Finishing Up the Kalamazoo Book Reviews
Jul. 22nd, 2007 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjI finally finished cataloging the last of the books shipped from Kalamazoo, so if I'm going to review them, it'll have to be now before they go on the shelves and I forget which they are. This isn't as in-depth as it might be, but the idea is to write something.
Hagen, Ann. 2006. Anglo Saxon Food and Drink: Production, Processing, Distribution & Consumption. Anglo-Saxon Books, Hockwold cum Wilton. ISBN 1-898281-41-6
I believe this is simply her previous publications under this name collected together and published in hardcover (as they so richly deserve). Hagen's work is a model of how to approach the study of a cuisine for which we have no surviving culinary literature (in a direct sense). It draws from archaeological, literary, and legal records with critical discussions of how to interpret these snippets to develop a larger picture of everyday life. The book is organized generally into sections on ingredients (i.e., the available plants and animals), technology (methods, equipment, etc.), the economics of food distribution, and the social context of eating and drinking. For those whose goal is re-creating historic cuisines, this book will not present you with a bunch of easily accessible recipes for creating specific dishes (which would be products of the author's imagination and best judgement in any case), but if you're willing to read the whole thing, it will give you enough information to create meals "not inconsistent with the known facts". (This is the sort of book I sometimes fantasize about writing for medieval Welsh cuisine ... after I finish the one on clothing, of course.)
Christensen, Arne Emil & Margareta Nockert. 2006. Osebergfunnet - Bind IV Tekstilene. Kulturhistorisk Museum, Oslo. ISBN 82-8084-024-9
The Oseburg ship burial was discovered ca. 1900 and the first three volumes presenting the find in detail were published with a few decades. The planned fourth volume on the textiles languished for nearly a century. And while we can lament the lack available information, it's likely that advances in the field of archaeological textile research, as well as publishing technology, have made this a better book for the delay. The main part of the text is, of course, in Norwegian. There's a summary at the end in English of about 50 pages, primarily consisting of descriptions of the artifacts. This isn't to say that the rest of the books is impenetrable for the non-Norwegian speaker, however. There are hundreds of figures, perhaps a quarter or so in color. They include photographs of the artifacts (both large-scale and detailed), technical drawings showing both techniques and motifs (both from the original excavation notes and more recent work), and some comparative material to illustrate the artistic context. And all figures have bilingual captions. In addition, such material as the tables of weave data will be accessible to anyone familiar with the field. This material is, in particular, a treasure trove of embroidery and decorative weaving. However other than the depiction of clothing in the woven tapestries, the usefulness of the material for understanding costume is much less as the clothing of the burial's inhabitant was badly disturbed by grave robbers. One intriguing costume-related topic is the group of narrow applied bands of colorful imported silk samitum that almost certainly were attached to one or more articles of clothing. This isn't necessarily a "must own" book, if only because it is rather expensive, but for anyone seriously specializing in Viking-era Scandinavian textiles, it is probably worth the investment.
Thomas Graham & Nicholas Williams. 2007. Bewnans Ke: The Life of St. Kea. University of Exeter Press, Exeter. ISBN 978-0-85989-800-3
The available corpus of medieval Cornish is small enough that a new addition is a cause for great rejoicing and this is the first new significant find in the last half century. Like much of the Middle Cornish corpus, this is the script of a play focusing on religious themes ... although rather delightfully, the latter part of the text then skips to an entirely different work with Arthurian themes. The presentation is given with an edited version of the original text and an English translation on facing pages, and with a transcription of the unedited original as footnotes across the bottom of both pages. There are extensive endnotes on vocabulary and grammar and the front matter discusses the historic and literary background of the subject matter. I haven't done much more than skim through it, but one of the things that caught my eye in the text are the macaronic bits -- characters interspersing lines in Cornish and English (all within a unified rhyme scheme!).
