Katherine Keenum

From Jesse Hurlburt: Out of the Darkness, Into the Light. May we make the journey. For the full manuscript page, click here.

Exhibition alert: An upcoming exhibition at the British Library—Medieval Women: In Their Own Words—has been announced by the British Library for October 2024. It will cover the lives of aristocrats and peasants and the craftwomen in between. Even one picture supplies information. Just look at the tether on the hen's leg, the little water trough with a chick perched on it, the distaff tucked under the farm woman's arm, and her bare feet. Looks like a great show for historians and historical fiction writers alike—if you have the good luck to be in London.

During an interesting and very convincing recent lecture on the symbolic imagery of curtains in Byzantine liturgical practice, Professor Warren Woodfin discussed this image of Night, the prophet Isaiah, and the little boy Dawn. He connected Nyt's starry shawl in the Paris Psalter to iconographical traditions including the parochet that covered the Ark of the Covenant and altar veils of the Byzantine Christian church. I have to admit though that when he put up a detail of Nyt, my thoughts jumped immediately to Mara's cloak of pocket universes in The Dark Lord of Dernholm and then to all the lovely strands of Greer Gilman's imagery of weaving, scarves, and the Pleiades in Cloud and Ashes. I was trained as a medievalist, but you know what? I'm keeping my fingers crossed Nyt inspires me to something wonderfully fantastic.

This is a detail from a 16th C copy of Rogier van der Weyden's Saint Luke drawing the Madonna. For the religiously literal-minded today, it must seem silly to imagine that one of Jesus's disciples was around as an adult to sketch His mother when He was a baby; but to the more mythically minded Middle Ages and Renaissance, what mattered was not chronology, but devotion. Luke the Evangelist and presumed author of the third Gospel was also believed to be an artist, ergo … a lot of symbolism packed into one painting. Well, leaving aside all the whole, huge topic of belief, resonance, and levels of interpretation, I come down to loving this detail for its exactitude in portraying an artist at work. Even better for the historical novelist is a splendid website post, History and Usage of Metalpoint Drawing.

Website alert: For historical fiction writers, a new website called After the Plague provides a wealth of information on life, health, and death in Cambridge, England, in the period ca. A.D. 1000–1500. It takes findings derived from scientific investigations of a thousand skeletons of people who lived in and around Cambridge and uses them, not only to generalize, but to reconstruct individual lives. Sixteen essay-length profiles are included.

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It's the glasses. Dark glasses, no less! The medieval iconography of Moses with horns is goofy enough, but these spectacles are irresistible. The question is, What to do with the picture besides use it to expound an oddity in art history? Maybe let it provide a model for some imaginary wizard? I like the idea of substituting a goat's face for the man's.

Incidentally, the Hagenau Bible, from which the picture comes, also illustrates a moment in publishing history, the move into mass-produced books through a rationalized system within scriptoria. Might the head scribe of a magical scriptorium be a demon?

Blog post alert: This image of a woman in a transparent veil in Alfonso X's Book of Games sent me searching for information about sheer fabrics in the Middle Ages. Imagine my delight at finding this very woman and my two earlier two chess-playing queens in a post on Two Spanish 13th century outfits. Eva, the blogger, even recreated the embroidery on the sleeves. Check out her very informative website, Eva's historical costuming blog.

Female education bonus: Not only mothers and schoolmistresses teaching girls to read, but from medieval Spain, two queens teaching chess to girls! The illustration is from The Book of Games (chess, dice, and backgammon) commissioned by King Alfonso X of Toledo. It's a wonderful source for images of 13th C Iberian ethnicities, clothes, architectural detail, and more. And the digitization at the RBME Digital website is excellent.

Blog post alert: The British Library is digitizing manuscripts pertinent to the lives of women in the Middle Ages. Hildegard-go! reports on ten manuscripts and contains this illustration of girls learning to read in a classroom. A link to the full manuscript, a Dutch prayer book, lets you view it and the page opposite (f. 28r), which includes an alphabet.

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For a fantasy story I am writing, I've been reading up on the gemstone Lapis lazuli and came across a story in ChemistryWorld— Blue teeth reveal medieval nun's artistic talent. Yippee! The archeological discovery of a particle of ultramarine pigment in the nun's dental tartar offered material proof that nuns worked as illuminators by at least the late Middle Ages. The finding is also covered in Harvard Magazine's Manuscripts Illuminated…by Women. It's of no use to me for my story, but, oh, what about in future?!?

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