This is not an official "event" no garb will be required, and there will only be a small fee requested to cover your supplies. It is scheduled for October 29th in the Shire of Quintavia (Berlin, MA Just off of i495. GPS Address: 46 Sawyerhill Road, Berlin MA.)
Although subject to change, the broad outline of the day's schedule is as follows
Our base text was requested to be a Papal bull. Even though he’s a bit earlier than her persona, the Bull Vocavit nos pius, of Pius II is going to be our pattern because Eneas Silvio Piccolmini was an overeducated Renaissance man, and a really good orator, so the text is more interesting than many. It can be found in Latin and translation starting on page 31 of Oration “Ut apertum vobis” of Pope Pius II (10 October 1458, Rome). Edited and translated by Michael v. Cotta-Schönberg. 4th version. With the papal bull “Vocavit nos Pius”. (Orations of Enea Silvio Piccolomini / Pope Pius II; 29)
Mohammad, Rex, et Corotica, Regina, servi populorum Orientis, universis et singulis has Nostras litteras inspecturis salutem. Pro Jure Armorum et Luce Inspirationis, regnantis Carum Regnum Humeris Nostris commisit. Hoc Regnum derigere et servare creditur, et alte fluctuantem pelago Orientalis populi regere naviculam. “Gravis haec quidem Nobis sarcina est, nec Nostrae vires sunt, quae tanti regiminis ferre molem sufficiant.”
Magna fortuna habemus nec gerere nec hic pondus tolerare solis, sed adsurgimus Nostris cameadoribus, cum dexteritate, arte et scientia armant. “Sunt preciosa in conspectu Coronae opera campeadorium” ait. De septem campeadoribus qui navigare Nos maria illa subveniunt, campeador Artis dehibet quem demonstrare scientiam artemque, et magnissime, fervor artibus habet, lucinaria radiare.
Nos enim nequid ad res bene gerendas ex latere nostro desit, de provectione et agnitione illi qui regnum communiunt cum artibus et scientiis, quin ea mens Nostro est id stabile propositum ac certum quaevis incommodo, quaevis pericula parvi facere placita Ordonis Lauri consulamus, et consilium persapientem eorum consequi. Itaque condecerminus exultare Fiore Leonetta Bardi Nostris Ordoni Lauri carissimi. Vestes sui tenuissimis filis subtili artificio indissolubili materia perfectae, quas, uti post eadem prodente approbamur, suis manibus ipsa texuerat. Etsi peregrina est, ergo iam non est hospes et advena, sed filia Orientis nobilis atque legitima. Threnis Nostri ornamentum aureum est, qui cum vestibus gloriosis gloria Nostrae auget.
Non facimus ipsis, sed gloriae populorum Orientis.
Datum Birkae, quinto Kalendae Februariae, regnum Nostri anno primo, Anno Societatis LVII
Mohammad, King, and Corotica, queen, servants of the people of the East, to all who see and read this letter, greetings. By the Right of Arms and the Light of Inspiration, it is upon Our Shoulders that the task of ruling this Beloved Kingdom rests. It is entrusted to us to guide and serve this kingdom, to steer the ship of the Eastern state as it is tossed about on the open Seas. “This is a heavy load for Us, and Our strength is not sufficient to carry the burden of this great charge alone.”
We have the great fortune to neither bear nor endure this burden alone, but are borne up by our champions, armed with dexterity, skill and knowledge. As it is said “Precious in the sight of the crown is work of ones champions”1 From the seven champions who help us navigate these seas, it is the Champion of Art who must demonstrate knowledge and skill and most importantly a passion for the arts to shine like a beacon, a light for all that the Kingdom and Society are.
