After the kazoo? Anyway, I went to the International Congress on Medieval Studies held at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, in person this year! It was a zoo.
First things first, if you looked me up because you want to know more about my presentation, here’s a PDF of the slides.
But if you’re a new reader or a longtime fan who isn’t the sort of person to hear about scholarly medievalism conferences… what is this Kalamazoo thing?
The 2023 conference was made up of over 400 sessions (2-5 presenters each) packed into 3 days, plus an exhibitor’s hall and a bunch of social events and also you have to eat, sleep, and walk all over campus. Apparently the conference used to be larger but got out of hand ten or so years ago, and has been strategically re-focused since then. In case the size of this event wasn’t clear already, the program is a book about the size of a standard manga volume, as thick as my finger and a little bigger than a mass-market paperback– and the program only contains session and presentation names and presenters, no descriptions about anything. One of the things I learned this year is, I should try to come up with catchier titles that have the key terms closer to the front so they’re easier to skim.
Okay, first, something super small that’s been bugging me: when I wrote about the Rule of Saint Benedict and “Open the ears of your heart and listen,” I said I first learned about it from a Janina Ramirez documentary, and it was actually Secrets of the Castle episode 5.
With that out of the way– hi! It’s been a while.
I’ve been getting out to events some this year, and I met (or re-met) quite a few of you. It’s been really good to remember why I do stuff like write blog articles and, really, research in general. It’s just not as interesting without someone to tell about it. You’re all a lot more excited about my weird ideas than I expected after too much time being a hermit, and that really means a lot to me.
I spent much of the beginning of the year preparing for ICMS Kalamazoo, where you joined me on a whirlwind tour of merfolk and epic battles and sinuous hybrids. In Dijon, I showed you teeny tiny writing and said “I don’t know” about Fiore and Florius a lot. In Iowa, I used my dayjob skills to turn parts of your intense but kind of rambly leadership summit into guidelines and standards. In Washington state, I read you stories that were both charming and tragic. In New Hampshire, I wasn’t even presenting anything and you found me and talked to me about translations anyway.
And maybe this was the whole point all along: I’ve missed you, and I think it’s high time I started writing up some of the things I’ve investigated and visited. Yes, I owe you a lot more explanations about merfolk. I haven’t forgotten. And I want to get back to sharing manuscript pictures with you, maybe with more paleography photos I took myself than clippings from scanned manuscripts.
I don’t think I’m ready to start reading social media again, so some experimentation will be required to figure out how this is going to work. But I don’t need to say “I hope you won’t mind”; you’ve all reminded me that that’s what this is all about, and you like seeing new and strange things.
My investigation into gauffering, the practice of impressing patterns into the gilded edges of books, began when I said “Well, it can’t be that rare, I’ve seen it in loads of paintings.”
Since saying that, I’ve been to a couple of major museums (but only a couple, since, y’know, pandemic). My in-museum photography is improving (especially since I got a nice camera), and it’s time for a new installment of “weird little details about books in paintings.” So, here are some photos I took at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Last time, I noticed that in a couple of my examples, the books in paintings had a fancy ornament at the top of the spine. With some new examples and some research, I now believe those ornaments are fancy versions of multi-stranded bookmarks.
Medieval readers didn’t usually read books front to back continuously the way we do now, so the unitary (or are they monolithic?) bookmarks we use now wouldn’t work for them. Instead, many medieval bookmarks had multiple thin cords or strands, all attached to a single anchor that would sit at the top of the spine and keep the individual markers from escaping. These are called portable register bookmarks, because they’re a removable, reusable version of a binding with many ribbons, strings, or strips attached to the top endband for use as bookmarks.
In Gerard David’s The Virgin Among Virgins, three of the women are reading books, and their book bindings and postures indicate they have different tastes and styles. All three have bookmark anchors, and two of them have the same style as the University of Cambridge artifact.
A lot of these examples are women readers, but this biased selection doesn’t reflect actual bookmark-user demographics, in art or in history. Here’s a painting in which two men have portable register bookmarks, as a counterpoint.
Here are the ones I spotted in my National Gallery of Art photos:
I recently gave a presentation about getting started with manuscript research. You can see a PDF of the slides and full-res versions of all the page images in them in this cloud storage folder.
