Long time no see...

It's been already two years since my last post - time does fly...
Please forgive me for not updating, but again so much has happened in real live!

Among other things there was the question whether I wanted to start working freelance making replicas of historical objects (not just books). My good friend Jörg Nadler needed a set of garments for his 18th century persona, a fisherman from the town of Schleswig in northern Germany, so I spend some time making clothes.

Fisherman around 1765

I had a lot of fun researching and making things out of my normal time period, but I felt that only making garments was not really my cup of tea, I missed making books.

And then almost out of nowhere a huge order came in and I spend the next 5 months making one historical book after the other :-)

I'll tell you about that in another post, but for now just a quick preview:

Prayer book with an overcover

Holy blingbling

Some of the most fascinating medieval textiles survived time because they were kept in church treasuries as relic pouches, church vestments ect.  

You see them in museums, admire the gorgeous craftsmanship - but why bother to recreate them, normaly they are of no use at a living history event...

Lid of a communion wafer box from Bayrisches Nationalmuseum

Really? Piety was an important part of everyday live throughout the middle ages, so we thought about explainig a bit of that to the public at museum events for a change. And besides being a very interesting aspect of live (ecspecially if you grew up in a family of agnostics like me...), it is a wonderful reason to recreate rather unusual stuff :-)

We already had the little Totentanz I made last year, some pilgrim badges, a rosary - kind of normal stuff... So why not go for something fancy, something the medieval pilgrim would have seen at a "Heiltumsweisung" (presentation of holy artefacts to the public, sometimes with a procesion): a relic. Or two, or maybe even three...

Andi and I began to research on interesting relics covered in textiles (yes, there are those incorporated in big vessels made of precious metals - I'll go for them after I won the lottery...). I started to play around with bits of silk fabric, silk and gold thread, small gold bezans, glass beads, pearls, pen and paper. Andi took care of what was going to be inside the textile covering: skulls and bones. And after ten months of research and handiwork, we finally had this: 

Display of our relic replicas at Marienstiftskirche Lich

The first thing I finished was a box for communion wafers - these were often used later on to house relics.

A round splint box of apr. 10cm diameter, covered and lined with fine linen fabric. On the outside the linen is covered by a 13th century silk fabric (replica). A fingerloop braid made from silk and goldthread covers the brim of the lid and forms a closure over a rock crystal bead. Small blue and white glass beads are sewn to the braid and over the area where the silk is fixed to the linen at the lower part of the boxes body.

Examples of this type of Pyxis ("box") are now in Basel (Historisches Museum), Munich (Bayrisches Nationalmuseum) and Regensburg (Historisches Museum).



Pyxis with silk covering

And then the "Bone-box" arrived - a parcel full of ribs, finger bones and skulls. No real human bones of course, but high class anatomical 100% scale models, really hard to tell from the real thing...

A lot of the relic busts you can see in churches and museums today have been altered (some of them even more than once) since the middle ages, so we looked for the rather rare examples without baroque additions. Not very successful until Isis from Medieval Silkwork visited us and brought a book with her called "Stof Uit de Kist. de Middeleeuwse Textielschat Uit de Abdij Van St.-Truiden " (thanks Isis!). And in there was what we were looking for: A relic bust covered in silk showing the cranium of a saints skull. Thanks to the photos and detailed description it was possible to build a bust just like the original.

Andi altered the colour of the part of the skull that would be visible so that it looked old and like it was touched rather often. Then he build an understructure out of wood to put the cranium onto. I made a linen cover for it stuffed with leftover bits of wool fabric and attached the visible silk covering to it. Just like the original, the bust is only meant to be seen from this side - the other side is not even covered at all, you can still see the wooden structure.

relic bust replica covered in 11th century silk

Besides the relic bust they also have skulls wrapped in silk fabrics in Sint-Truiden abby, so we also replicated those. The originals supposedly belonged to some of the 11.000 virginal handmaidens of St. Ursula... Relics of the 11.000 maidens can be found all over europe today - there literally was a "maiden export trade" in Cologne in the middle ages:  Outside the city gates a burial ground was found in the 12th century (then called ager Ursulanus) containing the remains of the maidens. Today there is a widespread belief that it was just one of the many roman or early medieval grave fields in and around Cologne ;-)       

Anyway, medieval people believed in the 11.000 handmaidens, so we replicated two of them: To the left a skull wrapped in red silk tafetta with a headband and bands crossing at the top of the head made from gold brocaded "Kölner Borte" (bands from Cologne woven with gold thread). I was lucky enough to buy one meter of it from a church vestment workshop - they sold some leftovers from around 1920 and older...

