48th Kalamazoo medieval congress, my comments on
Thursday 10:00 am
"The Illuminator of Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose (Glasgow University, Hunter Manuscript 409) and the Context of Its Production", Holly James-Maddocks, Univ. of York
"Antiphony, Strategy, Whim, and Nodding in the Yale Manuscript 229 Workshop", Elizabeth Willingham, Baylor Univ.
"Scribes and Artists Collaborating on Wycliffite Bibles", Kathleen E. Kennedy, Pennsylvania State Univ.-Brandywine
A sort-of typology of the illustrations in the manuscript: which illuminators (or, rather, which style of illuminators, since the individuals who did the illuminations are not known) did which illuminations of which copies of the Romaunt of the Rose. Ms. James-Maddocks believes that two groups (the Oxford Group and the the Owl-Illuminating group) were responsible for a particular set from three manuscripts, according to various signs and symbols - gold-colored balls, vines of a certain length and branching of leaves, and so forth. She brought up the fact that there were only three examples of scribes signing their works in 14-15th century england. And she mentioned that there is some evidence for London artisans moving to Oxford, rather than the more usual Oxford-London movement. London was The Center of Book Arts. but apparently there were enough paying customers who preferred smaller, less crowded cities.
Ms. Willingham discussed a Launcelot manuscript; I kept relatively few notes that are worth transcribing. She mentioned a couple of things that she found unusual - several pages that were mostly unfilled (four or five lines at the top, and the rest of the page was blank), of which some were lined but otherwise unused. Vellum wasn't cheap: why didn't they start a new chapter, rather than leave so much blank space? And why did some of the pages have small but repaired rips or holes, but were nevertheless used? Answer: a "workshop economy" as excuse for using hole-y or ripped vellum - vellum was expensive, so if the holes were small enough, why not use it?
I find that argument confusing: on the one hand they had pages that went blank, but on the other hand they used hole-filled vellum because it was expensive?
Ms. Kennedy discussed "Wycliffite" Bibles, of which there are 250 complete and partial copies still existing; some have multiple scribes and/or illiminators. There are similarities of illuminations between various copies, some similarities of which are in the usage of catchwords (not all Bibles had catchwords, but many of those that did seem to come from a small number of illuminators). And many of the catchwords were within ribbons ascribable to particular scribes - "catchword knots", in other words. These usually appeared in Bibles with fewer illuminations, which she believes may be because of sponsors with limited funds, as fewer illuminations usually meant more catchword knots.
She mentioned a group, the "followers of the corpus master, 1430's - 1450", and the "twisted ribbon scribe", and, in passing, the importance of teams of artists for one or a small collection of codices.
One lovely term from this session: "medieval hackers".
Stray question from the floor: considering the danger of Wycliffite bibles, were the artisans Lollards (Lollards, from an orthodox Catholic perspective), or in danger of harm from working on the bibles?
Thursday 1:30 pm
"The Unexamined Miracle: Manuscripts, Their Makers, and Lay Piety in Fourteenth-Century Book Culture", Karen Casebier, Univ. of Maryland
"Huntington Library MS HM 140 and the Search for Thematic Coherence", Cathy Hume, Northwestern Univ.
“'To Bynde Them Al Together': Art of Governance and Thomas Berthelet’s Sammelbände of Husbandry", Satoko Tokunaga, Keio Univ.
I have no notes for Ms. Casebier's or Ms. Hume's presentations.
Ms. Tokunaga talked about why certain books were bound together, using as an example a production of (if I read my note correctly) Wynkyn de Word's Boke of Kervying, and another work that was something of a sammelband (a collection of books on closely associated subjects): a book of husbandry, a book on the care and maintenance of horses, a book of surveying, and xenophon's treatise of household - all of which were of some use to a head of a medieval household.
Thursday 3:30 pm
I had intended to go to a session on Metals in Architecture, but wound up having a lively conversation at a table near the coffee and tea service, with Eric Johnson, OSU's curator of early books and manuscripts, and Mildred Budny of the ( Research Group on Manuscript Evidence ). It was quite an accidental conversation: none of us knew who the others were or of our mutual interests until five minutes into talking. Dr. Johnson was much of the school of thought that believes in showing students actual artifacts (in his case, books and individual artifacts) rather than showing them photographs or reproductions; he said they respond so much better, so much more lively, when they can actually hold a 400-year-old hand-illuminated hand-scribed *real* *honest-to-God* page, rather than see a slide and listen to a discussion. This is (as most of you know) a school of thought to which I very firmly belong. Which is why this conversation lasted for well over an hour.