Netherton, Robin and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds). 2007. Medieval Clothing and Textiles: 3. Boydell & Brewer Ltd., Rochester. ISBN 978-1-8438-3291-1
The usual high-quality mix of technical and practical, literary and economic, analytical and expositional. I think my favorite simply in the field of "wow, I never would have guessed these existed" is Swales & Blatt's article on the construction and categorization of multi-strand bookmarks.
Rogers, Penelope Walton. 2007. Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England (AD 450-700). Council for British Archaeology, Bootham. ISBN 978-1-902771-54-0
While this work covers much of the same ground as Gale Owen-Crocker's book on a similar topic, I wouldn't in any way consider them to be redundant. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to do a serious side-by-side comparison to convince you of this. Just buy them both. Trust me. The first half or so of Rogers' book covers the technology and methods of cloth production, moving then into the non-textile elements in costume, and finishing with putting together data from various sources to reconstruct entire outfits of several types for both men and women. Definitely a book that, if not directly aimed at, is certainly very conscious of the historic costumers in its readership.
Davies, John Reuben. 2003. The Book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge. ISBN 1-84383-024-8
I'm not going to claim this is a book of general interest. I picked it up because I'm still in the process of integrating all the personal names in the Book of Llandaf charters into my Welsh names database, and anything that helps me contextualize them properly is a Good Thing.
Huws, Daniel. 2000. Medieval Welsh Manuscripts. University of Wales Press & National Library of Wales, Cardiff. ISBN 0-7083-1602-6
Daniel Huws is pretty much the acknowledged expert on medieval Welsh manuscripts asmanuscripts. (Others compete for the title when it comes to the contents.) This is a collection of various papers of his, both on specific manuscripts and on related topics. One quite valuable item is a catalog of surviving vernacular Welsh manuscripts writen up to about 1400, organized by century and indicating works considered to be by the same scribe. Students of medieval Welsh literature so often encounter the material reorganized to focus on specific texts (and their variants). It can be enlightening to be reminded -- as we are in his article on the White Book of Rhydderch -- that so many of the "named" books of the Welsh middle ages were ecclectic collections of all manner of material: travelogue-like geographies like the Delw y Byd, translations of religious material such as gospels and apocrypha, translations of continental histories and literature such as the Pseudo-Turpin and the Song of Roland, as well as the more familiar stock of "native" Welsh literature such as the Mabinogi, the Welsh Arthurian tales, Culhwch, and assorted poetry and triads.
To close, I'm going to pull out a book I bought last year that I never got around to reviewing because it makes such a nice pair with my last one from this year.
Klausner, David N. 2005. Records of Early Drama: Wales. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. ISBN 0-8020-9072-9
Harper, Sally. 2007. Music in Welsh Culture Before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-5263-2
Both of these books think they are aimed at the university library market. This is both good and bad. On the good side, they are detailed, exhaustive, and meticulously-documented collections of data with sufficient analysis to contextualize the material, but with the assumption that they will be used as background for further, more interpretive research. They don't tell you what to think; they tell you what you need to know to figure out what to think for yourself. On the bad side, they are quite expensive books (the drama book was $200, the music book normally lists for $100 but I got it at a major conference discount) with essentially no publicity outside those who already know about them.
I'd actually been waiting for Klausner's book for maybe half a decade, ever since I'd met him at a Welsh studies conference and he mentioned it among his works in progress. It's part of a series of sourcebooks on early drama in the British Isles being produced by the University of Toronto Press. Most of the series is organized in volumes based on counties, but the Welsh material seemed to call for a more unified approach, for which we can probably be grateful as it means we get the whole in a single chunk rather than waiting for various authors to finish up their individual projects. Another benefit of Klausner's approach is that, given the relatively scanty material on drama in its strictest sense in the period covered (essentially, up through the mid 17th century), he has expanded the scope of the work to include performance art of all sorts: drama, music, poetry, song. The introduction gives a brief history of Wales and the social context of performance art there, then a discussion and catalog of the types of materials used. And then we get into a long and varied collection of quotations of textual material that describe, discuss, catalog, explain, or simply mention in passing anything related to the performing arts. The texts are given in their original language (and then, in the appendices, in translation). Just to give a sense of the varied nature of the material, here's a summary starting from the front.
