A friend pointed me to the existence of a small book called "The Manly Art of Knitting", written by Dave Fougner. It seems to be available used only, and that to a steep price - 90+ USD from the Big River Store, at least.

However, for those of you just curious about the contents, like me, with no actual need to buy it, there's a very nice review on the Historic crafts blog. (They have since moved to a new location, here on blogspot, and it looks like a nice blog, but unfortunately with no new posts done during the last year.)

Anyways - manly art of knitting. The book appears to contain instructions on how to knit a hammock, among other things (I like that idea). A hammock would be just the thing to lie in during this summer heat we have here (though that would also mean we'd need two conveniently spaced trees... which are not to be had in our garden).

Other (not so manly) links - on Medieval Silkwork, there's a post about female undergarments in written sources.

And I should be working on my article now, the deadline is looming up...

Cathy Raymond asked in a comment about my last Lengberg finds mention:

I blogged about that particular item awhile ago, pointing out its resemblance to the ancient Roman subligar which was worn by women, and an anonymous blogger commented that the Lengberg find had been identified as a man's garment. The blogger also claimed that a lot of 15th c German images show men wearing such garments.

The University of Innsbruck's web article on the finds agrees with my anonymous blogger--it identifies the item as a man's garment, and remarks, I believe, that it was found close to a wool fabric scrap believed to have come from a codpiece. Given that the Lengberg finds did not come from graves, I don't think that sort of association, in and of itself, is persuasive evidence. But there may be other evidence I don't know anything about that supports the identification of the garment as male.

Can you point me to any images confirming that men wore such garments? The English and French images with which I am familiar show men wearing briefs that look more like modern Fruit of the Loom briefs, but I'm not very familiar with 15th German miniatures or artwork.

These pictures are not very frequent, and most of the examples I have found are from crucifiction scenes where the two other guys are shown as well, or from similar martyr scenes. One example from a crucifiction scene, from end-of-15th-century Austria, is here in the IMAREAL. If you search for "Kreuzigung" with the timespan 1300-1600, there is at least one more example. When I'm specifically searching for those undies, I am thus looking for crucifiction scenes - though those only showing Christ will not suffice, since he's invariably shown with a cloth covering his nethers, no modern underwear.

Sometimes the corresponding undies are also shown in bed scenes or in "battle for the trousers" scenes. Those topics are usually searchable in most piccie databases, so I'd recommend them as search terms.

(Technically, you can also search for clothing - underwear or underpants on IMAREAL. However, the tagging is not always complete or correct, and that search will not necessarily find you all the instances. This is not intended to bash the IMAREAL tagging - I have a private, tagged, picture database and I do know how hard it is to do it consistently and correctly all the time.)

Oh, and regarding the male-or-female discussion: We have proof (picture proof) that these types of underpant were worn by men, but that does not exclude them being worn by women. We just have no picture (or other) proof for it yet. So personally, I would say that it's not very likely that a lot of women wore them, but that they might have been used by some, or in some circumstances as for controlling blood during menstruation, for example.

I hope that helps!

You have of course heard about the Lengberg Underwear finds - Beatrix Nutz is still very active publishing them, and a new article in French is in "Histoire et Images Medievales" published this month.

Meanwhile, others are putting their own experience together with the new finds, such as Isis Sturtevagen, who has a very interesting article about medieval underwear on her blog.

In non-bra news, the first Call for Papers for the 2013 UK Experimental Archaeology Conference to be held at Cardiff University and St Fagans National History Museum, Cardiff, on 11 – 12 January 2013, is out. Information and the usual other stuff ; ) can be found at the conference blog/website.

And finally, and something totally different: There's a new archaeological dissertation blog online, about “Sámi circular offering sites – a comparative archaeological analysis”. It is a PhD project in archaeology by Marte Spangen, Stockholm University.
I think it's very nice that more and more PhD folks blog about their work!

First of all a link to an archaeological find (h/t to Cathy, who blogged this first ): Unique find at Viking Burial Place (with textiles).

Then there's an ebook library with lots of free ebooks, including some about archaeology. As with one of the library links I posted before, there's unfortunately no proper "about" info - the site footer is written in something that looks like kyrillic script to me. Use with your own conscience and smarts intact, and please consider buying a version of a book through your book dealer of preference in case you really like one of the books.

And finally, a link to one of the databases that I wrote about a few days ago: the Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive, with images from the 12th to 20th century. They have a searchable database with descriptions, though "spindle" and "spinning" are not in there, and all pics I have seen in my glance at it were black and white. Still, lots of pictures and searchable by, for example, saints' names.

A few days ago, I stumbled across this sprang object in the Met museum, dated to 1450-1500. Late medieval sprang again, isn't that nice? And patterned too...

And if you are more into tabletweaving: Amalia has posted photos and information about a tablet-weave from Estonia. It's the border of an 13-14th century shawl or stole, a beautiful piece, and you should totally check it out.




(You should have clicked that link. Really. Not only because it's a beautiful textile, but also because I have nothing more to say here today.)

If you've ever wished to take a walk along the Bayeux tapestry, but you are not getting to Bayeux for now, you can do so virtually - the full tapestry is on the internet.

Now usually, I'll be one of the crowd that says horizontal scrolling on webpages is evil - but in this case... it's just cool.

After writing my PhD thesis (which will come out one day in English, I have not forgotten you - I am doing things towards it) I was quite happy to get going on some other writing/research topic. Unfortunately, though, that project fizzled out very soon in its career.

Then all those other things that will assault a freelancer and beg for time took over. Organising or re-organising things, getting smart about how to do invoices, keeping track of finances, sourcing goods that I could sell on markets, preparing workshops, flyers, business cards and so on. The decision to do a blog, and the time that went into it. Projects usually came (and still come) in clumps as well, tearing huge rifts into plans and schedules. And Textile Forum came into my life and took over for a few weeks each year (and will do so next year). In short, I did not get around to do much writing and research for the other book project that was still in my figurative desk drawer. And I sort of fell into a research hole.

Then came the opportunity to work again on that project. Let's call it... Dusty Old Bookproject, or DOB for short. I started, did some stuff, and ran against a wall because what I had thought would be a slight restructure and extension... was not. It needed a full re-thinking, re-working and re-structuring, and I could not see that yet. So I did some things on and off, but it really didn't come along very well. And there was still all the other freelancing stuff to be taken care of, which takes a huge chunk of time, continuously.

Then along came Exciting New (to me) Bookproject, and I suddenly rediscovered that research is such a huge heap of fun. Pure unadulterated fun in sitting in the library, going through books, taking up snippets of information and learning new things, new angles, new concepts. So now I am working on both of them, DOB and ENB, and instead of having a bad conscience... I feel good, because I am actually doing more work on DOB now than I did before ENB came along.

And I'm at a stage for DOB where I am looking for more material. More specifically, I am searching for links or books or hints on where some more extant headwear might be found. Date range is from about 500 to 1500, though I might narrow that down for the final book. Geographic range is Europe. And I'd be delighted if you could tell me of some, because just like the proverb says: Four (hundred) eyes see (much) better than two.