My main advice for new researchers (and, I suppose, everyone): Know why you’re doing this. Know what you want to get out of it, and who you’re doing it for.
Knowing those things will help you find answers to lots of other important questions. What manuscript should you study? Depends why you want to start a new project. What work should you do? Depends what you want to get out of it. What will the end result be? Depends who you’re doing this for.
Your project will be very different if you want to get personally, deeply engaged with a text on a particular subject than if you want to publish a translation of a previously untranslated work. When the going gets tough, understanding your original motivation and goal will help you stay on track.
I’m speaking from personal experience here. I used to wail about how I wasn’t sure I could or should keep going a few times a year until I understood what I get out of translation study group, which is mostly about connecting with the text and sharing that experience, but I also want to share some of it in a bigger way by publishing or releasing a version that can be read by other translators and scholars working on similar texts. I’m not in this to publish a book for newcomers to read as an introduction to historical sword study, and while I would like to bring some novelty to treatise interpretation discourse, I’m not going to starve without that vitamin while I chase down all the details of the text that seem important to understanding it.
But maybe you are! Maybe you are drawn to manuscripts so you can introduce newcomers to the field and introduce seasoned scholars to things they’ve never seen. Only you can know that, and it may require some introspection.
Thanks to the variable time compression effects of this year, I wrote this in early November, thought I’d sleep on it and see if I still liked it, and… well, here we are.
Because apparently I have a research theme for 2020, I’d like to tell you about a variety of medieval depictions of a decorative gold thing that’s said to have been uncommon in practice, but I’ve seen it in lots of artwork from varied sources.
But I’m starting in the wrong place. Let me begin at the beginning.
Sources disagree on how widespread or popular it was: U of Adelaide says “not common”, but the Language of Bindings Thesaurus says “not uncommon.” The Etherington and Roberts dictionary of bookbinding terms goes into more detail: “While this technique was used by a number of European bookbinders, it was especially associated with German bookbinding of the 16th century. The use of color on the edges of books bound in England was less frequent and more restrained. Plain gauffering was done well into the 17th century, usually on embroidered bindings, but appears to have declined sharply after 1650 or so.”
As always, the examples I’m about to show you are artwork– they aren’t photos, and the number or proportion of gauffered books in art has little relationship to the number that were actually made. These examples often place the books in the hands of saints, not ordinary people, and it seems likely the decoration is a symbol of wealth and preciousness. All I’m saying about commonality is all of these artists were aware of it as a way to make a book super fancy.
So. Pictures! First, a couple I saw and photographed in museums.
A Lady Reading (Saint Mary Magdalen), Master of the Female Half-Lengths, about 1530. Art Institute of Chicago
Mary’s gauffered book also has a chemise binding, which has a fabric wrapping built into the binding. It can protect the book from wear and handling or simply add additional tactile richness and specialness. The golden shadows in her book’s chemise may mean it’s made of shot silk, which is woven in a way that makes it change color in light and shadow.
Here’s a different Mary with a different book, from an altarpiece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters galleries. The angel Gabriel is interrupting Mary in the middle of reading a chemise-bound book to give her some big news; beside her on a table is a gauffered book lying open by a small scroll, both on a green drawstring purse.
The thing that caught my eye here and inspired me to take a close-up photo is not actually the gauffering, but the way the pages seem to dance in a breeze or perhaps turn themselves. This is very common in medieval and early modern depictions of open books– you can see it in the Chicago Mary Magdalen’s book too.
According to my rare books professor, who seems trustworthy, this was something medieval and early modern books simply did. The combination of the binding methods of the time and the properties of parchment meant that pages didn’t lie docile waiting to be read, but might seem to turn themselves in response to the book being opened, or might need to be held still for reading.
I didn’t get a picture– this sort of thing is hard to capture with a camera and lens that took two hands to aim– but one of the Morgan Library books I looked at did this a little. Occasionally, a page would refuse to lie flat against its neighbor; I didn’t test whether any would turn themselves. Holding these pages in place is a major function of the little weighted velveteen book snakes the library provided for me.