Friday 10:00
"Remodeling Chivalry through Food Play", Jodi Growitz Shearn, West Chester Univ.
"The Crusaders’ World: Foodways Experiences", Samantha A. Meigs, Univ. of Indianapolis
A demonstration with Ingeborg Slegers, Univ. of Indianapolis, and Linda Nicley, Univ. of Indianapolis.
This was nothing like what I expected from the description - no talks, almost pure demonstrations of recipes (most of which were quite tasty). The concept behind the session was to demonstrate how one example of "experiential learning" ("how to teach the concept of the Crusades to students through food, new foods, new methods of cooking, and general gastronomy in Them Thar Furrin Countries", basically) might work as a replacement for a lecture - food as exemplar of heaven, philosophy, humors; food as heaven on earth e.g. grains or paradise. What we got at the session were various foods, and almost no talking about crusades, or the crusaders, or pretty much anything else....but, then, the audience here was rather more familiar with the period than your typical high school class.
It did, however, fit in very neatly with the conversation I had with Dr. Johnson and Ms. Budny in the previous afternoon.
Two questions came up in the end-of-session Q&A: medieval cooks did not know, obviously, about bacteria and food-born diseases, but yet they managed to not make anyone terribly sick (or, rather, not make too many people sick), which led someone to ask: what methods did they use, if any, to keep the food fresh enough to avoid poisoning people, and what did they do to keep the cooking utensils (pots, pans, knives, cutting surfaces, etc., etc., etc.) clean enough to avoid the same?
The other question was on job differentiation: in households sufficiently large to have a food staff (to wit, at least two people involved in nothing but getting food to the table), when did the staff start separating into butchers, bakers, roasters, dessert-makers, brewers, butlers, scullery maids, children-who-turned-the-spits-with-haunches-of-meat, and all the 99 gazillion other jobs that involved taking raw things and turning them into edible and drinkable things? I pointed out that one possibly useful source on kitchen personnel might be in period account books; surely royalty, nobles, and the gentry would keep records on who got paid what, what kinds of foods were bought, what kitchen equipment needed repairs or replacements, whether or not an additional chamber to accommodate [bakers][brewers][vegetable-chopping] needed building, and so forth
Friday 1:30
Sponsor of the session: DISTAFF
"Viking Age Dress in Norway: Textiles, Quality, and Social Status", Ingvild Øye, Univ. i Bergen
"A Tale of Rags and Sheep: Dress Practices in Medieval Iceland, AD 1100-1500", Michèle Hayeur Smith, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown Univ.
“'Silk and Fine Cloth': Distribution and Consumption of Textiles in Late Medieval and Early Modern Denmark", Eva Trein Nielsen, Independent Scholar
"The Effects of Spindle Whorl Design on Wool Thread Production: A Practical Experiment Based on Examples from Eighth-Century Denmark", Karen Nicholson, Independent Scholar
A large percentage of women attendees...
Ms. Øye discussed textile production in Norway and associated finds in graves, as a method of ascertaining the status of the people in the graves.
Her sample was 126 graves with textile stuff (wool, spindle whorls, loom weights, fabric, etc). The fabric could be broadly divided into tabby, 2/2 twill, broken-diamond twill, and "other"; most of the finds she discussed were tabby and 2/2 twill, a smaller amount was BDT, and minor amounts of other. Of the textile tools, she discussed wool combs (and damn me but I wanted to ask what they were made of, but forgot to in the post-session Q&A), spindles (which averaged 22 grams), weights (of which there were 12 in her sample), beaters, and linen smoothers.
Some of the fabric samples came from bits torn off a dress by a brooch pin: one sample was bdt over twill over tabby.
I have a note that says "fabric type - half panama/samirun", but cannot remember why.
Her conclusion: textiles and tools left behind as grave goods could be used as symbols of status, as even upper-class women would do at least some weaving, sewing, or clothes-making
Ms. Smith's talk was cancelled because of non-appearance.
Ms. Trein-Nielson talked on silk and fine textiles in denmark, their distribution in Denmark, and where they might have come from (e.g., which countries sold silks to Denmark). I didn't take many notes, but did remember that good clothing indicate status, not only what the cloth was made of, but also how the person was dressed: if you were sloppy, or wore wrong clothing, or mismatched colors, you'd lose status. And that high-quality fabrics were re-used until they were, well, unusable: you have a good ell or two of fine silk, you'd use it in a good dress until the dress couldn't be worn, and then rip it apart and re-use the better remnants of the silk in the next dress. Fabric from England was heavily discouraged from importation; I believe the Danish royalty and trade guild much preferred local goods because local makers.
