With back-to-back Crown Tourney and business meeting, my SCA brain is fully re-engaged! Also, apparently I don’t function well without something of a sense of urgency, and I have both some internal and some external drivers generating that sense of urgency, so I’m grabbing on to the momentum with both hands and riding it as far as it will take me.
I don’t think I’m going to get back to getting these posts up weekly – my work pace is such that there’s just not a lot of interesting change week-to-week sometimes – but monthly or more, definitely. I think it’s just going to depend on what all is going on.
Working on:
I finished a big woodcut project a few weekends ago and then scrambled to finish a new vasquiña for Crown, and so I’m sort of between projects at the moment. I came back all fired up (as one does) and thinking about next steps on my garb. I’ve decided it’s time to suck it up and push through the last leg of the wool ropa, so I’ll be starting on that tomorrow night. By the time that’s done, fabric I ordered yesterday will have arrived to add sleeves to the ochre red working class dress I wore to Battlemoor X, and a new working class ensemble in grey-brown (fabric-store.com’s Drizzle – isn’t that color fantastic?) trimmed in black. And then I’ll come back to the black silk-and-velvet gown I wore on Saturday and figure out how to fix the (many) problems with it.
I have a large and impressive Gothic book that also has several problems that I think I can fix, and I’m going to tackle that this weekend, and then plan out some new book projects.
Reading:
The History of the Book in the West: 400AD-1455: Volume I (The History of the Book in the West: A Library of Critical Essays): y’all, this is a monster. 400+ pages of deeply dense scholarly writing (some of the authors included assume that, well, if you’re reading on this topic, you must be conversant in Latin, which I’m… not) and some of it is outside of my areas of interest, but it’s all fascinating, and there’s some stuff about the evolution of calligraphy in there that just about blew my mind. Recommended, with caveats; it’s not for the faint of heart.
The St Cuthbert Gospel: Studies on the Insular Manuscript of the Gospel of John: This is actually quite a lot more approachable. It’s a full monograph study on this one beautiful, important, and actually kind of oddball book that represents a snapshot of a particular moment of evolution in the codex that I’m really fascinated by. Again, I’m less interested in some parts (bibliographic provenance) than others (the OMG INCREDIBLY DETAILED analysis of the internal structure!!!) but enjoyed it all. Gorgeous, with many, many full-color plates. Must-have.
The Modern Maker Vol. 2 / Matthew Gnagy: I just brought this home yesterday, haven’t gotten into it yet, but, well, I’m making 16c Spanish garb, so there you go. I will of course buy it at some point but didn’t want to right now, so I’ve got it on ILL.
Geeking out on:
There’s a weird sort of black hole in the timeline of the codex, from about 700AD to about 1200AD, which is also (deeply unfortunately) a period of huge variation and innovation in book structure, from what we can tell from the tiny, tiny number of extant bindings. This is the period where the Western and Islamic bookbinding traditions diverged; we see new tools, new practices (sewn spine supports! treasure bindings!), multiple different practices and styles being produced in nearly the same place and time, some unique examples of experimental techniques, and some of the first contemporary documentation of the actual manufacture of books. But almost all of the surviving books from the period were rebound at some point, whether to extend their usable life or preserve the internal content. So the knowledge we have is very fragmentary and rather heavily weighted toward the few good exemplars (like the St. Cuthbert Gospel) that have been studied in great detail, and there are also very, very few reliable secondary sources that articulate a useful timeline of styles (Szirmai being the go-to; there’s an absolutely superb new book out, The Codex in Context: The Craft of Bookmaking in Late Antiquity by Georgios Boudalis, that overlaps Szirmai’s earliest chapters, and I’ve got a couple of other promising candidates in my to-read pile). It’s a fascinating rabbithole that I’m just getting started going down, but I feel like a research paper might be coming out of this.
Next Up:
The aforementioned sewing and bookbinding. I finished a reproduction of the title page illustration from the (illegal, totally pirated from Cervantes’ Madrid-based publisher) 1605 Lisbon edition of Don Quijote and I’ve just started working on a companion xylographic block with a favorite quote, and I’m thinking about what my next project will be.
The original (left), and my copy.
Liepa Jonaite's SCA pages 