We were wondering about old-style recipes for cakes a while ago, inspired by some quite old (Art Deco) tableware, which had rather small plates for the cakes (or whatever else would have been served on them).

So I did as you do when wondering about stuff like that - I went into the Internet Archive and the Open Library and had a rootle around for recipe books from the end of the 19th century.

One of the books I came across was a really curious example, with a lot of advertisements, and a lot of recipes, but not just for cooking, no, for about everything from dyeing wool to dyeing hair to cleaning stuff to baking to curing sick horses. It's called the Brill's Family Recipe book. 

I'm not sure if I will actually try one of the cake recipes - but it was definitely very amusing to leaf through this curious mixture, and it does give an impression of what was considered important or necessary recipes back then. 

I've stumbled across Digital Mappa a good long(ish) while ago, and I might or might not have posted about it here on the blog, but it might be time to revisit that. 

Digital Mappa is a tool for digital annotation of manuscripts and images, with the possibility to link multiple different sources, highlight parts of them, and, in short, do a bunch of interesting and potentially helpful things when researching and comparing stuff. Back when I last looked into it, I didn't find anything where you could use the platform without using your own installation. Which I tried to set up, but failed. 

A while ago I received a note about an update to the platform software, and I put on my list to check it out and maybe re-try installing it. These days, I finally got around to looking into it - and I found this article about DM. With, to my utter and great delight, a link to an installation where one can register and then use an already installed, up-and-running version.

Hooray! I've not spent a lot of time with the DM yet, and it certainly takes a little while to get used to, but I have hopes that it will be very, very useful for me and some of my projects - including some collaborative projects as well.

There's a presentation about (Re?)Building Textile Archaeology in the Nile Valley, hosted by the CTR, on December 9 - it's the inaugural lecture of Elsa Yvanez. You can join in with a pre-registration; more information about the lecture and how to attend can be found on the CTR website. 

The Conversation has an article about the DNA of medieval Jews - apparently some mutations of the Ashkenazi subgroup can already be seen in gene samples from the 14th century.

An interesting site if you're looking at images with Christian content (and there's so, so many of them if you're looking at medieval art): christianiconography.info is a "Guide to Christian Iconography: Images, Symbols, and Texts". 

It's always nice to stumble across a new portal for research and for discovering (and looking at) museum objects. My latest discovery in that regard is the portal bavarikon, which - to my and hopefully also your delight - is available in both German and English. 

You can find all sorts of things there, ranging from 3D images of some special items to online exhibitions and accompanying material, such as the reconstruction of how liturgical chants may have sounded - chants that are embroidered onto the blue cope of Kunigunde, which is preserved in the museum of Bamberg Cathdral. 

Have fun exploring!

I don't know about your email inbox, but mine contained today several mails informing me about advent calendars. Most of those are not really interesting to me, as they're telling me to buy things at a discount every day.

There's one advent calendar I'm really looking forward to every year, though, and that is the one made by Maria and Amica from Historical Textiles. The two (self-declaimed) textile nerds show some of their favourite textiles every year, often with links to more pictures on the corresponding museum page. It's a true gem, and every year I admire them for all the time and effort they invest in that count-down.

Here's the link to their December 1 calendar blogpost. Enjoy, and I hope you will enjoy the following posts as well!

A chunk of it was eaten by some more research into the photo database problem; then there was a bit of writing; there was a bit of textile work; some organising; there was lunch at some point inbetween, and woosh, the day was gone.

Speaking of time, just a few days ago I was chatting with a friend about wages, and pay, and freelance employment. A few years ago, I had found an online calculating tool that helped in calculating a sensible rate for freelance work, with a list covering expenses and taxes and all these things, but that has long since gone the way of the Dodo Website.

A quick search, though, found a page called, very fittingly: The Freelance Rate Calculator.  Clicking the link there sends you to a google spreadsheet that you can download and fill in, to find out what you will need per hour to earn the money you need. It does, very handily, remind you that you might want to have some savings too... so a very smart thing.

In case you consider going freelance: Check out this sheet, or something similar. You definitely want to find out if you can turn whatever you are planning to make your main job into a business that will sustain you... before you take the plunge.

Well, not here, but on this site called "Medieval Wall Painting in the English Parish Church: A Developing Catalogue".  I'm not sure about how up-do-date the "developing" is, since the copyright notice says "-2018", but it is a very nice collection of murals in churches. 

I've stumbled across it looking for Genesis scenes, which are a premium source for images of Eve spinning. (I've learned, though, that it's not always the spinning woman in those scenes, sometimes she has other occupations.) I hope you enjoy having a look at the paintings.