Ms. Nicholson's talk I found fascinating, since it wasn't theoretical. It was quite practical. She made or had made variou stypes of whorls (cones, bicones, and truncated bi-cone; also discs, bullets, barrels, cups, thimbles, stars...) out of clay using period exemplars, in various sizes and weights, attached them to spindles, and then tested them all to see what kind of threads each type and size of whorl could make, and which types/sizes were best (strongest, least fuzzy, whether embroidery or knitting or weaving...) The weight range ran from 14 to 38 grams, and I didn't catch the size variations - but this was more of a testing of the diameter of whorls than their thickness.
The primary measurement for the theads was "wraps per centimeter", aka "wpc"; thicker thread means fewer wpc's. The optimal thread produced by cones was 11 wpc; by bicones, 18 wpc. A broader (e.g., bigger diameter) meant the thread had less of a twist. Thick thread needed a heavier whorl, and conversely heavier whorls made for thicker threads. (Convenient, that.)
Somewhere in the 15 pounds of printed material I brought back from K'zoo may be a copy of the table she produced which lists the whorl shapes and sizes, and the wpc's for each whorl from minimum to maximum, and a range of optimal wpc's. ("A bicone whorl of 3.5 cm and 18 grams can produce wpc's from 8 to 19, with 12-15 being the best for embroidery....")
This isn't theory: she tested all the whorls herself, using fleece she had combed herself, to ensure consistency. This is the type of practical archaeology I like.
Friday. 3:30
"So You Found a Medieval Book or Fragment with Music: Now What? Helpful Hints for Non-specialists", John Haines, Univ. of Toronto
"The Abbey Museum Fragment: A New Source of Fifteenth-Century English Polyphony", Elizabeth Nyikos, Univ. of Oxford
"Newberry Library MS Case 2.5 and the Investiture Controversy", Justin Hastings, Loyola Univ. Chicago
"The Medieval Manuscripts of Edward L. Stone", B. Gregory Hays, Univ. of Virginia
Mr. Haines (of "King Alfred's Notebook", an LLC registered in South Carolina, about which I cannot find any other information), a self-described musicological liturgiologist, gave a quick and interesting overview on "you just bought this neat and nifty folio with what looks like funny-looking music." What is the music? Where is it from?
The capital letter is the start of a chant; red writing somewhere indicates a rubric (where we are in the liturgy), a single red letter indicates type of chant ("r" is a responsory). There are four typical books that would have music: the Office (antiphonaries and breviaries), and the Mass (graduals and masses). One can find where the musical phrase was used via the global chant database , and the Cantus website. He also recommended John Harper's book, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy (Oxford University Press, 1991, ISBN 978-0198162797).
He then ran through four typical pages, one each from an Antiphonary, missal, gradual, and breviary.
Of Ms. Nyikos' presentation, the only notes I can decipher refer to a useful web site: Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
Of Mr. Hastings' presentation, I have even fewer notes.
Mr. Hays discussed the life and collectiong of Virginian Edward L. Stone of Roanoke. He grew up poor, entered the printing business, became the printing shop's owner, expanded it into a regional power, realized that he wanted to learn more about the history of printing, and it was one small step from there to collecting manuscripts. Around 1925, started buying printed books of hours (one quote I can read from my notes: he was similar to "everyone's mad bibliophile, Sir Thomas Phillipps ").
Unfortunately, he never had a really large collection, as his print shop, while modestly successful, never produced a large profit, and 1929 also intervened. His total collection was roughly several hundred printed books and ten manuscripts.
Saturday, 10:00
"The Schoenberg Database and the Dark Secrets of the Book Trade: Uncovering the Sources of Manuscript Fragments", Scott Gwara, Univ. of South Carolina-Columbia
"Manuscripts Lost, Manuscripts Found: Using the Schoenberg Database to Track the Movement of Manuscripts in North America", Lisa Fagin Davis, Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and Melissa Conway, Univ. of California-Riverside
"Bibles for Sale: Thirteenth-Century Bibles and the Antiquarian Book Trade of the “Long” Eighteenth Century", Alexander Devine, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Nifty new word (at least new to me): biblioclasm - "Book burning (also biblioclasm or libricide) is the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material.
Mr. Gwara discussed the history and uses of the Schoenberg Database , which is a massive database of books and leaves, and their history after being produced - who owned them, where they were sold and bought, how they were broken up, where individual leaves may have come from. It was started by a collector named Lawrence Schoenberg, who, after retirement, needed something to do; he started entering all the purchase information of his books, and it just grew from there.
