUZANNE REITZ, DEN ARNAMAGNÆANSKE SAMLING (COPENHAGEN)



King Arthur’s lasting renown is one for the books. But a statistical spotlight now shines on medieval European literature’s round table of lost and forgotten stories.

An international team used a mathematical formula borrowed from ecology to estimate the extent to which medieval adventure and romance tales, and documents on which they were written, have been lost over the years. Only about 9 percent of these documents may have survived till modern times, the researchers found.

These findings indicate that simple statistical principles can be used to gauge losses of a range of past cultural items, such as specific types of stone tools or ancient coins, literature professor Mike Kestemont of the University of Antwerp in Belgium and his colleagues report in the Feb. 18 Science.

Their approach represents a simple but powerful tool for studying culture, says anthropologist Alex Bentley of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who did not participate in the study. “It’s like walking into an abandoned Amazon book warehouse decades later and estimating the total number of book titles based on the numbers of surviving single and double copies that you find.”

Much medieval European literature, which dates to between roughly the years 600 and 1450, has been lost, and many surviving manuscripts are fragmentary. Durable parchment documents were often recycled as small boxes or for other practical uses. That has left researchers unsure about whether surviving tales and documents are representative of what once existed.

Kestemont’s team turned to a formula developed by environmental statistician and study coauthor Anne Chao of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Chao’s statistical technique accounts for species that go undetected by researchers in field surveys of biological diversity. More generally, her approach can be used to estimate the number of unobserved events of any type that accompany relatively frequent observed events of the same type.

So, for example, this formula might be used to estimate the number of undiscovered archaeological sites in an early state society where the biggest settlements have been easier to find than smaller ones.  READ MORE...

Journalism IS NOT an Honorable Profession

It may seem like a bold statement to make, but I believe it without question now because of the Trump Administration.  

When Trump began his Presidency, I was attending the local gym and when I was on the treadmill, I would be watching FOX News on the monitor screen in front of the machine.  As I paid attention to what I was watching, it did not agree with what I had just watched on either CBS or CNN...  The more I paid attention to the news and started making comparison, I soon discovered that FOX News was the only station that was actually presenting the TRUTH.  The other two stations:  CBS and CNN were slanted the news to coincide with the Democratic Narrative.

In fact, the me I watched FOX News, the more I realized that the actual coverage was different if it negatively impacted the Democrats.  FOX News might devote an hour or so to the controversy but CBS and CNN were only devoting a minute or two...  if that.

Today, as I was driving down to a doctor's appointment, I was listening to a TALK  RADIO station out of Knoxville, and one of the callers shared an experience he had endured while attending an Ethics in Journalism class at the University of Tennessee.  While he was in this class one day, the professor played a tape between Walter Cronkite and President Johnson and the President was telling Cronkite how he should SPIN the news on the Vietnam War....  so that the public was only receiving a portion of the truth not the whole truth because it would look bad on President Johnson and the Democrats.

Back in the mid 1990's, I was interviewed by a journalist and when the article appeared, the so-called journalist had twisted my comments to make it look like I had said something altogether different from what I actually had said.

The recent fiasco in Georgia is another example of how journalists who are the handmaidens of the Democratic Party are going to SPIN the news in such a way that it again conforms to the Democratic Narrative which is not even close to the TRUTH...