A long overdue update…

Improvements?

Several areas of the site have been improved:

• Bibliography: There were a lot of problems with the Bibliography; now there are fewer of them. Formatting errors, content errors, sorting errors, broken links… mostly cleaned up, though no doubt there will always be problems!
• More speling erors corrected throughout. Also typos, mixed up prose, and other such text silliness.
• Broken links: This is an ongoing problem, with lots of sites arbitrarily changing their structure, moving stuff, deleting stuff or disappearing entirely. I have fixed what I can, but some links continue to go nowhere. Fixing the rest will be a long-term project. The British Library is a special case: They are still recovering from a devastating cyber attack, and many of my links to their resources (especially manuscripts) redirect to a “not found” page. The library is still working on recovery, so the links should come back to life eventually. Until they do, links to British Library resources from my manuscript pages have a warning icon next to them; clicking it shows the library’s page describing the problem and what they are doing to fix it.
• There are improvements to the overall formatting and display of some sections of the site, hopefully making them easier to use.
• There is a new short encyclopedia article on the Bestiaire Marial du Rosarius.
• A few texts have been added to the Digital Text Library.

A Fox

The fox is Reynard the Fox, trickster figure and anti-hero of medieval western Europe, and the subject of a new Encyclopedia article. Reynard is a mean, nasty and amoral beast whose tricks harm everyone around him, whether foe or friend. Yet his stories were very popular from their origin in the 13th century and into the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and are still popular today. The Reynard stories were available in many countries in different languages and versions, and were adapted for purposes other than entertainment, and sometimes became overtly political. During World War II the Nazis even adapted Reynard to produce a blatantly anti-Semitic film. Many of the Reynard stories are racist, misogynistic, and violent; most modern retellings of the stories leave out the nastiest bits, particularly when edited for children.

The encyclopedia article is relatively long, with lots to look at. There are over 400 bibliography items, with at least 100 more I haven’t had time to add yet. There are many images in the gallery, though not (yet) all of the ones in available manuscripts; one manuscript has over 500 images, so it will take a while for me to process them all. Even though the article isn’t 100% complete, there is enough done to make it useful, and if I didn’t put it online now instead of adding more, it would never get done, so there it is.