The Week+in Links (Coming Up for Air Edition)

I'm still alive. I just have nothing to say right now. Here are some links in the meantime:

Other people might have known about this already, but I've only just found out about it — a site that lets you search Lane and Hans Wehr simultaneously. It's very spiffy.

Al-Mawrid Reader

A proposed alternative to blind peer review:

Origins of Courteous Review

***

Apparently there is a Moorish-revival palazzo in Italy. I require additional information about the restoration history of the building — was the painting an imaginative over-restoration in the 19th century as it was at the Alhambra? — and a trip to Tuscany:

Amazing Technicolor Castle

A scathing review of Arabic poetry in English:

Adonis, Mistranslated

Jewish medievalists on Twitter celebrate Passover by sharing links to illuminated Haggadah manuscripts. Here are a few that have been going around:

45 Hebrew Manuscripts Go Digital

The Prato Haggadah

Two museum exhibitions in New York are displaying art of Jews in the Islamic world:

Centuries of Judaica From Life and Rites in Muslim Lands

A colleague of mine is doing some interesting work on the incorporation of Arabic materials into chivalric romances in Spain, and is presenting it for a more general audience:

Boy Meets Girl...

***

It has been a couple of really bad years for my field, with really prominent people dying really young. Remie Constable will live on in the profession not only through her meticulous scholarship but because she edited the sourcebook we all use to teach undergraduates. I had the privilege of getting to know her a bit last year at the Katz Center, and she was just a lovely, generous senior colleague: 

In Memoriam: Olivia Remie Constable

***

The British Library has updated its 2011 guidelines about not wearing white gloves while handling manuscripts, though the upshot is still the same — don't — even if medieval scribes (like the one in MS Hunter 36) appear not to have followed that admonition.

White Gloves or Not?

***

Finally, the tweet of the Week+, because  I'm sure that I'm weird enough that if I had been a kid now rather than in the 80s, I would have been medicated into normalcy:

I will forever be grateful for being a child in the 1980s, when you could daydream and be strange without it being a disease.
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) April 13, 2014