Our fifteenth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Edmund Beneyt of the Barony of Endewearde, who demonstrates that the delicious preserved lemons of the Middle East have a very long history indeed! (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

On the Preservation of Lemons

The preservation of food has been an ongoing struggle against Nature since man first started storing food for later use. There is evidence of the most basic form of preservation being used 14,000 years ago in the Middle East[1], and many different strategies have been discovered.

Pickling, the process of preserving food by either anaerobic fermentation in brine or immersion in a liquid of pH 4.6 or lower, is in use by most cultures across the globe. The range of pickled foods is astounding, from meats and fish to grains. The only limit on what can be pickled seems to be what is available to pickle.

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Our fourteenth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Lady Angela Mori of the Barony of Bhakhail, who demonstrates and explains the process of making one of the splendid helm crests so familiar from manuscript illuminations of tournaments. (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Making a Leather Swan Helm Crest

How to Model Crests or Helmets: “Whenever you have occasion to make a crest or helmet for a tourney, or for rulers who have to march in state, you must first get some white leather which is not dressed except with myrtle or ciefalonia, stretch it, and draw your crest the way you want it made. And draw two of them, and sew them together; but leave it open enough on one side so that you can put sand into it; and press it with a little stick until it is all quite full. When you have done this, put it in the sun for several days. When it is quite dry, take the sand out of it . Then take some of the regular size for gessoing, and size it two or three times. Then take some gesso grosso ground with size, and mix in some beaten tow, and get it stiff, like a batter; and put on this gesso, and rough it in, giving it any shape of man, or beast, or bird, which you may have to make, getting it as like as you can. This done, take some gesso grosso ground with size, liquid and flowing, on a brush, and you lay it three or four times over this crest with a brush. Then, when it is quite dry, scrape it and smooth it down, just as you do when you work on panel. Then, in the same way, as I showed you how to gesso with gesso sotile on panel, in that same way gesso this crest. When it is dry, scrape it and smooth it down; and then if it is necessary to make the eyes of glass, put them in with the gesso for modeling; do modeling if it is called for. Then, if it is to be gold or silver, lay some bole, just as on panel; and follow the same method in every detail, and the same for the painting, varnishing it in the usual way”

– From Chapter CLXIX, Il Libro dell’Arte (The Craftsman’s Handbook), Cennino D’Andrea Cennini

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Our thirteenth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Lady Raziya bint Rusa, of the Barony of Carolingia. She examines a question that troubles many people working with illuminated manuscripts: what exactly are those plants in the illuminations? Are they fanciful or are they plants that really existed in history? (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Persian Plants in Miniature:  What are the Plants in Persian Illuminations?

Four years ago I bought a book of Persian miniatures for reference to help me sew garb.  As I paged through over breakfast one illustration caught my eye – a hollyhock.  I am a gardener by trade, and thought it out of place that a hollyhock, a staple of the English country garden, would be found in Persia.  To satisfy my curiosity I did a quick web-search into Persian Plants.  This line of questioning would be the undoing of my motivation to sew; two years later I had a seven thousand entry horticultural database and no new garb.

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Our twelfth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Condêssa Violante do Porto, of the Shire of Quintavia. She examines a kind of puzzle that is all too familiar to the student of historical crafts: What do you do about problems arising from trying to do a historical craft with our more modern tools? (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Untwisting the Answer: A Trick for Tablet Weaving on Modern Portable Looms

The subject of this paper will discuss adapting period patterns for modern looms in order to tackle the problems presented by using modern tools for period narrow weaving. This is not exclusive or proprietary; as I will discuss, I stumbled upon this technique by accident. This technique is also an adaptation to a modern loom, and I know of no examples supporting this as a period technique. My argument is that it is possible, and easy, to maintain the integrity of period patterns when working on a modern loom without relying on modern solutions. This technique could be similarly applied to more period techniques of tablet weaving, such as the backstrap method, as another means of handling the problems associated with some of the more complex period patterns.

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Our eleventh A&S Research Paper comes to us from Lord Gideon ha-Khazar, until very recently of the Barony of Dragonship Haven and now of the Barony of the Middle Marches, and who did most of this research while he was a citizen of our fair kingdom. He examines the history of a group of people many of us know very little about – European Jewish freeholders who fought in battles alongside their non-Jewish counterparts – and provides fascinating historical support for medieval Jewish fighting personae. (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

 Jewish Carolingian Fighters: The Jewish Fighting Freeholders of Carolingian Southern France

“Quapropter sumus dolore tacti, usque ad mortem anxiati, cum cognovissemus per teipsum, quod plebs Judaica … infra fines at territoria Christianorum allodia haereditatum in villis et suburbanis, quasi incolae Christianorum, possideant per quaedam regum Francorum praecepta.” (Migne vol. 129 p.857 and Jaffe 288)

“Therefore we are struck with sorrow, anxious to death, since we have learned through you that the Jews … possess allodial lands within Christendom in towns and outside them, like Christians, through certain grants of the kings of the Franks” (Chazan 188)

— Pope Stephen III to the Archbishop of Narbonne and “all magnates of Septimania and Hispania”, 768 CE

In 768 Pepin, Carolingian King of the Franks, recognized Jews’ rights to own land in what is now southern France. Since the lands were held in allod (owned outright instead of feudally) and in Frankish law all allodial landholders had to fight when called, Jewish fighters took part in Carolingian wars (including Charlemagne’s Roncesvalles campaign) and helped garrison lands taken from the Muslims.

Thus SCAdians have documented historical bases for having openly Jewish fighting freeholder personae from Carolingian (8th-9th century) southern France and its Spanish March. Furthermore, the region was on Radanite Jewish trade routes extending all the way to China and Narbonne was a center for scholarship, so one could historically justify having fighter-traveler or fighter-scholar personae from those periods as well.

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Our ninth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Lady Adrienne d’Evreus, of the Province of Malagentia. She turns to the flora of her woodlands to learn ways that medieval painters made green pigments. (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Making green paint medievally with spring irises and fall buckthorn berries

Many medieval manuscripts explain how to make green for illumination with seasonably available resources. Excited to make green from my local plants, I used iris in May and buckthorn in September to make some beautiful green paint using instructions from an anonymous medieval treatise, De Arte Illuminandi. Even with some incorrect assumptions about materials, by using translated fourteenth century instructions as a guide with iris blossoms and buckthorn berries, beautiful green pigment was produced.

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Our second A&S Research Paper comes to us from Mistress Aildreda de Tamworthe, of the Barony of Carolingia, and is drawn from her study of the management of medieval households in England. (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Inside Blakemere: Notes from the Yearly Accounts of a Late Medieval Household

How did medieval people run their households? Those quotidian concerns – of provisions and repairs, staffing and expenses – are always with us, but they are not always easy to tease out of the historical record in detail. Happily, some of the records of larger noble households have survived, at least in the form of yearly accounts, and these accounts can provide us some fascinating glimpses into the day-to-day concerns of households that are both deeply familiar and deeply apart.

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