[And here I cannot find who the speaker was, damn it] was on Otto Ege, "Destroyer of Manuscripts". He was an individual with a modest income who realized how to earn extra money: he discovered that, while old books cost a pretty penny, individual pages cut from those books could be sold for a greater amount of money individually than they could as a book. Mr. Ege did have some ethics: he decided to cut pages only from incomplete or imperfect copies, "imperfect" copies being defined as any book with at least one wormhole, or an erasure, or a dog-eared page.... He preferred to sell folios or illuminations that were minimally imperfect, small, colorful, and clean, large scale
[Mystery Speaker] spent some time about the costs involved, both in how much Mr. Ege spent, and how much he sold pages for; sometimes the mark-up was on the order of 4,000 percent.
Ms. Conway and Ms Fagin-Davis talked about the creation of the Schoenberg Database and its use in tracking manuscripts in North America. The two women met a while ago, after discovering they had each come up with a similar idea for using computers in old-book bibliographies - where the books came from, who has owned them, etc., etc., etc.
Version 1.0 was a set of 3x5 cards. Version 2.0 was a Union Manuscript Computer Catalogue, which was (as was true in the 90's) quickly outdated every time it was printed out. Version 3.0 is now a PDF document PDF document (- the list of resources in the left-hand column; look for " DIRECTORY OF PRE-1600 MANUSCRIPTS.....")), eascy to update, easy to use.
Their attempts at tracking down collections, and getting accurate information about those collections, were interesting, and they spent a few minutes in talking about this. Their primary conclusion was "long surveys are useless"; they realized that all they really needed to do was just ask if they have old books, and how are they catalogued?" 10 pages cut down to two questions....
Their not-necessarily-current statistics are20000 codices and 25000 leaves in american public collections, and 319 private collections in census of which "many have been dispersed". Collectors are notorious for their privacy, which is why there are so few listed.
The Schoenberg Database lists sales, not descriptions of the objects sold, and only codices, not fragments
Mr. Devine talked on his PhD dissertation research, the cataloguing and collecting of 13th century bibles and the bookselling trade, 13th-Century pocket bibles (aka pandect bibles - "1. pandects, a complete body or code of laws: the Pandects of Justinian. 2. any complete and comprehensive digest.") in particular, the second most popular, after Books of Hours.
The names of the Bibles under which they are currently catalogued are many, varied, and confusing: bible, biblia sacra, biblia sacra latina, biblia vulgata, testament vetus et novum latinum.... And once you decide upon the name, you still have to worry about bibles plus stuff: bibles with glosses, illuminated bibles, bibles with or without psalms, the languages used. There are also the usual mistakes in catalogue entries; the title(s) may be changed between owners, and/or rebound into separate volumes and then re-rebound back into one with a different name. It's a mess.
...and now that I've had a rest, I am reminded of several sessions at the Medieval Congress from two years ago (2011, that would be), on precisely this problem. My commentary is at http://potboilerpress.com/blog/2011/05/46th-medieval-history-congress-western-michigan-university-2011/
Saturday, 3:30 PM
Sponsor: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art
Organizer: Steven A. Walton, Michigan Technological Univ.
Medieval Iron Smelting Demonstration
Darrell Markewitz, Wareham Forge
The building of the Viking-style smelter (liberally based on evidence from, if I remember correctly, the one at L'Anse aux Meadows) took place through most of Friday. I do not know when they actually started the Smelt Proper, but they were planning on breaking down the smelter (a conglomeration of clay and stuff) to get at whatever iron bloom they'd produced, at or soon after 3:30 PM. I showed up around 1:30ish, to look and to ask questions, and to see how different this one was from the ones I had leant my farm to, oh, 10 years ago or so. Minor technical differences (we used magnetite as the iron ore; they used "potters's red oxide with a bit of wheat flour mixed with water"), but, yeah, I recognized what was going on. There was some talk of ceramics (clay is used for the, ummm, stack, I guess you'd call it, so of _course_ that plus heat equals ceramics), and "smelter's glass" and glass beads (the clay is high in silicates, so in incomplete combustion some of it will turn into glass), and the usual chunks of useless stuff. They showed us a 5-pound chunk they'd just taken out of this particular stack during one of the "let's see what's going on inside right now" check-ups - it was a weird mixture of unburned charcoal in amidst bits of black glass in amidst what I must assume was bits of slag and unusable iron.
Then it started to rain, and gust, and the temperature dropped 15 fahrenheit degrees, and the shade fly dumped a half-gallon of water onto my right sleeve, and as I'd forgotten to bring a coat with me, well, I left early, and didn't see the breaking-down of the stack.