To ensure that we have, on our part, done all that we can for the promotion and recognition of those who buttress our realm through the arts and sciences, It is our intention and Our firm and certain resolve to ignore all inconveniences and dangers that we may take heed of the pleas of the Order of the Laurel and act upon their learned council. Thus we resolve to elevate Fiore Leonetta Bardi to our dearest order of the Laurel. “Her garments are of an imperishable fabric, wrought with the finest threads and of the most delicate workmanship; and these, as all assure us, she had herself sewn with her own hands.”2 Furthermore, though she comes from a strange land, she is “neither stranger nor alien”3, but a noble and legitimate daughter of the East. She is golden raiment for our thrones, who multiplies our renown with glorious garments.
We do this not for ourselves, but for the glory of the People of the East
Given at Birka, on January 28rd (5 Kalends Feb), in the first year of our reign, AS 57
Scroll text by: Aelia Fortunata, Margreta Gyllensteirna, Gun∂ormr Dengir, Aildreda de Tamworthe, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, and Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
]]>In principio erat Ideam et Idea mandabatur Æsam feilinni Jossursdottiri et Ideam Feilinn suscipiebatur. Pagina autem erat inanis et vacua et candidiatis erat super faciam paginae: et manus Feilinnis ferebatur super paginas. Dixitque Feilinn ‘fiat tabula’ et facta est tabula. Et divisit textam a imagonem, et paginam fulgere in tenebra confecit. Litterulae rubrae et atrae et aureae parere in pagina confecit, verba et sensiculi et paragrapha scripsit. Omnia per ipsa facta sunt: et sine ipsa factum est nihil, quod factum est.
Videruntque Ioannis et Honig, Imperator et Imperatrix Orientis cuncta quae fecerat et cuncta manum eam tetigerat, et erant valde bona, in vice eam creaverunt Comes Ordinis Manulei. Et factum est Mane et Vespere, dies sextus, mensis undecimo, quinquagesimo sexto anno Nostri Societatis.
In the beginning there was the assignment, and the assignment was given to Æsa Feilinn Jossursdottir and the assignment was accepted by Feilinn1.
And the page was void and empty, and blankness was upon the face of the parchment; and the hand of Felinn moved over the across the page2. So Feilinn said “let there be text” and there was text, and she separated the text from the illumination and caused the page to gleam in the darkness3. Letters in black and red and gold she caused to appear on the page, words and sentences and paragraphs she wrote. All things were made by her, and without her was made nothing that was made4
And Ioannis and Honig, Emperor and Empress of the East, saw all she had made and all her hand had touched, and called it good, and they, in turn, created her a Companion of the Order of the Maunche. And it was Morning and it was evening, the 6th Day, the 11th Month, the 56th year of our Society5
Scroll by Mistress Rhonwen Glyn Conwy
Text by Master Gun∂ormr Dengir, Lady Aelia Fortunata and Jerome of Stridon
This is our working copy, with chunks of the original that seemed useful collected as we found them, and then reworked to fit the content
The East Kingdom College of Scribes warmly invites you to a class series on "how to get good" at scroll layouts! Everyone is welcome to attend; the material will be for intermediate-level study.
We will be offering a series of three online classes on analysing scribal practice in period manuscripts. The goal of these classes is to practice looking at the details, beyond the letters themselves, that help make an SCA scroll "look like" an exemplar. Each class will have a different focus, starting from the small: letter and word choices; through the medium: inter- and intra-word spacing and justification of the line of text; to the full page: vertical line spacing and text block size and position. We'll look at everything except how to form the letters themselves. This class does not assume the students will know any particular hand, but some familiarity with a period hand is helpful.
When: January 30th (followup dates will be discussed then)
Where: Google Meet, please email the teacher for the link:
Gunðormr Dengir - 202643 (at) members.eastkingdom.org
(BL Royal MS 4.e.IX f.52r)]]>
This will be a participatory session, not quite a class in the usual sense. We will work on reading Beneventan Script, a hand used in the Montecassino/Benevento area of Italy, primarily in the 11th and 12th C as its use declined precipitously after 1215. Everyone is invited to try reading the texts, though it won't be required for attendance. Prior to the event, we will provide digital copies of all manuscripts to be discussed, and direction on how to get started, for anyone who chooses to prepare in advance. No previous experience necessary, other than basic literacy! This is the first attempt at expanding a local Reading Roundtable group to a more global audience.