Parchment can be generally kind of intractable. The gauffered book on the table in the painting has a little strip of binding material bridging across the fore-edge on the left side, which could indicate where the book’s last reader actually left off. But it’s not a bookmark; there are medieval bindings with bound-in ribbons or bookmarks with moving parts to record which page and column you left off on, so we know what a book with an attached bookmark would look like. I think this little strip indicates where the book was left open to (and the clasp naturally fell to, since its leather is too stiff to flop to the table) before the pages turned themselves to their current position.
That’s the strap from a book clasp, which holds the book shut when not in use. Book clasps are very common and in some collections even ubiquitous feature of medieval bindings. While it helps keep the book from flapping open during transport, they’re necessary for parchment books that never travel too. Parchment doesn’t lie flat without encouragement; this is sometimes poetically described as “longing to return to the shape it had when alive.” Book clasps affix the covers into a tidy, parallel slab shape and apply even pressure to the parchment, keeping it from taking ever more lively shapes. Erik Kwakkel’s piece “Hugging a medieval book” is a delightful examination of this practice if you want to know more.
I’m getting away from pictures again. Keep an eye out for more book clasps in these examples from around the internet.
I would have guessed that gauffering was done when a book was nearly finished, but these manuscript miniatures and painting show people writing content into unfinished books that already have decorated edges. It makes sense that gauffering might be done as part of the binding process, which could go before or after the content was put in. Also, it seems to hold up to handling better than I would have guessed (more on this later), so maybe there’s no detriment to doing it early.
Also, as you look at these, take note of the equipment of a scribe– the furniture, the accessories, the storage space, the scraps and note paper.
This illustration shows the author of Roman de la Rose pausing a moment in his work. Lots of manuscripts have a picture of the scribe or compiler of the volume at hand creating it and presenting it to a patron, generally as one of the first few illustrations in the book. This one is different; it’s about three-quarters of the way through the book, a part of the story itself. That suggests he’s probably the original composer of the text itself, possibly Guillaume de Lorris, breaking the fourth wall here.
Even without a caption, the picture itself hints that this must be the original creator, not a copyist or compiler or redactor or glossator. (There’s probably some artistic license at play, so this may not represent how medieval authors actually worked.) He’s writing in neat columns with red symbols and titles giving structure to the piece, and has even left a squarish space for a miniature illustration, like a scribe might do in a presentation copy for a patron or buyer, but not in a composition from scratch. However, something very important is not in this picture. There’s only one open book in sight! He can’t be making a copy of an existing exemplar or draft. I don’t know if scribes ever created copies of works they had memorized, but in this case the text clarifies that he’s the author.
Anyway, note that the large folio tome he’s writing in has gauffered edges. Folio describes a book where the pages are created from sheets of parchment folded once; the book size from sheets folded twice is called quarto, which is what the two volumes in his writing desk are. It’s harder to see, but those both also have patterns on their edges, meaning that (as far as we can tell) all of his books are gauffered– quite the fancy collection! The book he’s writing in is actually so big I’d guess it’s Royal or Imperial folio, since the height of the book looks longer than his forearm. It’s hard to be certain, but I think it’s much bigger than my next example.
The King of Arms of the Order of the Golden Fleece is not as fancy, book-wise, although he is also composing his text in a gauffered folio book. His writing desk is not designed for facing against a wall, which might mean it’s intended for non-solitary use, but I don’t know a lot about writing furniture. This design also means the storage area can be on the tall side, and accessed without interrupting his work or banging his shins with a cabinet door.
Peek inside that cabinet. It appears to be divided by a single shelf, with books stored rather haphazardly above and below. To the modern eye, it may seem more haphazard than the artist intended, since we’re used to books being packed vertically onto shelves with their spines facing out. Take a look at Erik Kwakkel’s post about reference book furniture to see more images of medieval reading and writing rooms with lots of books in them– not a single one has books on a shelf in a case or cabinet, all vertical with their spines facing out.
In the medieval period and into the early modern period, it was unusual for any person or institution to have so many books that they needed to be stored efficiently and in a way that would facilitate finding exactly the one you wanted. Even if you have dozens of books, you would probably recognize them all by their bindings (since matching bindings were also rare!) and picking up and checking each one wouldn’t be that much bother. If you needed to add a label to a book, the page block is a much easier surface to write on than the spine or cover, so you might write your label there and store the book with that edge facing out.
