[William P]

we all know or have seen the macejowski bible...

heres the thingthough since we very commonly see people being torn to shreds, helmts literally chopped into nearly all the way through, we see a man being ripped in half be a long glaive while wearing a hauberk, we also se numerous shots of people being stabbed throuh their maile.

.....havent we had several very long winded discussions o this forum explaining EXACTLY how close to IMPOSSIBLE it is for those those things to happen..

looking at it now, it looks like everyone in that book has 18-20 guage helms and butted mail. even then youd still be safe from the glaive. at least from being choppen nearly in half
i.e like the events of a hollywood movie where mail and plate can often by pierced like a cotten t-shirt.

does anyone have an idea what the deal is with these illustrations and why they depict things so impausible.

[Bartek Strojek]

[Marik C.S.]

To quote from a Youtube video about Spears: "Using vase Paintings as a was of studying how people fought is a bit like studying modern infantry tactics by watching Rambo movies."

I think the good man who made this video put it rather nicely and this point surely holds true for this bible.

[Christian Henry Tobler]

Hello William,

The likely reason we see so many implausible actions in the Mac Bible is because they're being performed by biblical heroes: they can do impossible things because God is empowering them to do so.

Cheers,

Christian

[William P]

[Chad Arnow]

The Mac Bible (actually a collection of illustrated Bible stories and not a complete Bible) is hardly unusual for the time. We see those implausible feats of strength often in period art for the purposes of furthering the story's aim, glorifying the person who commissioned the work, etc.

Consider also that this original manuscript was made up entirely of pictures when first created. Captions were added at a few different occasions and in different languages. So the pictures have to be very obvious in telling the story since there were no words (not a problem since many people would have been illiterate) and because they had just a few frames to tell an entire Bible passage. So the good guys have to very obviously destroy evil. If it depicts a sword bouncing off a helm, you don't know if the bad guy is injured or dies. But if it's split in half down to the neck.....

And like many manuscripts of the period, everything is depicted in roughly contemporary dress, arms, and armour except when it doesn't further the story or distinguish the players in the story. There was no serious efforts at archeology at this point (mid 13th century), and lifespans were short and hard, so trying to nail down the dress in the BC era 15 or more centuries later wasn't going to happen. In many ways, science and archeology in particular are luxuries of the kind of world we live in now.

I wouldn't bring Hollywood into this; it demeans the artists of long ago. I don't see the things in this manuscript relating to modern movie-making in any way. It's an apples to armadillo comparison.

Also, see this thread for a very similar discussion: http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=14456 . I may merge them, in fact.

[William P]

[Nat Lamb]

just to throw a cat amoung the pidgeons...
There was a recent investigation into the the speeds that trirmes moved at (sorry, cant remember who conducted the study). Used some pretty good sluething to get verification of the speeds they achieved. The study also got some elite modern rowers (pretty sure they were olympic or commonwealth games athletes) and compared them. Conclusion was that the trireme crews were rowing for hours at a significantly higher top speed than the moderd elite athletes could handle for a few minutes. Study looked at possible reasons for this and couldn't come up with anything better than "compared to our ancestors, we are puny sissy girly-men"

There is also the example of some fosilised footprints here in Oztrahya that are about 30k+ years old, boffins have calculated that the idividual who layed them down was A) running prety close to Usian Bolte speeds B) barefoot C) in the mud, and most impresively D) was still accelerating when the strides left these imprints. Again the conlusion was "Some random guy in the ancient past was faster than our top modern athlete, except barefoot in the mud"

So perhaps the Mac bible is showing feats we consider to be superhuman because our conception of "human" has been skewed by our impoverished abilities...

(by the way, I do not actually believe that people really were cleaving each other and horses in half through mail, just throwing it out there)

[William P]

[Aleksei Sosnovski]

Stronger people -> heavier, beefier swords (or otherwise they would break too often) -> heavier armor (to defeat these heavy swords, strong people can wear heavy armor, can't they?) -> still too difficult to cut through a helmet. I can believe that a professional trireme rower who was doing it 14/7 could row better than a modern day athlete. I can believe that a human who was running for his life 10/7 could run better than a modern day athlete (until his joints wear out that is). I can also believe that human species have physically changed in 3000 years. But in 700 years? I doubt it. Well, I also can't help suspecting that the results of the trireme tests and especially analysis of the footprints are not very precise. But I haven't seen them so cannot comment. But the biggest question is why medieval weapons and armor don't seem too heavy for us? And why does armor get heavier in the 16th century (when people should become weaker, if we assume that the degradation was a gradual process)? Why was is relatively light in the 13th century? The only reason I can think of is that it was enough.

[Dan Howard]