I think I may have blogged about this before, but I can't really remember - and that means it's not a bad idea to revisit the "Projekt Tafelmalerei" of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. 

The GNM has a very large collection of late medieval paintings on wood, and there's a project to research these paintings and make the information about them accessible on the Internet. The whole thing can be found at tafelmalerei.gnm.de and features 148 paintings, starting in 1260 and ending in 1520. So if you're interested in late medieval artwork, you might want to check it out.

The platform is German only; you find the paintings under "Objekte", and then there's preview images for all the items.

Especially interesting: There's a painting by the Meister von Uttenheim showing the Birth of Mary, and there's a lady dressed in a green gown that has a similar cut to one of the Lengberg dress fragments. Plus she's wearing a headdress with a geometrically ornamented inset - maybe something similar to a cap like that also found in Lengberg?

We were wondering about old-style recipes for cakes a while ago, inspired by some quite old (Art Deco) tableware, which had rather small plates for the cakes (or whatever else would have been served on them).

So I did as you do when wondering about stuff like that - I went into the Internet Archive and the Open Library and had a rootle around for recipe books from the end of the 19th century.

One of the books I came across was a really curious example, with a lot of advertisements, and a lot of recipes, but not just for cooking, no, for about everything from dyeing wool to dyeing hair to cleaning stuff to baking to curing sick horses. It's called the Brill's Family Recipe book. 

I'm not sure if I will actually try one of the cake recipes - but it was definitely very amusing to leaf through this curious mixture, and it does give an impression of what was considered important or necessary recipes back then. 

It's gotten really, really cold here yesterday evening (well, mostly compared to how warm it was for most of autumn and early winter), with us being solidly in the minus degrees, and today close to -10°C. Which is wonderful, in my opinion, due to several things: 

It finally feels a bit more like winter, and Xmas coming up. I don't have to worry about the cookies placed in the wintergarden getting too warm and cosy. The bit of snow that we got stays on the ground, making everything look much more wintery (see above).

But, most important, and on top of my hooray list right now: We can finally defrost the freezer, storing its frozen contents outside while the machine thaws and we remove the layers of ice that have built up. They are not horrendously thick yet, but quite noticeable, and I've been waiting for a chance to do this for ages now, but it has never been cold enough for long enough (with a reliable prediction, and preferably at a time when we're actually at home and can do it). The fridge's freezer compartment is already almost done; that's much less to clear out and hoist outside, so it was a spur of the moment job this morning. (In relation to volume, the fridge compartment for freezing had much, much more ice in it as well.) Most curious side effect, and the reason why this action is taking a bit longer than it would have for just clearing the ice out: I discovered that ice had also built up inside the door to the compartment. 

Telltale sign for that was water starting to drip out of the door corner as the defrosting started. Fortunately the door attachment to the fridge itself can be rather easily removed (it's a single screw holding one of the hinge parts), and so the door is now lying in a warm spot to thoroughly thaw and get rid of the water inside.

Once that's done, the fridge will go back into action, and then once it has cooled down the freezer compartment again, contents will go back inside. And then tonight the same thing with the freezer. (Sans the water-in-the-door, though... obviously. At least I hope there won't be secret stashes of ice in spots they are not supposed to be!)

Monday! Let's see what this week will bring - I have a list of stuff to take care of and, if possible, finish. Among these things is more involved stuff as doing a few tablet-woven patterns, then take photos of them (for not just one, but two articles that will appear next year), but also small puny tasks that I've just not gotten around to yet, such as "put away the last pots that still sit outside in the garden so they don't get killed by frost over the winter". It's actually getting cold here now, and there's been some snow falling yesterday and today, so we are finally getting something that feels like winter.

Which is very welcome to me, because it's somehow weird and sad to approach Xmas without it feeling like it's December, and wintry, and having a bit of snow and cold wind now and then. 

Speaking of months... In case you have some German and are looking for something to do tomorrow evening, the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg is doing a presentation about early printed calendars via Zoom tomorrow. Start is 19:00 German time, and you can join in for free via the link on their website.

I've stumbled across Digital Mappa a good long(ish) while ago, and I might or might not have posted about it here on the blog, but it might be time to revisit that. 

Digital Mappa is a tool for digital annotation of manuscripts and images, with the possibility to link multiple different sources, highlight parts of them, and, in short, do a bunch of interesting and potentially helpful things when researching and comparing stuff. Back when I last looked into it, I didn't find anything where you could use the platform without using your own installation. Which I tried to set up, but failed. 

A while ago I received a note about an update to the platform software, and I put on my list to check it out and maybe re-try installing it. These days, I finally got around to looking into it - and I found this article about DM. With, to my utter and great delight, a link to an installation where one can register and then use an already installed, up-and-running version.

Hooray! I've not spent a lot of time with the DM yet, and it certainly takes a little while to get used to, but I have hopes that it will be very, very useful for me and some of my projects - including some collaborative projects as well.

It's hard to believe, but it's blogiversary day again. And, even harder to believe, I am actually remembering to write about it on the very day itself!

Back when I started this, in 2008, I started out writing on the blogspot platform, and stayed there until 2015 - which was when I made a new website on Joomla, pulling everything together in one spot. 

There's been a lot of writing over the years, and there's been a lot of years since 2008. This blog is turning 14 today. FOURTEEN. Please excuse me while I am not believing this for a while. 

I've tried to find out how long the average lifespan of a blog is, and it seems to be somewhere around 3-4 years, but that's from an older blogpost... somewhere. Anyway, I think everything over ten years makes any blog some kind of dinosaur. In a similar line of thought, these days, I sometimes feel like I'm very old-fashioned, still doing a blog, while so many others have switched to (mostly) Instagram, or are on tictoc (I am so old I haven't even visited that yet), or somewhere that I haven't even heard of. While I'm also on Instagram, the blog is still my main thing. It's easier to search through the old entries than Instagram is, and for the instances that I feel like writing a lot, it's better suited to that.

Though admittedly, a lot of the entries are short, and sometimes it feels like I've written about everything at least once. From time to time, that means I sort of run out of steam, and wonder about whether I should stop or not - but then there's this link or that interesting article or something I feel like I need to rant about, and on it goes.

And then, from time to time, I get an utterly nice email telling me that someone stumbled across this blog, and found so many interesting things there... which always makes my day, and is the best reason for me to carry on a while longer. So there we go.

Blogiversary! Coffee and chocolate for celebration!  

There's a presentation about (Re?)Building Textile Archaeology in the Nile Valley, hosted by the CTR, on December 9 - it's the inaugural lecture of Elsa Yvanez. You can join in with a pre-registration; more information about the lecture and how to attend can be found on the CTR website. 

The Conversation has an article about the DNA of medieval Jews - apparently some mutations of the Ashkenazi subgroup can already be seen in gene samples from the 14th century.

An interesting site if you're looking at images with Christian content (and there's so, so many of them if you're looking at medieval art): christianiconography.info is a "Guide to Christian Iconography: Images, Symbols, and Texts".