Anyway, I’m getting off track again. The King of Arms of the Order of the Golden Fleece has eight books in addition to the one he’s writing in, mostly stored in a cabinet on the back of his writing desk. Some of them are gilded, but I think none of the closed books are gauffered.
Let us continue, then, to a man who is only shown with five books, but of those, the two biggest ones are gauffered, another has solid-color decorated edges, and two (the ones not lying flat) are labeled on their top edge. Like the others, I’ve included a detail zoom, and since I couldn’t find a photo that showed it better, a color-adjusted version of the detail to draw out the gauffering design a bit.
Nearly all of the books are closed with pairs of metal clasps, except the smallest one which has a binding that wraps all the way around and overlaps, then closes with red ribbon ties that have metal caps. You can also see clearly on two of the books (the closed gauffered one and the one with blue edges) that their covers have metal ornaments, although these in particular are not very ornamental– they all look like flat discs with raised flat discs in the center. These protect the covers from getting worn by rubbing against the surface of whatever book stand they’re read or displayed on. This book furniture is another thing that isn’t possible in collections with lots of books; books with raised metal parts interact awkwardly with each other.
This is Saint Paul, and like many saints, he’s posed here with the object of his martyring: a sword. However, there’s something unusual about this sword (especially as a symbol of martyrdom!)– look closely at the edge, visible just above his left wrist, and you’ll see it seems kind of square, not at all like a cutting edge. The Master of the Parrot has painted Saint Paul writing with not just any sword tucked into his arm; that’s a federschwert, a fencing (rather than war) sword with squarish edges that can withstand a lot of use but can’t be sharpened to cut, and his has an especially fancy grip.
The next few images are paintings of female saints. They’re shown holding books as symbols of their education and studious nature. As you look at these, take note of how they’re holding and using the books. In the modern study of medieval books, we can sometimes guess how a book might have been used by its size, or where the most fingerprints or smudges are.
Saint Auta was one of the companions of Saint Ursula, whose legend tells of the eleven virgins she traveled with (or eleven thousand, depending who you ask). In this altarpiece panel, Auta, still punctured by the arrow of her martyring, with a saintly palm frond tucked between her fingers, holds the viewer’s attention in the foreground, seemingly unaware that her relics are being transported behind her with great ceremony.
Auta’s book looks quarto-size, with edges gauffered in a fine, repeating pattern. It has a chemise binding, but not quite like the ones in the paintings of Mary Magdalen or the Virgin Mary above. Auta’s is trimmed much closer around two edges of the book, but left very long on the third, suggesting that it’s actually a large girdle book. Girdle books had a long extension of their covering material which allowed them to be hung from a belt (or girdle) for hands-free transport. Quarto seems big for carrying on a belt, to me (imagine hanging a modern hardcover novel from your belt) and I would prefer the next smaller size, octavo, which is closer to paperback size, but then, I need different things from books than medieval readers did.
Saint Margaret of Antioch is wrestling with a gauffered folio volume here. I’m impressed; I don’t think I could hold a folio book like this and still have the parchment pop up. The snout at the bottom suggests Margaret is managing this with a smallish dragon underfoot. One of her miracles was surviving being swallowed by a dragon, and freeing herself by inflicting her faith upon it from the inside.
Because she exited an abdomen unharmed, one of her saintly specialties is protecting or interceding on behalf of women in labor. Some depictions of her show the dragon holding receiving blankets in its mouth, although this often looks more like she’s found a way to deal with her dragon’s uncontrollable drooling problem. Margaret is also one of the saints who spoke to Joan of Arc (probably sans dragon drool).
Margaret’s book has hinged metal clasps– you can see the clasp dangling from the far edge, and the metal piece it connects to protruding on the near edge. These smooth, square clasps are reminiscent of the ones on Saint Paul’s books. The top end of the spine looks interesting, but I couldn’t find a better resolution image that revealed what the little gold flower shape is.
