I've found some strange things while cleaning bathrooms in my time (I worked in a nightclub while in undergrad; I saw stuff), but never a piece of medieval sculpture.
When lit from behind like this, the rich texture and complexity of this white-on-white linen altarcloth is readily apparent. So much work must have gone into this piece, which was made ca. 1350 by sisters of the #Premonstratensian abbey of Altenberg an der Lahn.
Now Cleveland Museum of Art, 1948.352: https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1948.352
The appendices of this book published in 1994 are more inaccessible to me than your average medieval MS. Even if the disk is still readable 30 years on, I have no 3.5" drive; even if I find such a drive, how do I access files written for IBM DOS? Since the author's now deceased, I worry that a chunk of her work is just... lost.
In theory, putting a minimalist concrete and steel shelving system into a Baroque library should be jarring—but I think this works surprisingly well? Maybe it's the light & the use of white space.
Želiv Abbey is a #Premonstratensian community founded in the 12th c.
https://www.yatzer.com/library-monastery-zeliv-monastery-sepka-architects
I love coming across little finds like this as I work through the notebooks of an early modern scholar. It's more than 300 years since this skein of silk threads—used to hold the wax imprint of a #medieval seal—was placed between these pages, but the colours are still as bright as the day it was made.
(Nancy, Bibliothèque Stanislas, MS 992, vol. 14)
I'm hypnotised by the rippling abdominal muscles of this farmer from medieval Roscommon.
https://www.rte.ie/news/connacht/2024/0318/1438550-roscommon-ringforts/
""Astrolabes are a wonderful example demonstrating that knowledge was always in motion, already in pre-modern times."
I love how simple the catalyst for this discovery was!
Some last photos from my Budapest trip: I’d never seen painted medieval book covers like these in person before. They were used for the account books of the Biccherna (chief financial officer of the commune of Siena) from the mid-13th to early 18th centuries.
Now Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
Every time I add a new reader’s card for an archives or research library to my collection, I wonder if this is what a Pokémon player feels like—though I’m not intending to visit ‘em all, of course. This week’s new-to-me readers’ room: the National Archives of Ireland.
This morning’s visit to Marsh’s Library, Dublin: a pocket-size public library that today still looks much as it did when first built in 1707.
"Few documents that survive from #medieval Europe were written by women or even dictated by women. Those that do are often formulaic, full of legal and religious language. Yet the wills and censuses that survive, and which I study, open a window into their lives and minds, even if not produced by women’s hands. These documents suggest that medieval women had at least some form of empowerment to define their lives – and deaths."
Of course the first site I visited on my first trip to Budapest had to be one with Premonstratensian connections. This is St Michael’s Chapel on Margitsziget (Margaret Island) in the middle of the Danube, which was founded in the 13th century as a monastery church. It remained in use until the 1520s.
An interesting find! It looks very much like it's the burial ground of the #Premonstratensian abbey of Woodburn, a late 12th century foundation. Woodburn had links to the Anglo-Norman lord John de Courcy, who was himself the builder of the nearby Carrickfergus Castle.
Working in a Special Collections in Ireland with a copy of trusty ole Gwynn and Hancock to hand is giving me such flashbacks to my misspent undergrad days. (For certain values of misspent.)