There is an experimental archaeology association , if anyone's interested.
"The Illuminator of Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose (Glasgow University, Hunter Manuscript 409) and the Context of Its Production", Holly James-Maddocks, Univ. of York
"Antiphony, Strategy, Whim, and Nodding in the Yale Manuscript 229 Workshop", Elizabeth Willingham, Baylor Univ.
"Scribes and Artists Collaborating on Wycliffite Bibles", Kathleen E. Kennedy, Pennsylvania State Univ.-Brandywine
A sort-of typology of the illustrations in the manuscript: which illuminators (or, rather, which style of illuminators, since the individuals who did the illuminations are not known) did which illuminations of which copies of the Romaunt of the Rose. Ms. James-Maddocks believes that two groups (the Oxford Group and the the Owl-Illuminating group) were responsible for a particular set from three manuscripts, according to various signs and symbols - gold-colored balls, vines of a certain length and branching of leaves, and so forth. She brought up the fact that there were only three examples of scribes signing their works in 14-15th century england. And she mentioned that there is some evidence for London artisans moving to Oxford, rather than the more usual Oxford-London movement. London was The Center of Book Arts. but apparently there were enough paying customers who preferred smaller, less crowded cities.
Ms. Willingham discussed a Launcelot manuscript; I kept relatively few notes that are worth transcribing. She mentioned a couple of things that she found unusual - several pages that were mostly unfilled (four or five lines at the top, and the rest of the page was blank), of which some were lined but otherwise unused. Vellum wasn't cheap: why didn't they start a new chapter, rather than leave so much blank space? And why did some of the pages have small but repaired rips or holes, but were nevertheless used? Answer: a "workshop economy" as excuse for using hole-y or ripped vellum - vellum was expensive, so if the holes were small enough, why not use it?
I find that argument confusing: on the one hand they had pages that went blank, but on the other hand they used hole-filled vellum because it was expensive?
Ms. Kennedy discussed "Wycliffite" Bibles, of which there are 250 complete and partial copies still existing; some have multiple scribes and/or illiminators. There are similarities of illuminations between various copies, some similarities of which are in the usage of catchwords (not all Bibles had catchwords, but many of those that did seem to come from a small number of illuminators). And many of the catchwords were within ribbons ascribable to particular scribes - "catchword knots", in other words. These usually appeared in Bibles with fewer illuminations, which she believes may be because of sponsors with limited funds, as fewer illuminations usually meant more catchword knots.
She mentioned a group, the "followers of the corpus master, 1430's - 1450", and the "twisted ribbon scribe", and, in passing, the importance of teams of artists for one or a small collection of codices.
One lovely term from this session: "medieval hackers".
Stray question from the floor: considering the danger of Wycliffite bibles, were the artisans Lollards (Lollards, from an orthodox Catholic perspective), or in danger of harm from working on the bibles?
Thursday 1:30 pm
"The Unexamined Miracle: Manuscripts, Their Makers, and Lay Piety in Fourteenth-Century Book Culture", Karen Casebier, Univ. of Maryland
"Huntington Library MS HM 140 and the Search for Thematic Coherence", Cathy Hume, Northwestern Univ.
“'To Bynde Them Al Together': Art of Governance and Thomas Berthelet’s Sammelbände of Husbandry", Satoko Tokunaga, Keio Univ.
I have no notes for Ms. Casebier's or Ms. Hume's presentations.
Ms. Tokunaga talked about why certain books were bound together, using as an example a production of (if I read my note correctly) Wynkyn de Word's Boke of Kervying, and another work that was something of a sammelband (a collection of books on closely associated subjects): a book of husbandry, a book on the care and maintenance of horses, a book of surveying, and xenophon's treatise of household - all of which were of some use to a head of a medieval household.
Thursday 3:30 pm
I had intended to go to a session on Metals in Architecture, but wound up having a lively conversation at a table near the coffee and tea service, with Eric Johnson, OSU's curator of early books and manuscripts, and Mildred Budny of the ( Research Group on Manuscript Evidence ). It was quite an accidental conversation: none of us knew who the others were or of our mutual interests until five minutes into talking. Dr. Johnson was much of the school of thought that believes in showing students actual artifacts (in his case, books and individual artifacts) rather than showing them photographs or reproductions; he said they respond so much better, so much more lively, when they can actually hold a 400-year-old hand-illuminated hand-scribed *real* *honest-to-God* page, rather than see a slide and listen to a discussion. This is (as most of you know) a school of thought to which I very firmly belong. Which is why this conversation lasted for well over an hour.
Friday 10:00
"Remodeling Chivalry through Food Play", Jodi Growitz Shearn, West Chester Univ.
