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Pedersen, Kathrine & Marie-Louise B. Nosch (eds). 2009. The Medieval Broadcloth: Changing Trends in Fashions, Manufacturing, and Consumption. Oxbow Books, Oxford. ISBN 978-1-84217-381-7

This is a collection of papers from an interdisciplinary symposium on the subject of "broadcloth" -- the archetypal high-end woolen fabric of the high middle ages. We start with a technical discussion of the physical and procedural differences between different types of wool fabrics, and specifically the consequences to the finished fabric of the difference between a long-staple, "spun in the grease" worsted fabric, and the shorter staple but higher quality "dry spun" woolen yarns used for broadcloth. But these short-staple threads then needed to be re-oiled for the weaving process and then fulled after weaving, not only to removing the oil "dressing" but to felt the fibers together to strengthen the finished cloth (a strengthening unnecessary with long-staple threads). The final part of broadcloth production was to raise a nap on the surface of the fabric. This created the defining look-and-feel of broadcloth with its smooth, rich texture (contrasted with the visual effects of fancy twill patterns common to the earlier woolen weaves).

Because broadcloth became an important focus of international trade, much of the available data on its production, value, and circulation comes from commercial records. Comparative price-lists and production totals for different weaving centers take up a fair chunk of the collection. Similarly, shipping records not only indicate sources and destinations but the amount of cloth shipped and often color and quality as well. Two articles use the technical descriptions of how broadcloth was produced to identify archaeological textile fragments that most likely represent this type of cloth. Another article looks at the visual and linguistic evidence for striped and other multicolored forms of broadcloth which diverge from the prototypical image of a plain solid-color fabric.

The collection concludes with some experimental work in re-creating Laken the broadcloth produced in Leiden, Netherlands, using historic technology. (The illustrative photos show the experimenters in appropriate historic clothing as well, though I don't know that this was the case for the entire reconstruction process.)

This is not a book for the generalist or the casual costume historian. But for those who also geek out on economics and trade, it's a nicely focused group of presentations organized to illustrate a topic central to the medieval textile scene.

Möller-Wiering, Susan. 2011. War and Worship: Textiles from 3rd to 4th-century AD Weapon Deposits in Denmark and Northern Germany. Oxbow Books, Oxford. ISBN 978-1-84217-428-9

The sub-title pretty much gives the scope of this volume. In the late Roman Iron Age in norther Europe, people were in the habit of dumping large quantities of weapons into lakes and bogs. And those weapons were typically wrapped in -- or accompanied by -- textiles. In the usual way of textiles, many were preserved only where they came in contact with the metal objects, so much of the book is restricted to detailed physical analysis of those small, fragmentary "textile casts" stuck to blades, shield bosses, and spearheads. But in the case of the Thorsberg site, the higher acidity of the context mostly destroyed the iron objects but preserved the textiles to a high degree. The book consequently gives Thorsberg twice as much coverage as the other main sites, with large numbers of color photos and detailed weaving diagrams as well as the usual thread-count distribution charts and whatnot. There's also a special chapter on tablet-woven items among the finds, as well as a great deal of comparative analysis, not only between the weapon-deposit sites but with other textile and clothing finds of similar era.

Why should you get this book? It focuses specifically and almost exclusively on the textile finds from these sites. It has the most detailed recent analysis of the Thorsberg garments that I've seen, although it assumes you already have access to a general grounding in their structure and construction. It provides a comprehensive guide to the weaves, counts, and weights of a very focused (geographically and temporally) set of textiles, although if you already have a more comprehensive work on the topic (like Lise Bender-Jørgensen's various publications) you may find this aspect redundant. The plentiful color illustrations of textile details may be quite valuable to those experimenting with weaving techniques of this era.

By the way, this is yet another book from the publishing arm of Oxbow/David Brown Books, who have picked up on the market for historical textile and clothing publications with enthusiasm and are making available (whether new or as reprints) some of the most valuable new works in the field. Encourage them in this, both by buying their publications and by letting them know how delighted you are that they're publishing them.

Gawronski, Jerzy. 2012. Amsterdam Ceramics: A city's history and an arcaheological ceramics catalogue 1175-2011. Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen, Amsterdam. ISBN 978-90-5937-267-2

(Repeat after me: I do not have a pottery problem.)

I saw a copy of this book at the West Coast Historic Culinary Symposium earlier this year but barely had time to do more than drool over it. Now I own a copy.

