This seems to be the week of happy discoveries: The Bryggen Papers are available for free, online, as pdf files. These volumes include (you may have guessed that from my enthusiasm) the one about textile equipment and its working environment!

There's a bunch of other interesting topics as well, such as children's games, fishing tackle, ropes and cordage, and locks and keys. Go have a look at the Bryggen Papers Archives!

If you're reading Middle High German texts, there's occasionally the mention of peacock feathers in clothing - quite often it's a "peacock hat", but sometimes there's also a reference to other garments in a kind of peacock-y style.

Nobody really knows what this kind of fabric was (or if there's several variations)... but I have now actually stumbled across a real piece of extant fabric that includes peacock feathers!

It was found in a relic case in St. Rumbold Cathedral, Mechelen, Belgium. The fabric has been radiocarbon dated to the 13th century, and it is a red cut velvet (silk pile on linen ground weave); applied across it, in a kind of cross-hatch pattern, are peacock feathers and gold threads (gilt silver around a silk core). Unfortunately the text doesn't say how exactly they were attached - but I'm utterly thrilled anyways.

It has been published in an article aptly named "A Box Full of Surprises" (available on academia.edu).

This is... way cool!

If you're looking for something to look forward to this Friday, I might have a helpful hint for you:

Alexandra Makin (who does the Cuthbert Embroidery project, in which me and Margit have been involved regarding the embroidery threads) and Ronja Lau (who is working about band-woven finds, and who I've had the chance of meeting during a Forum) will be the guests on EXARC's Finally Friday this week.

The title of their discussion is "Sew much to do, sew little time", and I'm sure it will be a very interesting one! If you'd like to tune in, check out the EXARC link. The event starts on August 7, at 17:00 Amsterdam time; it will be streamed via Discord, so you will need to have a discord login (free) and register yourself on the EXARC server; the link is on their Finally Friday page.

In the meantime, you can check out Alex' website to read a bit about Ronja's research (who has recently been interviewed there) and the Cuthbert Maniple project. I hope you have fun!

Too many tabs open in my browser - you know what that means: Link Post!

I don't know if you know about the more-or-less satirical party "Die Partei" in Germany, but they actually have two people in the EU parliament. Both of them are sort of doing the job of a medieval fool, trying to point out the absurdities and stupidities that nobody else mentions or dares to mention. With varying effect - but who knows, maybe it will change something over time. At least it's a way of keeping updated on things that are happening in the parliament, and on getting a few insights of how stuff works there (or doesn't work).

One of them, Nico Semsrott, now has started a youtube series he calls the "Nico Semsrott Show", explaining stuff. Here's the first episode, in English (to reach more people) with German captions available:


This article about a special blue dye is already a bit older itself, but I found it still interesting - it was used to dye the tassels on prayer shawls, and provided by a species of Murex molluscs.

The melting glaciers in Norway reveal archaeological finds - which is a wonderful source for archaeology, but still feels like a bad thing overall to me. Climate change will kick us all in the ass before long.

Finally, here's a concert titled "The Wool Merchant and The Harp" in the Leeds programme, featuring Leah Stuttard playing the harp.

 

There's this thing about superheroes: They have superpowers. Each, usually, their own, and they range from superstrength (Hulk smash! Superman! And don't forget Pippi Longstocking) to mind-reading to throwing fireballs to flying to freezing things and whatnot else.

Well. Flying and smashing and being superstrong might all be cool... but if I'd get to choose a superpower, it would be Universal Incredible Language Skills - as in speak, read, and understand any language like a talented native speaker. toBecause that would make things so much easier. Archaeologists still publish their research in their home language, usually, so if you are looking for things outside your own country or language area, you need to at least know about some basic terms in your goal language to have a chance of finding stuff.

On a side note - there's pros and cons for publishing in your home language as well, of course. If you publish in English, you might have colleagues in your own area who don't find the research; if you publish in your language, it won't be as visible from outside your language area. Unless, of course, your home language is English. Then you're lucky - though you might then be one of the people who, when young, never got far with learning a foreign language because you could always get by with your own...)

Anyways, I was able to find a lot of non-German and non-English articles and books and publications when I was working on my thesis, and had to brush up my language reading skills considerably to be able to handle them. For some of the very exotic things, I had help from friends and family (my Dad was able to help with the Czech articles, and I had friends and fellow students help with Polish, and Icelandic; plus people to ask about the finer points of Middle High German. I also had some help for the not-so-exotic-but-still-hard-for-me Italian.

I was a lucky lady to find all that help. It didn't hurt either that I quite like languages, and that I had lessons in English, French, and Latin in school (though I was so bad at Latin that it doesn't really count), and learned a bit of Dutch, Spanish, and Swedish while at Uni. In most of the languages I can read, my passive understanding skills are way, way, WAY better than my active skills - which is to say I can read simple everyday things in newspapers and more or less understand the gist of them; I can read archaelogical papers and understand them (better than the news in most cases, funnily); but I will have a hard time understanding spoken language and will probably not be able to speak beyond very limited, very simple short sentences. I also have a sort of mashed-up language slurry in my brain for some groups; for instance, I read "Generic Scandinavian" and it will take me a while and some thinking to be able to tell Danish or Norwegian apart. Telling those apart from Swedish is easier, but I will still have to take a second look. My Spanish is so bad that it once took an Italian guy about 15 minutes of me talking at him to realise it was Spanish, not Italian. (It was a fun conversation nevertheless.)

So. Superpower of choice - Universal Language Skills.

In case you should happen to have them, or in case you happen to read Finnish, you can find the original documentation of excavations, plus a lot of other resources, at Kulttuuriympäristön Palveluikkuna. Have fun!

Pantone decides on a "Colour of the Year" each year, and for 2020, their choice is "classic blue". As a blue-loving person, I do approve... though I like all kinds of blue, not only classic.

Science has a little news article about what our modern civilisation will leave behind for future archaeologists. (Or alien xeno-archaeologists, if humans go extinct.)

This link will bring you to an image of a tablet-weaving frame in a medieval manuscript. Just because.

The Museum of London has a post about pointed shoes (and sodomy!).

I've recently looked into medieval mittens for a bit, and one rather nice one can be found in the Museum of London, on permanent display in the exhibition. It's interpreted to be a work glove and dated to the 15th century.

If you're very fond of this thing, you could actually buy a print of it from the MoL (or buy a print of a number of other find pictures).

There's more photos online, taken privately and stashed in a forum archive - you can find the photo list with full-size images via this link. Images 184-195 show the leather mitten. (I found some of the images via larsdatter.com. I then found the list thanks to knowledge from days long gone past, when I wrote html in a text editor and learned about the structure of web addresses... shows again that you never know when some weird knowledge may come in handy.)