Gerald of Wales (references in his Description/Itinerary)
Mentions, especially of bards, in the Welsh laws
A 16th century list of "notable crwth players, harpers, and poets"
Various English laws that concern "minstrels" and "bards" in Wales
Summaries of various lawsuits either involving performers or where performance art was involved in the crime
Various diary and account entries giving payments to performers
Lists of tunes played on various occasions
Descriptions of eisteddfods
Scripts of masques performed in Welsh locations
Wills that mention musical instruments
Although not included in complete form, back when I first met him, Klausner set me on the track of an edition of three short "interlude" plays in Welsh, written around the end of the 16th century.
Harper's book on sources concerning music in Wales (again, up to the mid 17th century) is very similar in approach, with the exception that it identifies, catalogs, and discusses the original source material but doesn't include the original texts (although many are excerpted for illustrative purposes). The book is organized topically, covering native string music, church music, and then "international" music as performed in Wales. The usefulness of this work for the professional scholar goes without saying. For the non-scholar with an interest in pre-modern Welsh music, it supplies a detailed, yet reasonably accessible, summary of the sources, the issues, and the problems. It gives you pointers to those topics where more information is available, and gently lets you down on those topics where there simply isn't anything to be found. There is also an extensive bibliography of research in the field and even a discography of performances of covered material.
I have a suspicion that one of the reasons I'm excessively fond of books like these two is that they match so well my own research tendencies. Because so many of the fields I'm interested in are full of gaps and holes in the available information, my own instincts are to catalog what is there so that readers can build their own interpolations and interpretations rather than giving them a single interpretation (mine) to swallow whole. And when I read other people's research on these sorts of topics, I'm wary of authors that only give me their pre-digested, pre-interpreted conclusions, with a careful selection of the supporting data. I want them to show me all the information they were working from, so that I can come to my own conclusions, if necessary. Others may cry out in frustration, "Just give me a tune to sing and a play to produce!" but I'd rather know where the rotten boards are on the stage.
Hagen, Ann. 2006. Anglo Saxon Food and Drink: Production, Processing, Distribution & Consumption. Anglo-Saxon Books, Hockwold cum Wilton. ISBN 1-898281-41-6
I believe this is simply her previous publications under this name collected together and published in hardcover (as they so richly deserve). Hagen's work is a model of how to approach the study of a cuisine for which we have no surviving culinary literature (in a direct sense). It draws from archaeological, literary, and legal records with critical discussions of how to interpret these snippets to develop a larger picture of everyday life. The book is organized generally into sections on ingredients (i.e., the available plants and animals), technology (methods, equipment, etc.), the economics of food distribution, and the social context of eating and drinking. For those whose goal is re-creating historic cuisines, this book will not present you with a bunch of easily accessible recipes for creating specific dishes (which would be products of the author's imagination and best judgement in any case), but if you're willing to read the whole thing, it will give you enough information to create meals "not inconsistent with the known facts". (This is the sort of book I sometimes fantasize about writing for medieval Welsh cuisine ... after I finish the one on clothing, of course.)
