I'm back from our little vacation and working my way through the list of e-mails that arrived during the last few days. While I'm busy getting both my real and my virtual household back into working order, you can amuse yourselves with this picture of a medieval wandering household, complete with baby:

The image caption says it's jugglers/artists travelling. It's a coloured xylograph, single-leaf prints from about 1450. Today at the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig.

What I really like about this picture is that it shows a lot of medieval household items. You can see half a kitchen sticking out from the woman's carrycloth around her back... and as a true multitasking female, she's not only travelling, keeping all the household stuff, looking after the livestock (see the chickens on her head?) and looking after the baby, she's also spinning at the same time. Amazing. And modern folks say there's a lot of pressure on women nowadays...

Source: UITZ, ERIKA: Die Frau im Mittelalter. Wien 2003. Page 102.