New Research, New Projects, Site Updates:
Recently been having a good time editing this site as well as my other sites and web projects--I recently made a personal at pascals-chimaera that is more a combination of my various interests, projects, and media lists. For this site, over this past week I've greatly extended the Links page, updating it with not just links and videos, but lists of reading and books. I actually brought all my books off the shelves and catalogued them as much as I could. I sill have not read all of them, especially my most recent ones, but I really enjoy having lists of these things so I can forward them or direct people to them whenever I get questions! Also, the Zonelets javascript is really acting up, and this frustrates me, so I might go and try to manually add navigation bars or such things when I can.
I also added a lot more artwork, including some spicy comics I've posted on twitter a while ago but never quite put here. I want to expand the "yaoi" page to include some more artwork, but not sure how I want to organize it yet. I've had a lot more thoughts about how I conceptualize my ship and the different eras of it, now that I've had the chance to read a lot more troubadour poetry and lais, but it's fundamentally a very different kind of approach to my research.
This is kind of the contradiction of the site–I want to archive my information and process of factual research, while also being very creative and playing thematically fast and loose with the "characters" I've become invested in. In some ways, I think I've sort of envisioned myself as a kind of electronic troubadour using the material of personages and history to create something more experiential and moral rather than strictly educational. Just like how John Gillingham pointed out, even about the great Maurice Powicke and Roger of Howden, we are indeed inclined towards romantic hearts (and I've written about this already.)
Still, despite my desire to frolick, I have accepted within myself that I really am, actually, interested in sharing information! And with that being said:
Philip Augustus and The Frustration of Sources
My current plans when I'm able to are to maybe add some specifically "informational" pages, especially about Philip Augustus, since I am often frustrated by what I can find on the internet. There's a lot of good stuff on the basic factual information, and if you have access to the common authors and books available in English (John W. Baldwin, Jim Bradbury), you're generally in good hands. However, online the material about like the dramas of the wives, or the quote by Péan Gatineau, are sadly not very commonly publicized. It has frustated me especially in the case of Péan Gatineau, since a quote from him describing Philip II's appearance has been circulating on many "historical" sites and appears to have been constantly copy-pasted from each other, with the name itself mispelled as "Pain Gatineau." The quote seems to come from Gatineau's biography of Saint Martin of Tours, but I had to dig around to even find that out. Frustrating! Anyways, I would like to include this informatin on a page. I would also like to include links to articles that go more in depth about the Ingeborg situation, or the supposed illiteracy of Philip that I've seen mentioned a couple times (once by Bradbury, once by James Reston Jr. in Warriors of God) but not investigated in depth.
Anyways, all of this is kind of subordinate to making sure the site itself functions in an organized way. I'm kind of giving up on the zonelets style of blogging since I think it's just gonna be easier to write individual pages as posts and share them as I please.