"The Crusaders’ World: Foodways Experiences", Samantha A. Meigs, Univ. of Indianapolis
A demonstration with Ingeborg Slegers, Univ. of Indianapolis, and Linda Nicley, Univ. of Indianapolis.
This was nothing like what I expected from the description - no talks, almost pure demonstrations of recipes (most of which were quite tasty). The concept behind the session was to demonstrate how one example of "experiential learning" ("how to teach the concept of the Crusades to students through food, new foods, new methods of cooking, and general gastronomy in Them Thar Furrin Countries", basically) might work as a replacement for a lecture - food as exemplar of heaven, philosophy, humors; food as heaven on earth e.g. grains or paradise. What we got at the session were various foods, and almost no talking about crusades, or the crusaders, or pretty much anything else....but, then, the audience here was rather more familiar with the period than your typical high school class.
It did, however, fit in very neatly with the conversation I had with Dr. Johnson and Ms. Budny in the previous afternoon.
Two questions came up in the end-of-session Q&A: medieval cooks did not know, obviously, about bacteria and food-born diseases, but yet they managed to not make anyone terribly sick (or, rather, not make too many people sick), which led someone to ask: what methods did they use, if any, to keep the food fresh enough to avoid poisoning people, and what did they do to keep the cooking utensils (pots, pans, knives, cutting surfaces, etc., etc., etc.) clean enough to avoid the same?
The other question was on job differentiation: in households sufficiently large to have a food staff (to wit, at least two people involved in nothing but getting food to the table), when did the staff start separating into butchers, bakers, roasters, dessert-makers, brewers, butlers, scullery maids, children-who-turned-the-spits-with-haunches-of-meat, and all the 99 gazillion other jobs that involved taking raw things and turning them into edible and drinkable things? I pointed out that one possibly useful source on kitchen personnel might be in period account books; surely royalty, nobles, and the gentry would keep records on who got paid what, what kinds of foods were bought, what kitchen equipment needed repairs or replacements, whether or not an additional chamber to accommodate [bakers][brewers][vegetable-chopping] needed building, and so forth
Friday 1:30
Sponsor of the session: DISTAFF
"Viking Age Dress in Norway: Textiles, Quality, and Social Status", Ingvild Øye, Univ. i Bergen
"A Tale of Rags and Sheep: Dress Practices in Medieval Iceland, AD 1100-1500", Michèle Hayeur Smith, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown Univ.
“'Silk and Fine Cloth': Distribution and Consumption of Textiles in Late Medieval and Early Modern Denmark", Eva Trein Nielsen, Independent Scholar
"The Effects of Spindle Whorl Design on Wool Thread Production: A Practical Experiment Based on Examples from Eighth-Century Denmark", Karen Nicholson, Independent Scholar
A large percentage of women attendees...
Ms. Øye discussed textile production in Norway and associated finds in graves, as a method of ascertaining the status of the people in the graves.
Her sample was 126 graves with textile stuff (wool, spindle whorls, loom weights, fabric, etc). The fabric could be broadly divided into tabby, 2/2 twill, broken-diamond twill, and "other"; most of the finds she discussed were tabby and 2/2 twill, a smaller amount was BDT, and minor amounts of other. Of the textile tools, she discussed wool combs (and damn me but I wanted to ask what they were made of, but forgot to in the post-session Q&A), spindles (which averaged 22 grams), weights (of which there were 12 in her sample), beaters, and linen smoothers.
Some of the fabric samples came from bits torn off a dress by a brooch pin: one sample was bdt over twill over tabby.
I have a note that says "fabric type - half panama/samirun", but cannot remember why.
Her conclusion: textiles and tools left behind as grave goods could be used as symbols of status, as even upper-class women would do at least some weaving, sewing, or clothes-making
Ms. Smith's talk was cancelled because of non-appearance.
Ms. Trein-Nielson talked on silk and fine textiles in denmark, their distribution in Denmark, and where they might have come from (e.g., which countries sold silks to Denmark). I didn't take many notes, but did remember that good clothing indicate status, not only what the cloth was made of, but also how the person was dressed: if you were sloppy, or wore wrong clothing, or mismatched colors, you'd lose status. And that high-quality fabrics were re-used until they were, well, unusable: you have a good ell or two of fine silk, you'd use it in a good dress until the dress couldn't be worn, and then rip it apart and re-use the better remnants of the silk in the next dress. Fabric from England was heavily discouraged from importation; I believe the Danish royalty and trade guild much preferred local goods because local makers.