]]>The RMR is a group that meets roughly monthly to try and practice reading period hands. No experience is needed, nor is any knowledge of Latin, though it does tend to help. This month we will be working on Irish Minuscule, and maybe cursive if we have the time. These are members of the Insular family of scripts, used in Ireland pre-1000(ish).
The image below is f.52r from the Book of Armagh, now held in the collection of Trinity College, Dublin as MS 52.
]]>The RMR is a group that meets roughly monthly to try and practice reading period hands. No experience is needed, nor is any knowledge of Latin, though it does tend to help. This month we will be working on Visigothic, a hand that was used in Iberia from the 9th through early 13th centuries. For more information on the hand and a collection of links to digitized manuscripts and other resources, see Aiona Castro’ excellent Littera Visigothica.
The image below is from a copy of Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse. It was made at the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos around 1091-1110, and is often referred to as the “The Silos Apocalypse”. It is now held at the British Library with shelfmark Add MS 11695
A request came in: "I need assistance on a scroll text, an AoA for a 16th C Italian Jewish persona, ideally in Hebrew. Oh, and one other thing, she uses female pronouns in person but would prefer any awards to use neuter pronouns." My initial answer was, "That's impossible, every noun and adjective and pronoun in Hebrew has a gender and the only options are male and female," but I wasn't going to let a little thing like grammar stand in my way, so I came up with a plan.
I know very little about 16th century Italian secular works, but composing poems in a biblical style remained popular throughout the Middle Ages into the early modern period. There's a structure in biblical poetry called a bicolon in which the two adjacent lines say the same thing, the second line restates the first in different words. One example is Ps. 114:1-4[1]
When Israel went forth from Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of strange tongue,
Judah became His kingdom,
Israel, His dominion.
The sea saw them and fled,
The Jordan ran backward,
mountains skipped like rams,
The hills like young lambs.
Here I have split each verse in half to illustrate the parallelism of the images: Israel:Jacob, Judah:Israel, Sea:Jordan, Kingdom:Dominion, etc
My idea was to use this structure for the initial part of the scroll, with the first line of each bicolon using masculine grammar and the second line feminine. The first couplet drew on common biblical imagery, the gazelle appears as a female motif (Song of Songs, 4:5) and the tower as a symbol of strength and protection (Psalms 18:3).
SS 4:5 - Your breasts are like two fawns, Twins of a gazelle, Browsing among the lilies.
Ps. 18:3 - The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; My G-d, my rock, in Him I take refuge; my shield, and my horn of salvation, my high tower.
The remaining couplets were composed by Master Donovan Shinnock, a close friend of the recipient who was able to expound on her activities. Once composed the text was translated into biblical Hebrew by Dr. Ely Levine. The final part of the text, where Ozurr and Fortune do the awarding of arms, we decided to write in prose and not translate into Hebrew. This is SCA-specific wording, and would not end up as comprehensible Hebrew, as it would be littered with transliterated terms.
What follows is the text in 3 columns, English as written, Hebrew translation, and literal retranslation into English with grammatical forms noted.
[1] All translations of the Bible are based on the JPS translation available online via Sefaria: https://www.sefaria.org/
Once you have all the parts installed, there is some configuration that the Dockerfile
takes care of automatically that you will have to do by hand
(The AWS-way to do this would be to spin up a Postgres RDS instance, but that was too many variables for a first try. I leave it as an exercise to the reader)
Login to postgres and create a digipal DB and digipal user, for that the instructions in GitHub are accurate, see the databasesection, until the step that starts "After that, run in your terminal the following commands:".