Looking for a bigger photo of the Phoenix Saint Margaret is how I found this lovely triptych, also by Jacob Corneliusz von Oostsanen. Like the Annunciation at the Met, the wings of this triptych are attached with hinges so they can be closed across the center panel like shutters. The format creates a natural hierarchy of significance, with the center image of Mary and Jesus twice as large as the scenes with saints to either side. These particular saints were a popular combination, so much that the Wikipedia page about triptychs has another example with the same composition and subjects, including a gauffered book with an ornament at the top of the spine.
Saint Catherine of Alexandria (on the left with the sword and wheel) and Saint Barbara (on the right with the castle tower) are among the “Fourteen Holy Helpers,” the most effective saints to pray to in adversity, as well as virgin martyrs associated with self-education. I think they are great role models for daughters, but Barbara is known primarily for defying her father and Catherine’s big skill was winning debates against opponents twice her age. I suspect many parents might prefer the quiet behavior shown in the painting.
Catherine is reading a book with zig-zag gauffering, a single metal clasp, and a large gold and pearl ornament at the top of the spine (maybe a much blingier version of the feature on Margaret’s book?) which also anchors a thin bookmark with a gold tassel at the bottom. Barbara’s book has nested arch shapes in the gauffering, a large gold clasp, and appears to have a gold-stamped cover, providing an extra touch of richness– bindings were most often blind-stamped, tooled with no ink or foil.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the first manuscript I transcribed and translated from was a heckin’ chonker of a two-volume gauffered set. I don’t have any photos with other objects for reference, but the cover measurement on these is 402 mm x 276 mm, nearly 16 x 11 inches.
This is Paulus Hector Mair’s Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica, the copy that is held in Vienna. It’s on paper, not parchment, so it doesn’t need clasps, though the paper has picked up a bit of a warp. It’s interesting that the edge decorations use different designs– maybe the pattern-rollers were very width specific? If you look at the corners, you can see a little wear, especially on the second volume (the thicker one), but all in all, the fancy decoration is in great shape for being well over 400 years old.
The heckin’ chonker size is important, although it’s hard to keep in mind when I’m reading the book as high-res scans. There are a lot of things we don’t know about combat manuscripts, but how they were used (or intended to be used) is a really big one. The size and shape of books can be a hint, either because they match a specific size with a known use, or because their size or shape renders some uses impossible. Look at the books in these paintings, and their sizes, and how people are interacting with them. Then imagine going to sword class with a book like Saint Margaret’s. In a very literal way, where does a book like that fit in class? How would you use Mair’s two-volume set?
I’ve strayed a long way from my plan to show you some pictures of gauffered books, though I guess that won’t surprise you much if you’ve been following my writing. Loosely controlled straying is how I get from “What did medieval people do?” to “How did they do it?” to “Why did they do it that way?” The answers are rarely what I expect– when I find answers– but that’s how I know I’m on the right track. If my expectations aren’t being challenged, am I even learning anything?
I don’t tend to write about the kind of profound stuff that might rock your world, but I hope going on these rambles with me shakes up your expectations occasionally!
A little administrative announcement first: I’ve added pages to the top navigation area collecting my appearances elsewhere around the internet, one for video and audio recordings like podcasts, the other for writing and other stuff. Give a look at Writing and other projects and Lectures and recordings when you get a chance!
Second, a humble admission: in the name of getting this out to you sooner (or ever), I haven’t done a thorough editing pass. Please forgive any imperfections.
I was going to start with a joke about in these strange times, we can’t carry on doing what we always have but really that seems unnecessary.
Here’s a more true beginning: After being asked about it many times, I’ve finally started looking at artwork showing men’s armor in manuscripts. Strange days, indeed.
I’ve been avoiding it. There’s a huge amount to study. The ladies’ armor artwork spans at least 200 years, during which there were numerous major trends (regional and otherwise), and maybe that’s fine for a survey but it’s far too much to look into in depth.
Sometimes, the best approach is to wait and see what Lady Fortune puts into my hands. On this occasion, the key was searching the broader internet for videos of lectures at museums and universities. I cast myself upon the algorithms, and found myself watching Dr. Tobias Capwell talk about Saint Michael as painted by Bartolome Bermejo. The painting drew me in, and as I examined its details, I was reminded of something, and I realized I had my answer.
