There's a picture in my personal image database that has irked me for ages now. It's from a popular science book about the Middle Ages:

Hägermann, Dieter: Das Mittelalter. Die Welt der Bauern, Bürger, Ritter und Mönche. RM Buch und Medien, 2001.

There are plenty of illustrations in that book, and some of them state where they are from (or at least roughly), some of them don't. Of course, I'm talking here about one from the latter category. I've been looking for that image ever since I've seen it in the book, but to no avail - but maybe someone of you has?

Here it is:

[caption id="attachment_6015" align="alignnone" width="412"] From Hägermann, Dieter, p. 154. The description says "Travelling merchants with pack animals. They exchange information. French book illustration, 1448."


This might have been a marginal illustration somewhere, as it has been cut out from the background; some of the marginal images from the Luttrell Psalter have been treated similarly for the book. It might be a cut-out part from a "proper" image, too, though - the style somehow looks not so marginal to me. But then, I'm no expert on illuminations. I'd just really, really like to know where this comes from, so I can cite it properly and learn about the context and maybe see if there's more like it in the same manuscript - because it's one of the rare images where you have a woman merchant/traveller among the group, and I find that wonderful and fascinating.

So. Have you seen these merchants, by chance? Or do you know any similar pictures of travelling merchants that include women? Please let me know!

Update: They have been found. You can read about who did it, and where they are from, here.

I always find it utterly fascinating how much variation there is between different kinds of wool. On the photo you can see three balls of top, each weighing 200g. They are obviously very different fibres!



The Manx wool in light brown is the most voluminous, the grey Gotland fibre is smooth and straight and thus rolls up quite tightly, and in between the trusty brown Eider wool - which comes out a bit darker on this picture than it actually is.

Just like they are different in density when rolled up into a ball, they also feel very different. And I'm always stunned by the readiness of the Gotland wool to felt even though it feels so smooth and slippery. I think it's the felt-happiest wool that I have ever seen...

So... there's some site maintenance coming up. Fortunately, it seems like I've fretted way more about how difficult that might be than it was worth. Fingers crossed it will run smoothly, when I run it one of the next few days. Just in case this interests you, here's the background:

This website runs on Joomla!, which is a free and open-source CMS (or content management system). Basically, this means something you install to give you a basic structure, and a lot of templates that you can use to get a certain look. It's a good bit easier and quicker to handle than writing html from scratch, and uses the new-fangled things like css and javascript and shenanigans like that. It also keeps you updated on any new developments coming in, as there's a bunch of people working on the system, keeping it up-to-date regarding security, database versions, and whatnot.

There's several CMS to choose from, if you are setting out. I decided to go for Joomla! (yes, with an exclamation mark, even though that makes for awkward typing) because when I was first looking into making an online shop, I found a shop software that looked sensible and useful to me, and that was based on Joomla!. So when I set up the current site, pulling everything together into the same base made sense.

The blog, however, was running on blogspot back then. I wanted to migrate the whole thing, and found that J! doesn't have a good blog setup suitable to get the thing over. That may have changed by now, but back then I found there was a plugin that could be bought, integrating  Wordpress (which is primarily a blogging system, unlike J!, which is more a general-content-in-articles system) for blogging into a J! site. Ah, the things that are possible these days.

That's why my blog is running on Wordpress inside a J! installation.  From time to time, there's updates for some extra functions coming in, such as the spam protection used in this blog. The most recent one then made said anti-spam break because it doesn't support the current WP version that I have... since the special circumstances mean I don't get the regular updates for Wordpress, and those for the inside-J!-version usually came quite a bit after the regular ones. (If you caught a glimpse of spammy comments, these happened during the c 24 hours that I needed to find a replacement for the plugin.)

So... I went to check for an update for the plugin I have, and found out that there is sort of one. The company who made Wordpress4Joomla is not offering it anymore as a subscription service - the files are now available on GitHub, for free. Even better, and slightly unexpected: an update was included in this list just 2 months ago, to the almost-newest version of Wordpress, 5.6. Which is very, very nice, basically - but since there's just the files in the repository, and no support or explanation, it means some figuring out had to be done on what to do. Hence the fretting. Accompanied by some looking into options in case I don't manage to update the thing, and/or updates stop completely and I need to change to some other blog plugin.