The book starts with a review of the history of Amsterdam, covering the geographic scope of the city, relevant historic events but especially the construction of key landmarks, typical artifacts of each era (they do a series of similar objects such as a shoe, a spoon, a drinking vessel, an illumination device, for each of sections) and the location of key excavations. This takes up the first 100 pages of the book. Then we have a catalog of 1247 ceramic artifacts (of which about half fall within the SCA's period), all with color photographs, typical examples with cross-sectional drawings, with the find location, location of origin (if different), fabric, size, and type-group given. (Dates are implicit in the sectional groupings which correspond to the eras of the historic review.) I don't know if this is literally every substantially complete piece of pottery excavated out of Amsterdam (probably not0, but it's far more generous than the usual "just the pretty pieces" or "just a single example of each type". For example, the 1300-1350 section includes 13 stoneware jugs, 2 redware jugs, 6 redware tripod pipkins, 2 redware small cauldrons, etc. etc.

One fascinating result of this coverage is the ability to see the very slow rate of change in basic cookware types and shapes. For example, certain styles of tripod pipkin and frying pan continue essentially unchanged from the 12th through 18th centuries, while other specific shapes and functions of object appear for more limited terms or appear at later dates. The coverage also enables a much greater range of decorative features (when present) to be displayed so that typical versus unusual designs can be identified.

This is going to be a great source of ideas for new items to add to my open-fire cooking equipment (or for determining that I really do have almost one of everything relevant). I imagine there will be a great deal of lugging the book around to my favorite potters and asking, "Can you make me one of these?"

Pisani, Rosanna Caterina Proto, Marco Ciatti, Cusanna Conti & Maria Grazia Vaccari. 2010. The Guicciardini "Quilt": Conservation of the Deeds of Tristan. Edizioni Firenze, Firenze. ISBN 978-88-7970-493-9

This wasn't a bookroom purchase -- One of the DISTAFF presenters had a bunch of copies and I managed to snag one during the Pseudo-Session tailgate party. (If "Pseudo-Session tailgate party" doesn't make sense to you, there's no point in trying to explain.) There's something in this catalog for everyone. To start with, there's the physical conservation process of the textile, including the application a vast number of different imaging techniques to understand the internal structure, plus details of the future storage and display. There's the historic context of the textile itself and how it has been interpreted. There's the context of the literary motifs and the various media in which they were interpreted at the time the quilt was created. There's the context of "white-work quilts" in general. And there's a brief summary of the creation of a replica of the quilt for additional display options. Whether you're interested in studying the original artifact or creating a reproduction or an "inspired by" textile of your own, this is the most detailed work I've seen to date on the topic. Note that the physical analysis only covers the portion of this quilt (or the part of this set of quilts -- depending on your interpretation) held at the Bargello Museum, although the discussion of the imagery and literary context also covers the part held at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Parry, T. 1929. Peniarth 49. Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, Caerdydd.

I confess that the likelihood of me doing language-geeky things with Welsh texts tends to decrease as time goes by. Not from lack of interest, but from a realization of time-prioritization in my life and the fact that other things give me a better pay-off these days. But that doesn't stop me from stocking my library with books that would be very useful in the alternate universe in which I continued to make historic Welsh linguistics my primary focus.

Peniarth 49 is a manuscript of poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym, copied/written/transcribed by the scholar John Davies right around 1600. But my particular interest isn't so much for the literary material as for the reflection of the development of Welsh orthography at that date. The evolution of spelling can be a surprisingly difficult topic to study. Individual edited texts tend to focus their discussions on specific narrow features that provide evidence for chronology or reflect particular regional differences, but reverse-engineering those bits into a more general understanding of the range of typical orthographies for a specific time and place is frustrating. And, in particular, coming up with a general understanding of the range of spellings current in Welsh ca. 1600 is harder than you might think (just in case one were, say, interested in creating name consistent with that period).

The usefulness of a text such as this for studying spelling is that the material falls in an identifiable bracket. Unlike genealogical material, romances, or historic chronicles, we have a clear composition date (the dates of the poet) and the text will not reflect an older orthographic tradition than that date. And as a later terminus, we have the date at which the specific manuscript was created. In this case, that still leaves us well over a 200 year span of time, with any particular feature potentially reflecting any time during that span, depending on whether the text in question was faithfully copied from manuscript, transcribed from oral performance, deliberately updated in spelling by the writer, or any combination of these paths. But in a sense this is a feature, not a bug, as it gives us a sense of the range of spellings that one single author, creating a written collection with thematic unity, considered to be unsurprising to appear in combination.

