When doing my daily bit of aimless link-clicking yesterday, I stumbled across a very, very interesting article via medievalists.net, titled "The codpiece: Social fashion or medical need?" The short version of the article: The development of the prominent codpiece might be closely connected to a strain of Syphilis running rampant at that time, with symptoms including swelling of the genitals and treatment involving local bandages that, in addition to the swollen private parts, have to go somewhere.

This, to me, is another proof that clothes and what we call today the "development of fashion" are connected closely to a lot of other areas of daily life, even to things like illnesses. Availability (or scarcity) of certain materials and colours, climate changes, influences by marriages in the upper crust, availability or scarcity of food, work or travel requirements and social signaling, age and wealth as well as fads in the smaller social groups one is involved in and, of course, personal taste all blended (and still blend) together to a complex influence on the wardrobe of each person in history.

This blend is so complex that we will never be able to pinpoint all its ingredients for a person that lived in history - it would probably not even be possible to correctly analyse the blend for a person currently living, I suppose, since a lot of the elements are probably not things said person reflects upon. However, that makes this article about a connection between illness and fashion even more delightful to me: There is another factor that can actually be traced by an interdisciplinary approach, adding more knowledge about the mix. And at the same time, this proves that a) looking beyond one's own discipline is a really, really good thing and b) that we can never be too open-minded when we are looking at the history of garment development.

By the way, if you don't know medievalists.net yet, make sure to take a look around - it's a very interesting page!

Well, actually, the blogiversary was yesterday. Which I had written in my calendar to make sure that this year I would not again forget when the blogiversary was, and write a post on the actual day.

And then I remembered after posting the blog entry.

So... as of yesterday, this little blog of mine is two years old, and has grown very dear to me in that time. Blogging in the morning has become a daily little ritual (not so little on the days that I find inspiration, though, and write a longer bit), and I actually look forward to blogging again when I've been off-blog for a while.

But a blog is never only about writing - it's only a proper blog if it does get read and enjoyed as well. And blogiversary is, of course, a wonderful opportunity to ask you readers: If you could wish for something on this blog, what would it be? A topic that should be covered more often? Something that has come up too frequently for your taste? Anything else? (Of course I give no guarantees that I will actually fulfil these wishes, but hey, worth a try, isn't it?)

I stumbled over a batch of nice links recently, and I'm finally sharing them with you:

The Anjou Bible is fully digitalised and online - you can see it here. The Book Viewer is in Dutch, but the icons' functions are very, very obvious, so you should have no problem looking at the pictures.

I also stumbled across a site called Decameron Web with an article about sexual positions in the Middle Ages. There's also a lot of other resources and information about the Decameron there, including an Italian and English version of the text.


And finally, there's an interesting non-medieval project going on: An artist called Christopher Salmon is on the quest for money to make a short film from Neil Gaiman's short story "The Price". The text will be read by Neil Gaiman himself, and there's stunning artwork in graphic-novel-style going with it.



If you like the teaser and want to support it, you can pledge money (starting from 10 Dollars) to the project. The money will only be deducted from your account if enough supporters can be found - the film is budgeted at 150.000 USD, and there's yet a ways to go until that amount is reached.

We now interrupt our regular programme for a completely unscheduled and unexpected "Hooray!"

Yesterday, I received an e-mail telling me this little blog here has made it to a Top-50-List which you can find here - it's called  50 best blogs for Medieval History Geeks. And I was totally stunned and amazed to be in one list with the Great Ones of Medieval blogging, like the Medieval Material Culture Blog, Got Medieval, Unlocked Wordhoard and many more.

If you don't know the other blogs on the list, do go check them out (that's time well spent) while I am here, feeling totally cool because I've actually been listed in a Best-Of-List. Hooray!

The Book has been out for about half a year now, and it's doing very well - and I have not forgotten all those comments and questions that I receive about an English version. So I've done some planning and scheming and thinking and prep work, and now it's time to find either an agent willing to peddle the book on the Europe/US market or a publishing house, preferably with distribution on both sides of the Big Pond.

And here I sit, now, with my not-so-great knowledge of English-language-based publishing houses and agents. So I'll do what probably every blogger does sooner or later: I write a bleg.

I am looking for a possibility to bring my book to the English language market. It's a book geared to please both the scientists (art historians, archaeologists, textile conservators) and the Living History activists, offering the first general overview of still extant medieval garments plus all the background knowledge needed to re-create garments using a reconstructed historical tailoring technique. The German version is doing very well and has been getting rave reviews from scientists and Living History folks alike.
If you know an agent or publishing house that might be interested in this book, please give me a hint - I'd be delighted to have a few more leads than I have at the moment!

This weekend, an e-mail with a research-related question fluttered into my inbox:

Some months ago, I was doing websearch on nalbinding and ran across a blog entry about ancient scrivner tools that actually may have been misidentified nalbinding needles.

Unfortunately, the author of the mail can't find it anymore and thus asked if it might have been on my blog. Where it is not (or at least I can't remember writing it at all, which usually means I never did write it). But the Internet is large and full of knowledge - any of you know this article and maybe even where it is?

And while I'm blegging: Recently, historical spools and bobbins for thread have come up again and again as a topic, and I remember that I had already taken one foray into the library to look for some more examples - but these little buggers seem to be hard to find. The one that is cited (and reproduced) most often is the spool from London, and I know that there are some thread spools, including simple reed cutoffs, in the finds from Kempten. But apart from that? There's only little mention of "possible bobbins" or so in most of the publications that readily come to mind. Have I missed the compendium of thread spools and bobbins? Or is there really so little of these small helpful things out there?

This little blog of mine has gained enough importance to slowly become a target for spammers, it seems. Because spam-type comments have turned up only very seldom in the past, I have never voiced any spam-comment policy, but I feel that it is time now to do so.

If you have tried to comment on an older post, you will have found that comment moderation is enabled. Fresh posts can be commented on without moderation (pun intended), but screening comments makes it easier for me to nip a multi-post comment spam attack in the bud (there were about two of these already, and cleaning them up takes time and gets on my nerves in a major way).

As to the rest... I feel that freedom of speech is an important thing, and I also think that the internet is a very good and very valuable platform to say (write, that is) what you mean, feel, and think. However, I also feel that a blog post and its comments are something like a conversation between blog author and commenters, and if I'm standing around in real life chatting with a bunch of people about, say, ice cream flavours and discussing their impact on the environment and somebody suddenly starts to praise an ice cream factory that is known to mine the last glaciers, grand-style, for ice, or suddenly intrudes on the conversation with a speech about how we should all convert to the Church of the Holy Spaghetti Monster and dress up like pirates AT ONCE... I would feel quite pissed off.

And since these spammers are just delivering their bit and turn away again at once, it isn't even possible to start discussing them into the ground about how mining these last glaciers is the worst thing ever, and so on.

So here's the official comment policy: Comments are more than welcome, whether they agree with me or disagree with me, as long as there is some connection to the blog post they belong to. Unsolicited advice on what, where or how to buy something, product placement including unrelated blog or website placements*, buy-here links and other spam-type comments whether religious or not, will be deleted from my blog. Abusive comments may also be deleted. Comments are moderated for older posts to screen out the bad eggs before they turn up, saving you from disappointment after you click to see the new comment.

That's it. Now... comments, anyone?

* Pointing out a website or blog that is related to the topic of the blog post, or to the general topic of the blog is very welcome, of course!