By default postgres is not configured to allow password login locally, only "account" based socket login. You need to change that by editing /var/lib/pgsql93/data/pg_hba.conf
. Set the line that looks like
local all all ident
to be
local all all md5
Replace ident
with md5
and restart postgres. You can now continue in the GitHub instructions from "After that, run in your terminal the following commands:"
/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
, at the endinclude "vhosts.d/digipal.conf"
/etc/lighttpd/modules.conf
include "conf.d/fastcgi.conf"
/etc/lighttpd/vhosts.d/digipal.conf
#include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
#include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"
fastcgi.server = ( "/iip/iipsrv.fcgi" =>
(( "host" => "127.0.0.1",
"port" => 9000,
"check-local" => "disable",
"min-procs" => 1,
"max-procs" => 1,
"bin-path" => "/etc/lighttpd/iipsrv.fcgi",
"bin-environment" => (
"LOGFILE" => "/tmp/iipsrv.log",
"VERBOSITY" => "10",
"MAX_IMAGE_CACHE_SIZE" => "20",
# "FILENAME_PATTERN" => "_pyr_",
"JPEG_QUALITY" => "75",
"MAX_CVT" => "3000",
"FILESYSTEM_PREFIX" => "/apps/digipal/images/"
)
))
)
NB. you will need to set the FILESYSTEM_PREFIX
as needed for your environment
iipserv.cgi
to /etc/lighttpd/
and set it as executable: chmod a+rx /etc/lighttpd/iipserv.cgi
As I have my system configured these apps are not accessable to the outside world, but only to localhost
. When I want to use it, I ssh to the machine and do local port forwarding, i.e.ssh -L 8000:localhost:8000 -L 8081:localhost:8081 ${USER}@${SERVER}
The port 8000 is used for the web server, 8081 for the image server (that's what lighttpd does). You should then be able to access your digipal by pointing a browser to http://localhost:8000
NB. this worked for me, after some hacking around, but I provide no guarantee that these instructions are complete. Moniti estis
]]>There is some documentation on spinning up Digipal in a server, versus the Docker distribution, on their Github, but I found that information incomplete. Here is what I had to do to configure a running instance in AWS, running on AWS's linux AMI, which is mostly like Fedora. Note that I do not have Nginx running, so there's still some port weirdness. This is part 1 of 2, we'll just install and build everything. Part 2 will have configuring lighttpd
to serve the images and postgresql
account stuff
The following packages all to be installed with yum
. There's a single-line at the bottom if you want to just do it
Big omnibus commands, need to be run as root or via sudo
yum install git postgresql93 postgresql93-server postgresql93-devel ImageMagick
mysql56-devel gcc, gcc-g++ libxml2-devel libxml2-python27 libxslt-devel automake
autoconf libtool libjpeg-devel libtiff-devel lighttpd lighttpd-fastcgi
yum install nodejs npm python-lesscpy --enablerepo=epel
-g
makes it global - npm install -g less
git clone https://github.com/ruven/iipsrv.git
cd iipserv
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make check
sudo cp src/iipsrv.fcgi /etc/lighttpd/
Now time to install digipal itself
git clone https://github.com/kcl-ddh/digipal
cd digipal
git checkout 1.2.1a
pip install -r requirements.txt
NB 1.2.1a is the current version in git. If you want to look at the versions, go to the GitHub page and click the "branches" dropdown. Replace 1.2.1a with any of those values verbatum
]]>The goal - take the code that has been running in an ElasticBeanstalk environment and run it as a Lambda job, triggering whenever a file is dropped into an S3 bucket.
The Requirement - To properly deploy it into our prod environment, all resources must be deployed via CloudFormation. Note that we are not the development team, so we are assuming that some code has been written and uploaded as a .war/.zip file to an S3 bucket. This means that, at a high level, we need three deployments to:
lambda.amazonaws.com
as its role. Also include several managed policies to let the Lambda instances come into beingThis is the IAM role given to the running Lambda instance. The example given spawns a Lambda inside an existing VPC, so needs the managed VPC role. If you are running outside a VPC, a different managed policy is needed.
