The imperial garments from Bamberg, topic of the special exhibition that started last year, are now featured in an online exhibition! So for all of you who were not able to go there in person to see these, you can now go and visit Bavarikon to view some very nice photos of the garments. These include a few close-ups that will bring you closer to seeing the individual stitches than would be possible in front of the real thing, as lights in the exhibition aren't too bright, and there's always a glass between you and the things.

In theory, the language can be switched from German to English, but there seems to be only German available - you can still enjoy the images, though.

There's a quite interesting article online about arrow wounds found on human remains in a site in Exeter - where, due to the fracture patterns and spalling it was even possible to see the probable turn direction of the arrow causing one wound.

Arrows usually spin, due to the slight curve of the feathers used as fletching; that stabilises the arrow while it's flying through the air. Depending on the curve of the feathers used, it will either turn clockwise or counterclockwise, and the curve of the feathers in turn depends on whether it was a left or a right wing feather.

It would be very interesting to know if one arrow-maker would prefer to do all arrows fletched in the same direction... or not. Or if they used tools or gadgets to get the fletching as consistent, and as accurate, as possible (like modern people do, when shooting with bow and arrow has become a sport, and precision is important) or if they just did it by eye. Back when I was having a bit of a go at shooting with bow and arrow, I tried both - my latest set of arrows had one feather taken from a bird of prey and two goose feathers each. They were rather soft, and made a quite distinct noise when flying through the air, and they were not stuck on in the precise 120° angle that more modern fletching is done in, and they were a little irregular anyways - but my shooting precision was never on a level where I'd feel that the irregularity made any difference. (Read: I had a lot of fun, but was quite bad at it.)

Modern feather fletching, by the way, is made from turkey feathers, and you can get them in all kinds of colours and patterns, pre-cut with a die so they are all exactly alike... and that makes the arrows look very different from ones done with less standardised, more natural fletching. They will all fly, though. And they will all make quite a bit of an impact!

In case you're interested in German, or in Middle High German, and you don't know it yet, let me introduce you to the Wörterbuchnetz. This is a webpage that gives you access (and a search function) to a large number of German dictionaries and the Middle High German Word Database (MHDBDB is the German acronym) plus a few encyclopaedias. It is a wonderful resource if you're looking for meanings of words in the past - there, one of the Sources with capital S is the Grimm'sches Wörterbuch, and it's all in there as well.

An unexpected treasure trove is the Rechtswörterbuch, too - there's laws and regulations cited in there which also include medieval texts, and you can search for the names of jobs, for instance. There's a lot in there about the Schneider (tailor); the Färber (dyer) is only mentioned as a dialect term for a crook. So it's not complete, and not perfect, but if you like these things, it might still keep you entertained for a good while!

Bronze Age! Yes, that's a bit before my usual time span, but I'm getting more and more fascinated by these very early textiles. First of all, I wonder how much of a difference the fibre makes - would you be able to tell, from the touch of the finished cloth, whether the fibre has 15 micron 0r 22, or 30?

I'm also fascinated by an oddness in the weaving technique. The surviving blankets were huge - the one from Egtved was 190 by 258 cm. That is a width that would be hard to handle for a single weaver. Add to that the fact that there are weft crossings in the fabric - there's just one weft per shed, but it's not the same one all the way through. Weft A comes from the left, weft B from the right, and at some point roughly in the middle, both go to the surface of the fabric and cross each other. Then weft A continues its journey to the right in the next shed, while weft b goes to the left, and they turn normally at the selvedge. This sometimes occurs with three weft threads instead of two.

Thanks to the wonderful image database of the Danish National Museum, you can have a look at this weft crossing thing in the Trindhoj blanket here. There's some crossings in the area left of the hole - you can download the image and then go hunting for these oddities with your image viewer of choice.

My suspicion is that two (or even three) weavers worked together on these superwide fabrics, and the crossings are where the spools or sticks or whatever they used changed hands from one weaver to the other.

This is really fascinating, and I'd love to try this out. The only tiny issue is that this requires a superwide loom (with the corresponding large number of weights, and large amounts of yarn), and some other people willing to have a go at weaving... Though a bit of testing might be possible with a loom and fabric with less width, to get an idea of the method, at least.

 

Yay Friday! I'm looking forward to the weekend, even though there might be some work necessary this time - we're nearing the end of the month, and lamentably, I still have not finished my tax paperwork. Sigh. (I think there's not much left to do, but it's been a while since I did the prop work I already did, and thus I need to catch up on the status and do the rest of it.)

If you are looking for something to fall into during the weekend, not tax-related, you could try... Folgerpedia's digital resources. Folger is the world's largest Shakespeare collection, and you can explore a lot of related topics there as well. And from Shakespeare, you can venture off into the world of manuscripts, and early prints...

There's also EMMO - Early Modern Manuscripts Online - where you can browse all kinds of different transcribed books, for instance. These have been transcribed by volunteers, and you can actually become one, too. That's your opportunity to learn early modern scripts... and get a glimpse into letters from back when. Or recipes. Or... well.

 

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.

I've been doing some more sniffing around on the 'Net for a work project, and I've come across this very nice project: The Rode Project, featuring two altars by the late-medieval artist Hermen Rode. One of them is in Lübeck, the other in Tallinn, and both are absolutely spectacular - and you can have a really close look at them in the Rode Project.

Both are from the late 15th century, and you can virtually open them to enjoy the altars in all their aspects - plus see the paintings in infra-red or in normal light. And, of course, marvel at the wonderful things that all the people are wearing!