Ms. Nicholson's talk I found fascinating, since it wasn't theoretical. It was quite practical. She made or had made variou stypes of whorls (cones, bicones, and truncated bi-cone; also discs, bullets, barrels, cups, thimbles, stars...) out of clay using period exemplars, in various sizes and weights, attached them to spindles, and then tested them all to see what kind of threads each type and size of whorl could make, and which types/sizes were best (strongest, least fuzzy, whether embroidery or knitting or weaving...) The weight range ran from 14 to 38 grams, and I didn't catch the size variations - but this was more of a testing of the diameter of whorls than their thickness.
The primary measurement for the theads was "wraps per centimeter", aka "wpc"; thicker thread means fewer wpc's. The optimal thread produced by cones was 11 wpc; by bicones, 18 wpc. A broader (e.g., bigger diameter) meant the thread had less of a twist. Thick thread needed a heavier whorl, and conversely heavier whorls made for thicker threads. (Convenient, that.)
Somewhere in the 15 pounds of printed material I brought back from K'zoo may be a copy of the table she produced which lists the whorl shapes and sizes, and the wpc's for each whorl from minimum to maximum, and a range of optimal wpc's. ("A bicone whorl of 3.5 cm and 18 grams can produce wpc's from 8 to 19, with 12-15 being the best for embroidery....")
This isn't theory: she tested all the whorls herself, using fleece she had combed herself, to ensure consistency. This is the type of practical archaeology I like.
Friday. 3:30
"So You Found a Medieval Book or Fragment with Music: Now What? Helpful Hints for Non-specialists", John Haines, Univ. of Toronto
"The Abbey Museum Fragment: A New Source of Fifteenth-Century English Polyphony", Elizabeth Nyikos, Univ. of Oxford
"Newberry Library MS Case 2.5 and the Investiture Controversy", Justin Hastings, Loyola Univ. Chicago
"The Medieval Manuscripts of Edward L. Stone", B. Gregory Hays, Univ. of Virginia
Mr. Haines (of "King Alfred's Notebook", an LLC registered in South Carolina, about which I cannot find any other information), a self-described musicological liturgiologist, gave a quick and interesting overview on "you just bought this neat and nifty folio with what looks like funny-looking music." What is the music? Where is it from?
The capital letter is the start of a chant; red writing somewhere indicates a rubric (where we are in the liturgy), a single red letter indicates type of chant ("r" is a responsory). There are four typical books that would have music: the Office (antiphonaries and breviaries), and the Mass (graduals and masses). One can find where the musical phrase was used via the global chant database , and the Cantus website. He also recommended John Harper's book, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy (Oxford University Press, 1991, ISBN 978-0198162797).
He then ran through four typical pages, one each from an Antiphonary, missal, gradual, and breviary.
Of Ms. Nyikos' presentation, the only notes I can decipher refer to a useful web site: Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
Of Mr. Hastings' presentation, I have even fewer notes.
Mr. Hays discussed the life and collectiong of Virginian Edward L. Stone of Roanoke. He grew up poor, entered the printing business, became the printing shop's owner, expanded it into a regional power, realized that he wanted to learn more about the history of printing, and it was one small step from there to collecting manuscripts. Around 1925, started buying printed books of hours (one quote I can read from my notes: he was similar to "everyone's mad bibliophile, Sir Thomas Phillipps ").
Unfortunately, he never had a really large collection, as his print shop, while modestly successful, never produced a large profit, and 1929 also intervened. His total collection was roughly several hundred printed books and ten manuscripts.
Saturday, 10:00
"The Schoenberg Database and the Dark Secrets of the Book Trade: Uncovering the Sources of Manuscript Fragments", Scott Gwara, Univ. of South Carolina-Columbia
"Manuscripts Lost, Manuscripts Found: Using the Schoenberg Database to Track the Movement of Manuscripts in North America", Lisa Fagin Davis, Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and Melissa Conway, Univ. of California-Riverside
"Bibles for Sale: Thirteenth-Century Bibles and the Antiquarian Book Trade of the “Long” Eighteenth Century", Alexander Devine, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Nifty new word (at least new to me): biblioclasm - "Book burning (also biblioclasm or libricide) is the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material.
Mr. Gwara discussed the history and uses of the Schoenberg Database , which is a massive database of books and leaves, and their history after being produced - who owned them, where they were sold and bought, how they were broken up, where individual leaves may have come from. It was started by a collector named Lawrence Schoenberg, who, after retirement, needed something to do; he started entering all the purchase information of his books, and it just grew from there.
