You might or might not be familiar with St Oswald, also King of Northumbria - I am currently definitely getting to know him a little better.

I have the pleasure to work on a 3D reconstruction of Oswald as he's portrayed in a Garden of Paradise dating to the early 15th century, and like these projects often are, there's a lot to discover and at least as many questions.

The digitised version of the painting can be found at the Städel Museum website, and the guy in question is the one to the right, hugging the tree. There's quite a lot of things going on in the image, but if I only sort of concentrate on Oswald, the primary problems are: What kind of fabrics were used? Especially the red-gold hood is rather unusual; this time saw quite a fancy for hoods with a long, dagged liripipe, and there's a number of illustrations where the liripipe is drawn through a sleeve, but Oswald... has two. That's a new one to me, definitely. (Should you have seen anything like it, please do let me know!)

The cloak could be silk or wool, but I'd lean towards some nice, fulled wool as a practical coat. Then the hose, which I would assume to be joined already, have some gold decor at the shins; the fabric could be either silk or wool. Gold ornaments re more something that makes me think silk, however, wool would be the easier and more budget-friendly choice. In addition, modern silks tend to be quite different from medieval silk fabrics, so I am not sure where I'd be closer to the mark regarding the fabric. (Modern wool is also different from historical wool fabrics. We're basically going for the looks here, trying to get as closely as possible without going for a full fabric reconstruction, as that would not be in the budget in any way, so it's compromises in each case.)

For the whatever he's wearing on his upper body, I'm planning to use some relatively heavy modern silk. Unfortunately, there's not much visible apart from the right sleeve, which looks rather baggy. As there's a teeny tiny bit of mail armour visible on the top of his leg, it can also be supposed that the garment was rather short.

So here we are. Timeframe is in the 1410-20s, so the dagged hood is definitely very nicely fashionable. There's no surviving man's garment from that time exactly, though we have two complete (with a little damage) from mid-14th century (Charles de Blois and Chartres); there's also the garment of the Black Prince, so at least there's some basis to put conjectures on. 

Still, this leaves quite a bit of guesswork, or of interpretative decisions. Which, by the way, is something that is going on so much and all the time with these reconstruction projects. (One of them is also what to start with - the upper garment? The hose? The hood? Hmm...)

I mentioned the hose rabbit-warren, right? What I did not mention is that I am also trying to tag, sort, and order all the images that have not been tagged, sorted, and ordered yet (and no, you do not want to know how many there are). Some are doubles that I can delete, some are easy to sort as a chunk (party photos, for example) and some... well, some are tedious.

One of the images was without a caption, date, tag or anything, and it has been hanging out there since it was used as one of the images in my thesis. The original manuscript is the Codex Vindobonensis 1857, or known today as signature Cod. 1857 HAN MAG in the Austrian National Library.

Back when I was writing my thesis, there was digitisation going on, but it had not progressed as far - so in some cases, the way you'd get to see pictures was through facsimiles. They are intended to be as much as the original as possible. For the thesis, I thus took the image from the book in the library in Bamberg; if I remember correctly, I requested the scan, got it on a CD, and used the image.

So picture my surprise when I wanted to tag this image today and thought the nicest and easiest way would be to find the entry for the now-fully-digitised manuscript in the Austrian Library... and found this:

This is... clearly not the same guy. First thing, my copy apparently got flipped at some point so I have the mirror image. And then - the position is almost the same, but the face is quite different; the hands are different. The folds in the garments are different, with the shirt or braies especially obvious. The leg position is a little different. And the points, the whole point because of which I was using this image, are different too. They are  much darker and much more obvious in the facsimile version.

Now I am really wondering. Wasn't the facsimile supposed to look exactly like the original? Was there a second version of the manuscript? But then, why would the images be so close and yet different? How much egg do I now have on my face because of this? Questions over questions. I'm now planning to go back to have a look at the facsimile at some point to see if at least the flip only happened with the scan transferring to me.

And this, dear readers, is why one should never fully trust anything but the original itself, no matter what. Sigh. Also it's why digitisation is The Thing, because it means there's at least a few less steps inbetween - it's digitising the object, and then you can look at it, and if it's high quality you can look at it right down to the level where you see the pores in the parchment. So if you're pointed to a re-drawing*, or a reconstruction without access to the original... be wary.

*Re-drawings, in German "Umzeichnung" used to be a really big thing in archaeological publications, as you don't need a good quality image to use for your print prep and, even more importantly, you don't need to go and ask for publication rights. I don't know whether it was just laziness, or whether it was much more difficult than it is today (it was surely more involved than shooting an email!), or whether it was a cost issue either in printing the image or in procuring the rights, and it was probably a mix of those with varying proportions of the individual ingredients. Anyways this means that a lot of older archaeological publications are full of image references to show things related to the find in context, rendered as a little black-and-white line drawing (which admittedly was much, much easier to print in the text part). If you see these, I heartily recommend trying to find the original before believing all of it. Quite often, a digital image is available today with a little use of the search engine of your choice, and you can see how it really looked... because even if you try really hard, and do really well, a line-drawing will still be an interpretation.

