Sometimes it really is amazing what you learn as a, well, let's call it "collateral" when looking for something, or researching stuff.

For instance... one thing I learned today is that it's amazingly hard and time-consuming to taper down a 0.5 mm diameter beech rod at both ends. Why would I want to do this, you ask? The answer is, of course, related to the Textile Forum - it's to fake an old Peruanian spindle (which you can find described on this page, scroll down a bit), with the laughable weight of up to 5 grams. I have glass beads to serve as whorls which fit perfectly, but of course the spindle itself needs to be the right shape. 

So I went at it with an electrical drill, sand paper, and various sharp wood-working instruments. Combined with my very mediocre skills at wood-working, it went... tediously. I have to finish tapering down my first try, as one end is still way too thick, and depending on how that goes, I might have another go at it with a different tool, and a different process, but let's say that it is by far not as easy as I had assumed. (Nothing new here, though. My experience, which I am of course not always taking hints from, is that most things that you'd guess to be straight-forward, easy, and quick to do, aren't.)

Another thing I learned yesterday is that goldbeater's skin, which is a bovine membrane, is the outer layer of the bovine appendix. (I knew it came from the appendix, but not that it was the outer layer only. I had wondered, since the bovine appendices you can buy for use in making sausage products make for a very thick casing, but goldbeater's skin is very thin.) The membranes, for gold-beating purposes, are dried and probably treated similarly to parchment (sources vary on that). For use in gold-beating, they are then covered with a special kind of plaster, which is beaten in, and then they are used for about 70 times - afterwards, they are too brittle for gold-beating and get discarded, or re-used for other purposes.

Among those is the use in musical instruments, as in a kind of "bird-flute", I've been told. Might making gold thread also be one of them? That is on the list of things to possibly find out. It would at least be a very fitting second use of the skins, and if you're going to buy your leaf gold or leaf silver or leaf gilt-silver (the most common type, saving some on the pricey gold), you could pick up the membrane at the same time. Provided, of course, that it has not become too brittle, or that the plaster inhibits use for gilding the membrane, or that the pieces are too small for getting gilded and then cut up into strips and then wound around a thread core. Ah. So many things that are lost to the passage of time.

By the way, if you're buying the skin today, it's quite pricey. Which is not new, because back in 1952, when a gold-beater got paid 65 Pfennig for an hour's worth of work, a skin cost 1 Mark (which is 100 Pfennig, for those of you not familiar with the old German currency units). There's fewer sources for the skin these days, though, as the modern variation is a kind of plastic.

Fascinating, all that stuff, right? 

I've mentioned the Bible as one of the gender-spinning-question related items in the last post (before the long weekend of Pentecost - just in case you wondered about yesterday's blog silence). 

There are a few mentions of spinning in the Bible. Finding them is made relatively easy by the helpful BibleHub site, where you can look for keywords and then get information about them, and related terms as well. 

One of the mentions of "spinning" is in Exodus 25:35, and it goes:

And every skillful woman spun with her hands, and they all brought what they had spun in blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen.

Exodus 25:35, English Standard Version

The BibleHub site also lists the different translations, another very helpful feature. 

So. Here it's "woman" in all versions. Another interesting bit, for our intents and purposes, is Proverbs 31:19, which is from a passage about the virtues of a noble woman: 

In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers.

Proverbs 31:19, New International Version

In this part, spinning is closely linked to women, and especially virtuous (as in good) women. The making of yarn, and cloth, and further on in the passage clothing the family, is something mentioned as a positive aspect. 

If that connection was seen as a strong one (which would be sort of standing to reason, given the importance of textiles and textile manufacture), it is not a great jump to using it as a kind of symbol in artworks to signal that a specific woman would be one that is virtuous/good/productive.

Spinning can also be seen as negative, though - it depends on the context. You can read more about the topic in "Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages". 

However, in both cases it's very much associated with the female gender.

The question remains: How much of the women-only impression that we get from our sources is due to representation bias? Were there men spinning in the Middle Ages, in relevant numbers? How about children - male and female? It would be really, really interesting to know more about this - also because finding out whether there's a strong representation bias in this case might give an insight in possible other representation biases.

 So - there was discussion already about the riding slits, and how folds fall in dresses with and without a middle gore, and then I got a question via Instagram about women on horses. The examples given are taken from the Codex Manesse, which is the very splendid, very famous illuminated manuscript in the Uni Heidelberg (here's the full digitised MS).

There are three women on horses in the book's images: on fol. 69, fol. 183v,  fol. 251, and fol. 316v. The last is the easiest, because the lady in question is not sitting astride, but sideways, and she's held by a man sitting in the saddle as you'd expect him to:

Now, the others are more difficult to gauge. First of all, for comparison, a man dressed in a riding coat (Reisekappe), sitting on a horse, from the same MS: 

That is a rather typical garment for travelling, and it - like the tunic worn beneath it - definitely has a riding slit cut in here. Both fall very smoothly, with almost no folds, and certainly no bunch-up folds to be visible.

For the women sitting on the horses, it looks different.

This is actually the only one of the three women where I'd be sure that she is sitting astride. There is one foot definitely visible, and it's in the correct position for medieval riding. She's also looking straight ahead with a straight body position.

Note how the fabric drapes over her leg, and how a fold comes down from under her butt behind her knee towards her ankle. My suspicion is that the bunch-up problem was solved here by having a really generous amount of fabric in the dress - so there's enough both in width and length of the dress to make it work.

For the next two women, there's also folds draping around their legs, and a cascade of folds going down under the butt towards the knee.  

She's either sitting astride and turning backwards towards the man, or she is sitting sideways in the saddle. I lean towards astride, but I'm not completely sure. Unfortunately, all her feet are hidden.

This lady is sitting even more sideways, with really curious folds of the garment. They might be intended to show bunching up - but the rest of the folding actually looks a bit more like sitting sideways to me. 

There's an image in a British Library MS that shows, very clearly, an un-slitted dress, with the wearer sitting astride, as it drapes over the horse. 

As far as I can tell, there's thus two possible solutions to the bunch-up problem: Either having garments with sufficient width and length to cover everything that is supposed to be covered even when adding part of a horse to the equation, or sitting sideways. Another thing that would be interesting to test with reconstructed garments - and some horses with reconstructed saddles...