[And here I cannot find who the speaker was, damn it] was on Otto Ege, "Destroyer of Manuscripts". He was an individual with a modest income who realized how to earn extra money: he discovered that, while old books cost a pretty penny, individual pages cut from those books could be sold for a greater amount of money individually than they could as a book. Mr. Ege did have some ethics: he decided to cut pages only from incomplete or imperfect copies, "imperfect" copies being defined as any book with at least one wormhole, or an erasure, or a dog-eared page.... He preferred to sell folios or illuminations that were minimally imperfect, small, colorful, and clean, large scale
[Mystery Speaker] spent some time about the costs involved, both in how much Mr. Ege spent, and how much he sold pages for; sometimes the mark-up was on the order of 4,000 percent.
Ms. Conway and Ms Fagin-Davis talked about the creation of the Schoenberg Database and its use in tracking manuscripts in North America. The two women met a while ago, after discovering they had each come up with a similar idea for using computers in old-book bibliographies - where the books came from, who has owned them, etc., etc., etc.
Version 1.0 was a set of 3x5 cards. Version 2.0 was a Union Manuscript Computer Catalogue, which was (as was true in the 90's) quickly outdated every time it was printed out. Version 3.0 is now a PDF document PDF document (- the list of resources in the left-hand column; look for " DIRECTORY OF PRE-1600 MANUSCRIPTS.....")), eascy to update, easy to use.
Their attempts at tracking down collections, and getting accurate information about those collections, were interesting, and they spent a few minutes in talking about this. Their primary conclusion was "long surveys are useless"; they realized that all they really needed to do was just ask if they have old books, and how are they catalogued?" 10 pages cut down to two questions....
Their not-necessarily-current statistics are20000 codices and 25000 leaves in american public collections, and 319 private collections in census of which "many have been dispersed". Collectors are notorious for their privacy, which is why there are so few listed.
The Schoenberg Database lists sales, not descriptions of the objects sold, and only codices, not fragments
Mr. Devine talked on his PhD dissertation research, the cataloguing and collecting of 13th century bibles and the bookselling trade, 13th-Century pocket bibles (aka pandect bibles - "1. pandects, a complete body or code of laws: the Pandects of Justinian. 2. any complete and comprehensive digest.") in particular, the second most popular, after Books of Hours.
The names of the Bibles under which they are currently catalogued are many, varied, and confusing: bible, biblia sacra, biblia sacra latina, biblia vulgata, testament vetus et novum latinum.... And once you decide upon the name, you still have to worry about bibles plus stuff: bibles with glosses, illuminated bibles, bibles with or without psalms, the languages used. There are also the usual mistakes in catalogue entries; the title(s) may be changed between owners, and/or rebound into separate volumes and then re-rebound back into one with a different name. It's a mess.
...and now that I've had a rest, I am reminded of several sessions at the Medieval Congress from two years ago (2011, that would be), on precisely this problem. My commentary is at http://potboilerpress.com/blog/2011/05/46th-medieval-history-congress-western-michigan-university-2011/
Saturday, 3:30 PM
Sponsor: AVISTA: The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art
Organizer: Steven A. Walton, Michigan Technological Univ.
Medieval Iron Smelting Demonstration
Darrell Markewitz, Wareham Forge
The building of the Viking-style smelter (liberally based on evidence from, if I remember correctly, the one at L'Anse aux Meadows) took place through most of Friday. I do not know when they actually started the Smelt Proper, but they were planning on breaking down the smelter (a conglomeration of clay and stuff) to get at whatever iron bloom they'd produced, at or soon after 3:30 PM. I showed up around 1:30ish, to look and to ask questions, and to see how different this one was from the ones I had leant my farm to, oh, 10 years ago or so. Minor technical differences (we used magnetite as the iron ore; they used "potters's red oxide with a bit of wheat flour mixed with water"), but, yeah, I recognized what was going on. There was some talk of ceramics (clay is used for the, ummm, stack, I guess you'd call it, so of _course_ that plus heat equals ceramics), and "smelter's glass" and glass beads (the clay is high in silicates, so in incomplete combustion some of it will turn into glass), and the usual chunks of useless stuff. They showed us a 5-pound chunk they'd just taken out of this particular stack during one of the "let's see what's going on inside right now" check-ups - it was a weird mixture of unburned charcoal in amidst bits of black glass in amidst what I must assume was bits of slag and unusable iron.
Then it started to rain, and gust, and the temperature dropped 15 fahrenheit degrees, and the shade fly dumped a half-gallon of water onto my right sleeve, and as I'd forgotten to bring a coat with me, well, I left early, and didn't see the breaking-down of the stack.
There is an experimental archaeology association , if anyone's interested.