Stefan's Florilegium     

The Honorable Lord Stefan li Rous (Mark S. Harris), creator and curator of the Florilegium website, passed away on Friday June 10th, 2022. This site is no longer actively maintained. However, it has been archived using the Archive.org Wayback Machine and he prepaid the domain registration fee for "florilegium.org" until August 20, 2024 so the content is not at risk of being lost.

In the meantime I, Jeff Rush, longtime friend and holder of the domain name and hosting account behind the site will continue to preserve his work. Feel free to email me with any questions or concerns.

We are holding an in-person memorial of Mark's life on Saturday August 27th, 2022 from 2pm to 4pm with a Facebook Event Page. Please come. It is open to all and being held at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. It would have been his 65th birthday. Attendees are invited to wear medieval garb in Stefan's honor.

In any case, feel free to visit his Facebook page and post your memories of Mark there.

You can read about his life on his obituary. And I've curated some photographs of Mark to share.




The Florilegium website is a collection of files that I have assembled from various sources since I first joined the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) in 1989.The information in these files comes from the Rialto newsgroup (rec.org.sca),the old fidonet medieval echo conferance area, various mail lists, messages from various Facebook groups and articles submitted to me by their authors.

Several types of files are available:

  • -msg (or no suffix)   These files are composed of a variety of short messages from a variety of authors having a common subject .
  • -art  A stand-alone article written by a single author.Some are off of the networks while some were submitted to me by the author.
  • -bib    A bibliography of book and article titles on a single subject.
  • -FAQ    An article file that follows a Frequently Asked Questions format.
  •  What's a `Florilegium'? Literally, it means "a gathering of flowers".Florilegia were collections of choice tidbits (from Ovid, Aristotle, various popes, church scholars, etc) arranged topically.

     Typically, a florilegium is huge, encyclopedic, and contains only choice selections from particular works. Example, Ovid's Metamorphoseswould be too long to include in its entirety and might suggest some ofthe wrong ideas (from a Church viewpoint), so only those works that offerclear exegetic or moralistic exempla would likely be included. Thus, a florilegium would probably *not* include Nestor's account of the battle of the Lapiths -- the tale pokes fun at Nestor, at old men attempting to claim wisdom solely based upon age, and (less directly) at Homer. A florilegium probably *would* contain the tales of Midas, however, because they provide lessons on the evils of greed, pride, and gossip.

    I hope you find these files useful, interesting, amusing or all three.

    Honorable Lord Stefan li Rous (Mark S. Harris) stefanlirous@gmail.com).