Christensen, Arne Emil & Margareta Nockert. 2006. Osebergfunnet - Bind IV Tekstilene. Kulturhistorisk Museum, Oslo. ISBN 82-8084-024-9
The Oseburg ship burial was discovered ca. 1900 and the first three volumes presenting the find in detail were published with a few decades. The planned fourth volume on the textiles languished for nearly a century. And while we can lament the lack available information, it's likely that advances in the field of archaeological textile research, as well as publishing technology, have made this a better book for the delay. The main part of the text is, of course, in Norwegian. There's a summary at the end in English of about 50 pages, primarily consisting of descriptions of the artifacts. This isn't to say that the rest of the books is impenetrable for the non-Norwegian speaker, however. There are hundreds of figures, perhaps a quarter or so in color. They include photographs of the artifacts (both large-scale and detailed), technical drawings showing both techniques and motifs (both from the original excavation notes and more recent work), and some comparative material to illustrate the artistic context. And all figures have bilingual captions. In addition, such material as the tables of weave data will be accessible to anyone familiar with the field. This material is, in particular, a treasure trove of embroidery and decorative weaving. However other than the depiction of clothing in the woven tapestries, the usefulness of the material for understanding costume is much less as the clothing of the burial's inhabitant was badly disturbed by grave robbers. One intriguing costume-related topic is the group of narrow applied bands of colorful imported silk samitum that almost certainly were attached to one or more articles of clothing. This isn't necessarily a "must own" book, if only because it is rather expensive, but for anyone seriously specializing in Viking-era Scandinavian textiles, it is probably worth the investment.
Thomas Graham & Nicholas Williams. 2007. Bewnans Ke: The Life of St. Kea. University of Exeter Press, Exeter. ISBN 978-0-85989-800-3
The available corpus of medieval Cornish is small enough that a new addition is a cause for great rejoicing and this is the first new significant find in the last half century. Like much of the Middle Cornish corpus, this is the script of a play focusing on religious themes ... although rather delightfully, the latter part of the text then skips to an entirely different work with Arthurian themes. The presentation is given with an edited version of the original text and an English translation on facing pages, and with a transcription of the unedited original as footnotes across the bottom of both pages. There are extensive endnotes on vocabulary and grammar and the front matter discusses the historic and literary background of the subject matter. I haven't done much more than skim through it, but one of the things that caught my eye in the text are the macaronic bits -- characters interspersing lines in Cornish and English (all within a unified rhyme scheme!).
Netherton, Robin and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds). 2007. Medieval Clothing and Textiles: 3. Boydell & Brewer Ltd., Rochester. ISBN 978-1-8438-3291-1
The usual high-quality mix of technical and practical, literary and economic, analytical and expositional. I think my favorite simply in the field of "wow, I never would have guessed these existed" is Swales & Blatt's article on the construction and categorization of multi-strand bookmarks.
Rogers, Penelope Walton. 2007. Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England (AD 450-700). Council for British Archaeology, Bootham. ISBN 978-1-902771-54-0
While this work covers much of the same ground as Gale Owen-Crocker's book on a similar topic, I wouldn't in any way consider them to be redundant. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to do a serious side-by-side comparison to convince you of this. Just buy them both. Trust me. The first half or so of Rogers' book covers the technology and methods of cloth production, moving then into the non-textile elements in costume, and finishing with putting together data from various sources to reconstruct entire outfits of several types for both men and women. Definitely a book that, if not directly aimed at, is certainly very conscious of the historic costumers in its readership.
Davies, John Reuben. 2003. The Book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge. ISBN 1-84383-024-8
I'm not going to claim this is a book of general interest. I picked it up because I'm still in the process of integrating all the personal names in the Book of Llandaf charters into my Welsh names database, and anything that helps me contextualize them properly is a Good Thing.
Huws, Daniel. 2000. Medieval Welsh Manuscripts. University of Wales Press & National Library of Wales, Cardiff. ISBN 0-7083-1602-6
Daniel Huws is pretty much the acknowledged expert on medieval Welsh manuscripts asmanuscripts. (Others compete for the title when it comes to the contents.) This is a collection of various papers of his, both on specific manuscripts and on related topics. One quite valuable item is a catalog of surviving vernacular Welsh manuscripts writen up to about 1400, organized by century and indicating works considered to be by the same scribe. Students of medieval Welsh literature so often encounter the material reorganized to focus on specific texts (and their variants). It can be enlightening to be reminded -- as we are in his article on the White Book of Rhydderch -- that so many of the "named" books of the Welsh middle ages were ecclectic collections of all manner of material: travelogue-like geographies like the Delw y Byd, translations of religious material such as gospels and apocrypha, translations of continental histories and literature such as the Pseudo-Turpin and the Song of Roland, as well as the more familiar stock of "native" Welsh literature such as the Mabinogi, the Welsh Arthurian tales, Culhwch, and assorted poetry and triads.