In the end, after looking at previous installation packages and the files in there, I started up the (already rather old) copy of my site running locally on my computer, and tried to just copy the new files with changes in them over the old ones, bringing my WP first from 5.1 to 5.2, and then from 5.2 to 5.6. And lo and behold! it did work, as far as I can tell from this test.

Which means that I can go and try to do it on the actual live and running thing, here. As soon as I have a bit of time and the necessary inner calm to do so, because it's always a little nerve-wracking to do things like that... even if there's backups to roll back to the previous version in case things go pear-shaped.

I'm really happy, though, that I was an adventurous student with enough free time on my hands back when the Internet started to become what it is. My first site, done just for fun, was written by hand in html in a plain text editor. That gave me a good, solid basic understanding of things internetty - and over the years, by having to keep at least partly up to date with how things developed, I gained enough understanding of the scripts and things that came into being to not be completely daunted. I can more or less understand some things happening when I read scripts - not well enough to do my own programming, but it suffices for a lot of small tweaks that are necessary in some cases. And that, when it works, is also deeply satisfying!

Resources! Stuff to read and watch!

I always enjoy stumbling across repositories or book lists where you can download fresh, juicy research. (Admittedly, I do download more than I actually read. I'm trying to get everything sorted into my library database, at least, though I'm eternally not caught up with that. The reason? See above - stumbling across repositories... resulting in a little search-and-download splurge.)

My newest discovery is the DiVA portal. That's short for Digital Vetenskapliga Arkivet, a Scandinavian site where you can search for theses and papers from 49 university and research institutions. It looks like it's very well tagged in English, too - searching for "textiles" and either "history" or "medieval" yields a number of results, some of them in English, most in Swedish. Also nice: you can limit the search results to things with full-text available.

Many of these are student papers, so it's research that you don't get to so easily otherwise - delightful to have the possibility to see these via the portal. And if you don't read Swedish (or Norwegian), most should have an abstract in English. Plus you can look at images in any language.

Definitely in English is the upcoming series of the British Library in their Food Season, where there's a number of online events about different aspects of modern and historical food and food culture. If you're a foodie, it's definitely worth checking out.

There's not only new spindle whorls in the shop, there's also new wool - from a rare sheep breed.

The Manx Loaghan sheep is a small, hardy breed that can be found on the Isle of Man. The sheep are a four-horned breed; some of them even have six horns. You can read a bit more about it on the Wikipedia page, with links there for more.

It's mostly kept for its meat, but the wool is also really beautiful: a warm, brown colour that reminds me of honeydew or chestnut honey.



The wool arrived just in time to make it into the shop in time for the March newsletter... which will go out tomorrow in the English version, and has been sent already in the German version. Hooray!

 

I spent part of the day today standing in the wonderfully sun-warmed wintergarden, sorting these wonderful new arrivals:



Fresh wheel-thrown spindle whorls, with a new colour - there are some grey ones among the mix now, too! I'm all delighted with them.

They were lined up in neat rows according to their weight range:



Now they are in my shelf, sorted away, waiting to be sent to new homes... and, of course, waiting to be properly photographed so they can be listed in the shop! That will happen tomorrow, though, when the light is nice and bright but not too bright yet.

I've done a little research work these past days, and I've stumbled across, the title might be a hint, free books!

The University Publisher of Kassel University offers books (dissertations, but other types as well) both as printed volumes and as pdf downloads, the latter being entirely free. You can see the whole programme of the publisher here.

Two books that I came across that may be interesting for you, too, are Presche, Christian: Kassel im Mittelalter and Wolkewitz, Ursula: Die gravierten Messinggrabplatten des 13. und 14.Jahrhunderts im Bereich der norddeutschen Hanse - ihre Herkunft und ihre Bedeutung.

There might be more, but unfortunately there is no good search function for the catalogue, and I have not had the time (nor the inclination or patience) to click my way through the long list. In case you find something interesting, too, please let the rest of us know in the comments!