I swear all I did was adjust the color settings in the highlighted zones. That really is part of the painting. Seriously, though, look at it for real, it’s great.
Wait, no.
I had my answer: To balance and complement heavily bejeweled ballgown armor from tapestries and allegories, I could look at men’s fantasy armor– more usually called “the heroic style”– as it was depicted in the late fifteenth century.
I knew I was on the right track as soon as I started finding more questions than answers.
So, here’s the first one: In the Bermejo St. Michael lecture, Dr. Capwell talks about fire-gilded armor, where a thin layer of gold is fused into the outer surface of the steel. It was as dazzling in reality as in the painting, he says, and was expensive and rare. Few people could even dream of it, but a special few including Charles the Bold were able to indulge and realize their elaborate fantasies. (Maybe they shouldn’t have.)
But here’s the thing– ever since finding out fifteenth-century chronicles sometimes have pictures of women leading armies, I’ve made sure to get a steady diet of them. And something snagged my curiosity early in this exploration, which has grown over time with each mention of “gold armor is special and rare.”
So, the first of many questions about illustrations of men’s armor from the mid to late 15th century:
Why is there so much gold armor in manuscript art?
The Bermejo painting offers an easy answer: because putting important heroic characters in the kind of fantastic armor dukes and kings dream of makes sense.
This seems like a good place for a little sidebar about fiction. In medieval literature, the lines between fiction and nonfiction are very blurry; history and legend are often not treated differently from each other. It’s sort of like a universe in which everything anyone has ever believed seriously is true somewhere.
Gentle readers, it’s been a while since I wrote. I keep starting to, but to write about new armor lady pictures I’ve found I need to think of something to say about them, so I need to know when and where they’re all from, and somehow I never write down all the information I need on the first try, and then somehow the weekend is over again and while I have glorious heaps of downloaded pictures and manuscript scans and maybe they’re tagged correctly, I still haven’t written anything.
So… Let’s do something different. Let’s go on a paleography adventure! Come with me while I explore some old handwriting.
Most of the manuscripts I look at are not first drafts. I usually read books that were made by commission or for sale, though not all of them were finished. The handwriting is consistent and even and intentional, whether or not I can read it easily. They have few if any corrections (by the writer’s hand or any other), and sadly only rarely have marginal notes.
In my ongoing translation project, we’ve been looking at terminology consistency, things like how many words are used for a particular concept in Latin and how many in German. It occurred to me that in order to create a new translation with consistent terminology, the translator would need to work through the whole text once to find out what all the concepts are, and then choose consistent terms to use, and then go back and re-work it to put all of the terms in the right places. It should’ve been obvious, since the manuscript we’re working from doesn’t have corrections, but I had never thought about the existence of a translation draft.
What would that look like? Would it have as many extra notes and corrections as my drafts do? I may never know about this exact text, but I have hope that someday I’ll know more about what tools and steps were involved in creating new translations in the 16th century. And maybe somewhere, some library or museum has a gloriously messy translation notebook from someone who was working German to Latin.
My brother recently asked me a question after watching this “Instant Legolas device” video. The video mentions that “nothing in the medieval world was not decorated.” The question was whether that was a cultural thing, or a misperception based on survivorship bias where the objects likeliest to survive into the modern era were generally higher quality and fancier.
My first reaction was that an average person’s regular tools must have been simpler and plainer, because who needs an everyday wood-choppin’ axe that’s got fancy borders?
On the other hand, it is true that people in the past in basically every era before 1900 used more decoration on the things they did decorate than modern people do or would. The term horror vacui refers to decorations or details that fill all available space as though the creator was afraid of emptiness, and has been applied to works from Victorian England as well as Ancient Greece.
What do I mean by “more decoration”?
There’s a rule of thumb in historical costuming that once you’ve put trim on your clothing, you should go back and add at least that much more trim to achieve the minimum historical look. Modern sensibilities are simply never over-the-top enough. Let’s start with something familiar. Think of a necklace, maybe something you’d give as a gift or wear yourself. Now think of an elaborate necklace, extra-fancy, maybe even gaudy.
Darth Kendra Research 