"LambdaRole": {
"Type": "AWS::IAM::Role",
"Properties": {
"RoleName" : "LambdaRole",
"ManagedPolicyArns" : [
"arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AWSLambdaVPCAccessExecutionRole"
],
"AssumeRolePolicyDocument": {
"Version" : "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Principal": {
"Service": [ "lambda.amazonaws.com" ]
},
"Action": [ "sts:AssumeRole" ]
}]
},
"Path": "/"
}
},
The actual lambda function definition. Needs to have the code uploaded to S3 in order to deploy. This can be run in parallel with the IAM role creation. This example builds a Lambda that runs in Java8, but Node.js and Python would be similar. In this sample the Lambda is given a SecurityGroup to allow it access to back-end services (RDS, etc), where access is by source group.
"SearchLambda": {
"Type": "AWS::Lambda::Function",
"Properties": {
"Description" : "Description Text",
"FunctionName" : { "Fn::Join" : ["-", [{"Ref" : "EnvTag"}, "import", "lambda01"]] },
"Handler": "org.hbsp.common.lambda.pim2cs.S3EventHandler",
"Role": { "Fn::GetAtt" : ["LambdaRole", "Arn"] },
"MemorySize" : "512",
"Code": {
"S3Bucket": "Sourcecode-BucketName",
"S3Key": { "Fn::Join" : ["/", ["directory/path", {"Ref" : "EnvTag"}, "artifact-name-version.zip"]]}
},
"Runtime": "java8",
"Timeout": "300",
"VpcConfig" : {
"SecurityGroupIds" : [
{"Ref" : "AppServerSG"}
],
"SubnetIds" : [
{ "Ref" : "PriSubnet1" },
{ "Ref" : "PriSubnet2" },
{ "Ref" : "PriSubnet3" }
]
}
}
}
Initial deployment of S3 bucket to create it. This is needed for the Lambda permissions, but cannot have notifications attached yet.
"PlatformBucketQA":{
"Type": "AWS::S3::Bucket",
"Properties" : {
"BucketName" : "sp-transfer-qa",
"Tags" : [
<Many Tags Go Here>
],
"LoggingConfiguration" : {
"DestinationBucketName" : "logbucket",
"LogFilePrefix" : "s3/"
}
}
},
This assigns calling permission TO the lambda function from the source S3 bucket. Both of those must be already created before this can be executed. It is possible that this would work with a "DependsOn" clause, but I find it easier to simply deploy this as a seperate step from the Lambda and Bucket
"SearchLambdaPerm": {
"Type": "AWS::Lambda::Permission",
"Properties" : {
"Action": "lambda:InvokeFunction",
"FunctionName": {"Ref": "SearchLambda"},
"Principal": "s3.amazonaws.com",
"SourceAccount": {"Ref": "AWS::AccountId"},
"SourceArn": { "Fn::Join": [":", [
"arn", "aws", "s3", "" , "", {"Ref" : "PlatformBucketQA"}]]
}
}
},
This is an addition to the previous S3 bucket code, adding the specific notification configurations. In this model only files created, where created includes renaming/moving files in the bucket, that match the glob asset/incoming/*xml
. The "Event" parameter can be changed to trigger on different S3 actions
"PlatformBucketQA":{
"Type": "AWS::S3::Bucket",
"Properties" : {
"BucketName" : "sp-transfer-qa",
"Tags" : [
<Many Tags Go Here>
],
"NotificationConfiguration": {
"LambdaConfigurations": [
{
"Event" : "s3:ObjectCreated:*",
"Function" : { "Fn::GetAtt" : ["SearchLambda", "Arn"] },
"Filter" : {
"S3Key" : {
"Rules" : [
{
"Name" : "prefix",
"Value" : "asset/incoming"
},
{
"Name" : "suffix",
"Value" : "xml"
}
]
}
}
}
]
},
"LoggingConfiguration" : {
"DestinationBucketName" : "logbucket",
"LogFilePrefix" : "s3/"
}
}
},
In JSON, the code in YAML will have the same fields, just different structure ↩
(image #10, describing Havdallah -- the ceremony at the end of Shabbat)
AM