So, for example, we can trace the different treatments of the sound rendered in Modern Welsh as "rh" which appears here in the most conservative form of plain "r", in the briefly experimental "rr", as well as the eventual winner "rh". Similarly, the establishment of "f" to represent the sound [v] in all locations (even the laggard word-initial position) can be traced through the three segments of the manuscript, written by the same man at different times.

Perhaps most interesting as a spotlight example are the variants of the poet's name throughout the manuscript, thanks to the common formula ending each poem with "so-and-so sang this". The name David is remarkably resistant to following the usual rules of Welsh orthography in many pre-1600 context, due to the combined influence of the early medieval Welsh spelling being identical to the Latin (David) and likely encouraging a retention of the Latin form, plus the orthographic influence of English on the legal records that are our most prolific source of personal name data for 15-16th century Wales. Yet here, apparently relatively free of those normalizing influences we have the following. I've included every single mention of the name, in the order in which they appear in the manuscript -- and thus in the order they were recorded -- to show both the variability, the patterns, and the shift from one default to another over the course of the book's completion. The manuscript has three "hands", which current theory holds represent the same writer at three different periods of work (in which he was copying poems from different manuscript sources that had come into his hand). Whether the different levels of consistency represent his originals or a progressive tendency to use a standard form is an open question. But the most prominent differences between group 1 and group 2 (the use of "dd" versus "Da" as the shortest abbreviation; and the use of "v" versus "f" in the fully spelled out first name) are consistent with an earlier and a later spelling tradition, while the shift from "Davyt" to "Davydd" in the first group suggests the spellings may come from two different spelling traditions within his source for that portion.

The first source

dd ap gwilym (3 times)
Dauit ap glm
Davyt ap glm (3 times)
Davyt ap gwilym
dd ap glm
Davyt ap glim
dd ap glim
Davyt ap glim (2 times)
dd ap glm
dd ap glim (5 times)
Davyt ap glim (2 times)
Dauydd ap glm
Dd ap glm
dd ap glim
Davydd ap glim (3 times)
davydd ap gwilym
davydd ap glim
davydd ap glim
dd ap glm
dd ap glim (2 times)
davydd ap glm
dd ap glim
davyd ap glm
Dauyt ap glm
dauid ap glim
davydd ap glym
dauyd ap glim
Da ap glm

The second group

Da Glm
Dauydd ap Glm
Da ap Glm
Dafydd ap Glm
Da ap Glm (8 times)
D ap Glim
Da ap Glm (14 times)
Dafydd ap Glm
Dd ap Glm
Da ap Glm (7 times)

The third group

Da ap Glm (36 times)
D ap Glm
Da ap Glm (16 times)

Dalby, Andrew. 2012. The Treatise of Walter of Bibbesworth. Prospect Books, Totnes. ISBN 978-1-903018-86-6

(I keep wanting to read the author's name as "Bibblesworth". Then I giggle.)

The names "Prospect Books" and "Andrew Dalby" normally bring to mind "historic culinary literature", so why do we find them here associated with a mid-13th century book on instruction on the French language in the form of rhyming couplets? The backstory of the work is interesting enough on its own. Walter wrote the treatise for his neighbor, Dionisie de Anesty, for the instruction of her two stepchildren. They children's maternal grandfather was William Marshall so their proper instruction was no small matter, one might think. At any rate, Walter penned what is essentially a thematic vocabulary, set out in rhymed couplets, ornamented with a fair amount of wordplay in the form of puns, contrasts of homophones, and the occasional riddle. The subject matter is grouped in topics. As he sets out in his own preface: "the whole vocabulary of ... husbandry and estate management, as in ploughing ... weeding, hoeing, reaping, mowing, carting, stacking, threshing, winnowing and grinding; kneading, malting, brewing, holding a High Feast. THen all the French of beasts and birds ... of woods, croplands and pastures, orchards, gardens, courtyards ... flowers and fruits. Thus you wil find the proper way to speak and answer that every gentleman needs to know."