To the right a skull covered in silk gauze with a tabletwoven silk headband I made with little flower shaped gold bezans. The warp of the headband appears to be striped because the tablets alternated s and z in groups...

skulls of less important saint were often just sewn into fabric
instead of incorporating them into a precious metal vessel 

Looking for other types of relics we came across some put inside a glass or crystal vessel, so we had to build one of those. Here is a bone fragment put inside a 13th century glass replica sealed with wax. The cedula (piece of parchment or paper stating from which Saint the relic is) inside the glass is a copy of a paper cedula from Bad Gandersheim from the 14th century - something rather common in a lot of church treasuries: Older relics were occasionaly repacked and labled with a new cedula when their vessel was to worn or considered not grand enough anymore...  

relic in a glass vessel

And finally we got into mass production ;-)

Bad Gandersheim has a vast number of relics from different Saints wrapped or sewn into little pieces of costly fabric, some labled with a cedula. So we used a lot of the silk fabric cut-offs I had kept from different projects over the last years. Most of the relic packs are really small, so a little wood turned pyxis can house a lot of them... There is one in Quedlinburg Domschatz where the lid is stuck nowadays - maybe its content looks like this: 

Pyxis filled with relic bundles

First time Andi took all the relics with him was to a rather small, but very nice event in Lichs gothic Marienstiftskirche - the perfect room for his presentation :-)

As it was so much fun to research and recreate all this, we will keep up "the relic industry", so look out for updates...

Girdle book (part 4)

It's time to update some of my "work in progress" posts, so here is something about the little girdle book again.

First of all, it turned out quite different from what I originally had in mind...

I decided against a cover made of silk for two reasons:

The friend that is going to use it is a craftsperson, not a rich member oft nobility. So a book bound in silk might be a little bit over the edge - and then I found this picture of a very cute girdle book with a striped leather cover that we both liked very much.

Decision made :-)

The girdle book bound in silk is not totally off my agenda though - I just somehow moved it from the to-do-list onto the wishlist ;-) Now I have to find the perfect text for it. Maybe it's going to be the catechism the Dance of Death is from...  

Back to the little girdle book:

The leather I was going to use for the cover is a very smooth, cream coloured sheeps leather tanned with oxalic acid. Unfortunately, dirty fingerprints stay on easily...

Normally books are blindtooled after attaching the leather to the boards - but here I had to do the blindtooling first. The parallel lines were drawn with a heated blunt knive (really blunt, not only "not really sharp"!) along a wooden ruler. That worked quite nicely and I hope it won't wear off during use.

I glued the leather to the wooden boards with animal glue, which has a great advantage here: You don't have to soak the leather with glue as with wheatpaste, you just apply the glue to the boards.

This way its a lot easier to make sure the blindtooled lines stay parallel than with wobbly wet leather :-) 

On the top and on the sides of the boards the leather was folded around the edges and glued to the inside of the board. Extant leather on the corner was cut away and the edges were additionaly secured by sewing (I don't have a picture at the moment). At the top of the back the leather was folded inside and glued in place so that you can see the silk wrapped headband. 

Five little cast flowers were riveted to the boards as both decoration and protection for the leather surface. Now I have to attach the clasp (you can already see the holes for the nails in the picture above) and finish the loose part of the leather with a cord just like on the original or gather it in a turks head knot - depends on the future owners choice :-)

Small codex part 2

After preparing the boards and spine, the book was finally ready for it's leather cover...

I used bark tanned calf skin for the cover - it has a relatively fine grain, is smooth and strong and has a nice colour due to the chesnut bark used. The leather was cut to size and the part of the leather that will be folded over the edges of the boards was thinned using a paring knive.    

Here you can see my little glue pot - its just a small period mug that I use to warm the animal glue on a little stove. Animal glue is only usable when warm and quickly cools down to a kind of jelly. I like working with it, you have to be rather quick or work only smaller areas at a time, but as there is not so much water inside the glue it does not soak through leather or paper. Some people say that it smells bad - but in my experience that only occurs when the glue pot is used over several days without cleaning. After all, animal glue is a feast for bacteria as long as its not dry... Once dried, it stays strong yet flexible for decades (even centuries).   