To close, I'm going to pull out a book I bought last year that I never got around to reviewing because it makes such a nice pair with my last one from this year.
Klausner, David N. 2005. Records of Early Drama: Wales. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. ISBN 0-8020-9072-9
Harper, Sally. 2007. Music in Welsh Culture Before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-5263-2
Both of these books think they are aimed at the university library market. This is both good and bad. On the good side, they are detailed, exhaustive, and meticulously-documented collections of data with sufficient analysis to contextualize the material, but with the assumption that they will be used as background for further, more interpretive research. They don't tell you what to think; they tell you what you need to know to figure out what to think for yourself. On the bad side, they are quite expensive books (the drama book was $200, the music book normally lists for $100 but I got it at a major conference discount) with essentially no publicity outside those who already know about them.
I'd actually been waiting for Klausner's book for maybe half a decade, ever since I'd met him at a Welsh studies conference and he mentioned it among his works in progress. It's part of a series of sourcebooks on early drama in the British Isles being produced by the University of Toronto Press. Most of the series is organized in volumes based on counties, but the Welsh material seemed to call for a more unified approach, for which we can probably be grateful as it means we get the whole in a single chunk rather than waiting for various authors to finish up their individual projects. Another benefit of Klausner's approach is that, given the relatively scanty material on drama in its strictest sense in the period covered (essentially, up through the mid 17th century), he has expanded the scope of the work to include performance art of all sorts: drama, music, poetry, song. The introduction gives a brief history of Wales and the social context of performance art there, then a discussion and catalog of the types of materials used. And then we get into a long and varied collection of quotations of textual material that describe, discuss, catalog, explain, or simply mention in passing anything related to the performing arts. The texts are given in their original language (and then, in the appendices, in translation). Just to give a sense of the varied nature of the material, here's a summary starting from the front.
Gerald of Wales (references in his Description/Itinerary)
Mentions, especially of bards, in the Welsh laws
A 16th century list of "notable crwth players, harpers, and poets"
Various English laws that concern "minstrels" and "bards" in Wales
Summaries of various lawsuits either involving performers or where performance art was involved in the crime
Various diary and account entries giving payments to performers
Lists of tunes played on various occasions
Descriptions of eisteddfods
Scripts of masques performed in Welsh locations
Wills that mention musical instruments
Although not included in complete form, back when I first met him, Klausner set me on the track of an edition of three short "interlude" plays in Welsh, written around the end of the 16th century.
Harper's book on sources concerning music in Wales (again, up to the mid 17th century) is very similar in approach, with the exception that it identifies, catalogs, and discusses the original source material but doesn't include the original texts (although many are excerpted for illustrative purposes). The book is organized topically, covering native string music, church music, and then "international" music as performed in Wales. The usefulness of this work for the professional scholar goes without saying. For the non-scholar with an interest in pre-modern Welsh music, it supplies a detailed, yet reasonably accessible, summary of the sources, the issues, and the problems. It gives you pointers to those topics where more information is available, and gently lets you down on those topics where there simply isn't anything to be found. There is also an extensive bibliography of research in the field and even a discography of performances of covered material.
I have a suspicion that one of the reasons I'm excessively fond of books like these two is that they match so well my own research tendencies. Because so many of the fields I'm interested in are full of gaps and holes in the available information, my own instincts are to catalog what is there so that readers can build their own interpolations and interpretations rather than giving them a single interpretation (mine) to swallow whole. And when I read other people's research on these sorts of topics, I'm wary of authors that only give me their pre-digested, pre-interpreted conclusions, with a careful selection of the supporting data. I want them to show me all the information they were working from, so that I can come to my own conclusions, if necessary. Others may cry out in frustration, "Just give me a tune to sing and a play to produce!" but I'd rather know where the rotten boards are on the stage.
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