But where, in this, is the culinary connection? There are, of course, many vocabulary items related to crops and domestic animals, but the section that makes this text of interest to culinary historians takes the reader through the laying out and serving of a meal, though interspersed with unrelated matter for the sake of the obligatory wordplay. Sample sections include:

Clean the house and spread with rushes; set up the table and cover it.
Cover the ends and sides of the table before lords;
At least let this be agreed, cover the table with a white tablecloth.
Cover the second, too, with a white tablecloth if you have one.
...
Wash the cups, clean the bowls, cut the agnails from your nails with scissors;
Off you go, scullion! With your flesh-hook take the haggis out of the pot.
...
Get people together for a meal; you can even do them honour in this way.
Slice this loaf that has been pared; the crusts should be given for alms.
...
A young man of fashion came here from a dinner
And told us about the feast, how the service was arranged.
Without bread and wine or beer no feast will be comfortable;
But they had all three, they told us.
At the beginning was served boar's head, well armed.
The snout with the neck garlanded, then venison with frumenty.
... Then there were various meats roasted, six dishes each and more on the side,
Cranes, peacocks and swans, marsh-geese, sucking-pigs and hens;
As third course they had rabbits in gravy and Viaunde de Cypre steeped,
Mace cubebs and gilded cloves, white and red wine in plenty;
Pheasants, woodcocks, partridges, fieldfares, larks, plovers well roasted.
Brawn, crisps and fritters with powdered rose-sugar as corrective;
And when the table was removed, blanch powder as whole sweetmeats.

* * *
There are also descriptions of brewing and bread-making that, while not sufficient in detail to be used as recipes, are certainly specific enough to be a basis for reconstructing something plausible. Given that the treatise was written well over a century before the Forme of Cury, there is value in interpolating between the sketchy mentions of dishes in Bibbesworth and related items, such as the Vyaunde Cypre in the more detailed later book.

So I want to try something new this year. Rather than simply listing off all the books I picked up at the conference with a brief note on why I bought them, I'm going to try to blog them all individually a bit more in depth.

Jeay, Madeleine & Kathleen Garay. 2006. The Distaff Gospels. Broadview Editions, Peterborough (Ontario). ISBN 978-1-55111-560-3

This is a facing-page bilingual edition of several versions of a 15th century French text that wavers between documenting superstition and folk-magic and satirizing the women who perpetuate and transmit it. The "framing story" of the text asserts that the writer has stumbled on the regular social get-togethers of a group of old spinsters (in the sense of "women engaged in spinning", not at all in the sense of "unmarried women" -- they are all quite sexually experienced). The women have asked him to transcribe their conversations over the course of a series of evenings as they share their traditional lore with each other. The set-up is reminiscent of (and perhaps, again, satirizing) the story-telling framework of the Decameron, with the women electing a leader for each evening's discussion who presents the primary material, which other women then comment on and supplement.

The "gospels" of the title is not the modern editor's label but part of the original text. The shared lore is specifically framed as "gospels", complete with distinct chapters and commentaries, providing a stark contrast with the carnal and often borderline-heretical content of the lore. This content covers relations between men and women, how to manage a husband's behavior, medical advice, practices regarding the divination and/or shaping of the attributes of infants (e.g., gender, personality, health), managing the everyday supernatural (e.g., what to do if your husband is a werewolf), and practical issues around the salvation of one's soul.

Despite the satirical attitude of the author, one practical value of these texts is in providing examples of folk beliefs and practices that are likely close -- if not identical -- to those actually currant at the time. Example:

Another woman said: 'A long time ago I heard one of my relatives relate that she feared that her husband could be a werewolf. But as she had been advised, as soon as night was falling, she would drag her belt or her apron behind her and that way, he could not approach her.'

'This is not a bad strategy,' said another one, 'because it has been proven. But when he is following you, you ust have a consecrated candle with you and hold it in your hands without lighting it, and instantly he will turn away and will go elsewhere in search of adventure.'

I need to borrow a copy of Else Ostergards new book "Medieval Garments Reconstructed" to write a review under deadline. I know several of you have posted about it but can't remember who exactly. Anyone willing to lend it to me for a week? Needless to say, local peeps only!

(Yes, I know, I should own a copy -- I actually ordered it at Kalamazoo 2 years ago but that was a couple of credit card security crises ago and I haven't gotten around to updating my information so they'll ship it.)

1. Picked up my new glasses(es) (how do you pluralize glasses?). The old prescriptions haven't been working well for a while, but it's always a bother to make the appointments (and remember to keep them). I decided to try something different for the glasses themselves. The graduated lenses -- while nice when I first started using them -- have become less useful now that I have dedicated computer glasses. So for the "driving glasses" I went to plain bifocals, which gives me a much larger close-reading field at the bottom even though I also went for a smaller (and lighter) lens overall. They're going to take a little getting used to. Even though the lower field has the same general focal length as the graduateds, the sudden change makes me more aware of it. The computer glasses are much the same (except for the prescription update, of course) but a little smaller and sitting higher on my nose. This means that it's easier to do close reading underneath them, if necessary. (This is useful when, for example, I'm doing hand sewing and watching tv at the same time.)

