Best Of MetaFilter

"Everyone's favorite mystery text, the Voynich Manuscript, is finally getting careful attention from leading medievalists": Pleasant_confusion posted A new approach to the Voynich Manuscript.

paduasoy has posted the London Medieval Murder Map to scratch your 14th-century murders-most-foul demographics itch

In Ask Metafilter, iamsuper asks, How unfashionable were the medieval poor? "How fast did fashion spread in, say, medieval times, or Tudor times? Would people living in remote areas perhaps be wearing clothes that were 100 years or more out of fashion? Or would fashions evolve at similar speeds to today?"

Judith: The First Crowned and Anointed Queen of Wessex... At Twelve Years Old

My aim with my newsletter is to eventually have written a biography of every single woman we know existed in England between roughly 500 and 1100: Wobbuffet posts historian Florence H R Scott's excellent and accessible "Ælfgif-who?" collection, with links to each entry so far.

What happened when someone in the Middle Ages got pink eye, or someone in Elizabethan England got athlete's foot or crotch rot? Did the infections just hang around forever? Was everyone just infected with this type of stuff? (It's pretty well-known that basically everyone had lice and fleas, I believe.)

In Ask Me: Minor infections in the days before anti-biotics or anti-fungals? Many good answers, and Jane the Brown brings the serious history again.

FGR: Belly by bloody marty mix (cc by-nc-nd)

The oldest use of the f-word has been discovered, dating the word some 165 years earlier that had ever been seen. It appeared in the name "Roger Fuckebythenavele"

and in the dream-jobs-you-never-knew-you'd-kill-to-have department, litlnemo offers, "I teach a class on dirty surnames (yes, really) and this one so has to go into my list. Those medieval English people were not the most delicate of speech, let's just put it that way."

In other deep thoughts on names and other things, MCMikeNamara asks, Has Axl Rose ever commented on the fact that his stage name is an anagram for "oral sex"?

medieval beekeeper by hans s (cc by-nd)

Another thing to consider is how dark homes were in the Medieval period. There was not a lot of window glass. Homes were often very smokey and the various sources of light were inadequate. Clutter seems to have become prevalent during the late Georgian/early Victorian era as the lighting improved and manufacturing made extraneous possessions affordable. Until then you did a lot of groping around in the dark. Kitchens were often not part of the main house, as were workshops, weaving galleries and cloisters, places where work could be done outside where there was sufficient light to do it. This probably discouraged them from having a whole lot of stuff on display inside.

Jane the Brown offers a great overview of possibilities, conditions and practicalities surrounding xarnop's question, "Are there any surviving evidence of household decorations from medieval times in Europe?"

Ottonischer Winter 2013/2014 by Hiltibold (cc by)

Dontjumplarry asks, "What strategies were used by peasants of medieval Europe to prepare for and survive the harsh winter months?" and gets some interesting answers about food preservation technologies and construction, heating and cooking techniques, as well as complicated laws governing foraging rights.