I have the nagging suspicion that I will be hunting literature on new(er) finds, or their re-evaluation, for quite a bit of time. Today was spent on trying to hunt down some Spanish things with more details about the garments worn by the Archbishop Rodrigo Ximenéz de Rada, who happened to have very nice hose in his grave. There's an image and a short description in Vestiduras Ricas, but nothing more - and I would like to know more now.

So, literature hunting, someone may have ordered a book in the process (and downloaded things that now need sorting and checking out), and now the next thing is to find a copy of the Ärkebiskoparna Bremen book by Margareta Nockert - which I also, to my dismay, still lack.

There's not much else to report; all this finding and reading and digesting written stuff is slow work too. Which I now have to put aside for a bit to take care of some shop things as well, and probably also check up on the cat to give her a cuddle. The things you have to do, you know. 

I wrote about my medical shenanigans a way back, when I had an adenoma removed from the pituitary gland. I am happy to say that today's check-up (part of the aftercare) revealed no evil surprises, and all seems to be functioning as well as it should.

The only after-effect that I can really point out is that my nose feels slightly congested easier than before, which is a little annoying sometimes - but not too bad to live with. Having a lost or reduced sense of smell would have been much, much worse.

So I am good to go for another year and a half, until the next check. Hooray! 

There's been a design contest for new Euro banknotes, resulting in ten different designs that were shortlisted. Now there's a public survey on the ten options, and hopefully we'll end up with a nice new design.

You can read more about the redesign here, and click your way further to look at all the options and then take part in the survey. 

... maybe do like some medieval folks in Konstanz. Use it as ceiling in your house.

I'm not pulling your leg - that's the new and kind of sensational find recently made: A basement ceiling that can be dated to 1244 mostly consists of part of a ship. There's not so much detail to be found on the 'net yet, but if you read German, there's a little bit here at the SWR page. 

Sometimes, well, things sort of line up. This time, they lined up to lure me down the hole into that extensive rabbit warren that is late medieval to early modern legwear (men's legwear, that is). 

The things that lined up were a) the Alpirsbach project, b) the currently ongoing clothes-like-in-a-picture project,  and c) the almost-eternal updating and translating of the thesis project. 

The latter would greatly benefit from some more details in regard to the legwear reconstruction and development, both in the theoretical part and in the (very short, I know) practical results part. The first is skimpy as there was next to nothing known (now I know of a little bit more), and the latter is superdupershort because, well, it is toward the very end of the book and I was running out of time, and even more running out of steam.

There's this classical thesis writing timeline, you see. You start out and you're told that you should do it within three years, and at the beginning, that sounds like forever and a day, and you start, and suddenly the first year is over but well, you made progress and starting out is always a little slower, and then suddenly you are nearing the three-year mark but there is still so much to look into and tweak and to study and to read and to try and then you are close to year four (four! When did this happen!) and in some instant of painful insight you realise that really the only thing you want now IS TO FREAKING FINALLY GET FINISHED WITH THIS THING THAT IS EATING YOUR LIFE AND WILL NEVER STOP DOING SO UNLESS YOU MAKE IT STOP BY HANDING IT IN AND NO I WILL NOT LOOK INTO THAT BOOK AGAIN I WILL JUST DELETE THIS REMINDER RIGHT NOW HERE YOU GO CHAPTER DONE. Phew. 

This may be a little dramatic, but at times, that really was how it felt. I was told about this timeline before (as probably everybody starting out on a PhD is). And I did what everyone in that situation does, just like every author has to be convinced that their new book is the hottest shit ever and will sell like nothing else, and every editor has to listen to this and nod quietly and think to themselves "yeah, yeah", I was told about this timeline and I nodded quietly and I thought "yeah, yeah" and then, suddenly, well, see above. 

The legwear, at that point, was still sort of basic ideas and outlines only, and it did get elaborated on enough to pass, but, well, see above. By now, I have realised that there is enough material and open questions about just the development of male legwear throughout the centuries that it would easily merit its own PhD, so I won't be able to cover it all, but I'd like to have a little bit of extension to the short chapter in the updated version.

There's several stages in the development - at first, the hose are just getting longer but with no cut-out necessary for the crotch yet; then they have to get even longer and need some kind of crotch solution; then they cover the front as well, needing something to cover up the gap between the two leg parts. At some point, the two hose get joined by sewing them together, and that is probably only the butt first, and then there's the codpiece at some point getting added to both cover up the front (where previously breeches and shirt may have been seen) and also offering possibilities to have the construction a little easier in the lower butt and lower crotch area.

However... this hose development goes hand in hand with the shortening tunics in male fashion, and plenty of men in the not-so-fashionable strata of society just go on wearing the mid-thigh to knee tunic, and the old-fashioned legwear going with it. The other guys, well, we don't have a lot of finds, and we do have a good bit of images but they have this maddening tendency of only almost showing the bits with the crucial information. Argh.

So now I find myself pondering pattern developments (at least I have one new idea! Yay!), folding up little bits of paper, drawing on any sheet that is in reach while some question comes up, and even thinking of making small fabric mock-ups. Plus spending quite a bit of time staring at men's butts and legs in medieval art. Which is, admittedly, also kind of... fun.