2. My goal for today is to cut and set up a holiday tree (plus various housekeeping activities necessary to make this possible). There's a nice trunk on the volunteer redwood that I intend to use -- the last hurrah for my home "Christmas tree farm" since the main trunk has now gotten tall enough to touch the phone wires and with that and the upcoming marketing of the house it's time to take it out. This isn't particularly tragic: a redwood tree that takes up root in the 1.5 foot wide strip between the sidewalk and the retaining wall is doomed from the beginning.

3. Among the various pre-marketing projects for the house (hmm: my "house projects" tag is going to get a lot more workout in the next year) will be scheduling the arborist to come in and do some major pruning. I'm also planning to get someone in to do major "garden staging". The yard is a major part of this place's curb appeal and I'll want it dressed its best.

4. My first staging-preparation project is going to be making drastic cuts in my fiction library, as well as packing up the stuff I'm keeping. Given that the second-hand fiction market is essentially non-existent these days, any suggestions for what I should do with assorted sf (more fantasy than hard science fiction) and historic mysteries dating back to the '80s? I have local library sales to fall back on, but other recommendations are entertained.

5. It's being an interesting exercise to decide what to keep. Obviously anything that I do regularly re-read. Also things that I strongly expect to re-read. Series runs that I'm still following as they come out. Works by authors that I'm particularly fond of, whether or not I'm specifically fond of the particular book. By the way, the fiction sifting has been a leftover project from the "life cleaning" of several years ago -- it isn't specifically related to the impending move.

I've often said that I never bothered to remember the titles and authors of books I liked until I started buying books for myself in college ... after all, if you're simply working your way from one end of the library to the other, it'll all get read eventually. So I tend to freeze up when I contemplate one of those memes along the lines of "15 books that have most influenced your life" because I'm horrible at remembering specifics and I've read a very large number of books in my lifetime. But it occurred to me to try my own personal variant: starting from the very beginning, what are the first 15 books I encountered that made enough impact on me that I can still identify them clearly?

It'll probably take a couple of posts to get through this (especially since I only have 5 minutes left on my lunch hour at this point).

1. Dr. Seuss "If I Ran the Circus"

I could already read when I started kindergarten, so I started working my way though the shelf of the class's picture books during "free play" time. I really really wanted to read "If I Ran the Circus" because I hadn't read it yet and it looked interesting, but there was this boy who would always grab it and hog it throughout free play time so no one else could read it. I thought this was particularly egregious since he couldn't even read yet. (I suspect I did eventually get a chance at the book -- a school year is a very long time to successfully hog a book. But what sticks in my memory was the time when I was thwarted.)

2. Somewhere on my computer I have a note saved with the title and author of the next book, which someone on rasfc provided when I described the plot. I read this book, I think, in 2nd grade. The protagonist was a girl from another planet or something along that line and she had a "necklace made of stars" that was an artifact connecting her with her origins. (I was always a sucker for alien protagonists gone astray in the "real" world.) I was in the middle of reading this book on the day that it was "parents visiting day" for my class, so my mother got to witness me completely ignoring my "reading group" get called up to the front of class to do our assignment -- and even ignore my own name get called specifically. I was that engrossed in the book. Fortunately, both teacher and mother considered this amusing.

3. Alexander Key "The Forgotten Door" -- I read this in 4th grade, I believe. At my grade school, normally you stayed in the same classroom with the same people all the time, but occasionally there would be special lessons with students drawn from multiple classes and you'd end up sitting at someone else's desk in someone else's classroom for those. During one of these, I cam across a copy of "The Forgotten Door" in the desk I was borrowing and started reading it, hidden in my lap, while the lesson was going on. Yeah, another story about an "alien" kid gone astray in the real world. Totally hooked. Every day while the special lessons were going on, I'd make sure I sat at that desk so I could read some more. (I have no idea what the topic of the lessons was. I'm sure I got an A.) But it was clear that I wasn't going to be able to finish the story before the series ended, so I went to the drastic step of WRITING DOWN THE AUTHOR AND TITLE so I could locate the book and finish it. I believe I even went so far as to buy a copy.

(to be continued)