How to calculate along lines - Rechenbuch (part 1)

A Rechenbuch is a kind of calculating manual, dating from medieval or renaissance times...
This book is a reprint of one of Adam Ries works "Rechenbuch auff Linnien", printed as a follow-up edition in 1578. Although the original text is from the middle of the 16th century, the cover should look like a simple no-nonsens binding from the 15th century. Sturdy, practical, not too expensive - the right thing for a clerk around 1476 who would have need of such a Rechenbuch.
 
I started by discarding the modern book cover and taking apart the modern binding. After that, the book was just a little heap of pages, folded and stacked into sections. Now I could start again, just as if it had recently come from the press :-)

The binding and cover will follow the technique and design of this little book: Ephraem Syrus: Sermones from the 15th century, a small volume with wooden boards and a simple leather cover. It measures 14,5 by 10 cm and has 99 leafs.

The Rechenbuch is 16 by 10,5cm and has 114 pages, so not exactly the same, but very similar in format.

 I used 5 raised bands cut from chamois leather just like on the Sermones, which is quiete a lot for a book that small. I think the medieval bookbinder wanted to make really sure this binding would last - well, it did for almost 500 years :-)



Above you can see the sewing over the raised bands, the spine has been glued for the first time and is ready to have the headbands sewn on.
As the book is so slim, I needed the help of two turned wooden jars I use to store dryed glue and polishing chalk to make it stand up. Again I'm amazed about the beauty simple things like tools or containers have, when they are handmade!
 
To the right you can see the book lying on a small book bag with tassels, handwoven from madder and tansy dyed wool. Another lovely little detail that makes medieval bookbinding such fun :-)

Speaking about little details - here`s a preview of the brass clasps and mounts that will decorate the leather cover:

The clasp is still burnished as it was produced to replace a missing clasp on an original medieval book during restoration. I gladly use these replicas, but I polish them before use till they gleam.
The little semipherical mounts will be on the front and back cover near the corners, they prevent the leather from contact with the table or bookshelve surface.

Some books have a similar mount in the middle of the cover, some have a more eleborate flower, cross or rosette to add a little decoration.
When you look closely on the cover of the Sermones, you can still see the tiny holes in the leather left by the long gone mounts...

Enough for today, I`ll keep you posted :-)

Girdle book (part 3)

Here are the dirty details as promised in part 1 :-)

First, an overall view of the book, lying on the cream-coloured chamois I'm going to use for the inner book cover, under the textile book cover that really forms the Beutelbuch.
You can see the three raised bands on the spine, that is the hemp cords the sections are sewn onto. The ends of the cords were frayed so they really lie flat when pasted to the oak boards. At the ends of the spine you can see additional cords called headbands. Those were sewn onto the spine ends after sewing the sections to the raised bands. At this time, they don't look very decorative as you can see in the next foto:

 It's just a plain cord lying on top of the pages...

"What for?" you may ask - but this is just the first step :-)
The headbands are used for different purposes. On some books, the leather cover is sewn to them to fix it and to protect the spine from dirt. Not very pretty, but usefull...
The headbands can also be a decoration AND a protection for the book, when headband and leather cover are fixed together not with plain sewing but with one or more strips of leather braided over the headband and through the leather of the cover. This very prominent braid can be the same colour as the leather or a contrasting colour or it can even be a multicoloured design.
But those leather braided headband are not very practical if you want to put a book upright on a shelve as it is normal today...

For a girdle book, this also does not work, at least not for the outer cover.
The next option is to wrap the headband with thread before you cover the boards with leather - and this is what I  did here. As the outer cover is going to be silk fabric, I used silk thread instead of the more common red and white linnen thread for the headbands.

The actual design is not taken from a surviving book, this is just my idea what would look nice when its peeking over the top of the pages when you read the book. Surviving examples often show a very asymmetrical arrangement of colours or are just executed in one colour. But I liked the two dark red stripes in the green silk wrapping to be almost symmetrical (I didn't measure with a ruler or something, I just changed colour when I thought fit. When you look at medieval books, precision to the millimeter seemes to be a concept totally strange to the medieval bookbinder...)

The next steps will be: Putting another layer of glue unto the spine, covering the boards with the (inner) leather cover, attaching the clasps and finally putting on the (outer) silk cover that will extend over the lower part of the book and have a turkish knot on the end...

Way to go, I think I'm almost halfway through :-)