Quantcast
Channel: 井の中の蛙 » Medieval
Browsing all 5 articles
Browse latest View live

A bounty of medieval symposia

Premodernists, particularly those who focus on history, sometimes feel gloomy about the state of premodern Japanese studies in the U.S., where a number of large graduate programs have shrunk,...

View Article



Mystery Circles on Early Armor

What is that circular disk which early medieval samurai wear over their swords? Is it a weight, to keep it from flopping around while horseriding? That’s my best guess at this point. I’ve done a...

View Article

Dinner first, then dessert

I was going to post about it here, but Another Damned Medievalist raised the question of how to deal with primary sources in a class where students lack important background concepts, and so I’m going...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The Three Stages of Ninja

The ninja question came up last week in my Samurai class — we were talking about possible writing projects — so I had to do my ninja spiel, which has become a bit of a set piece. The history of ninja...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Seppuku: A Samurai Suicide Miscellany

For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).1 Since I’m teaching both Samurai and Early Japan this semester, seemed like...

View Article

Browsing all 5 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images