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East Kingdom Gazette

Covering the Eastern Realm of the SCA

Arts & Sciences Research Paper #15: On the Preservation of Lemons

December 1, 2016 by mollyeskridge

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

Lemons, preserving. Photo by Aildreda de Tamwurthe.
Lemons, preserving. Photo by Aildreda de Tamwurthe.

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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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #14: Making a Leather Swan Helm Crest

November 1, 2016 by mollyeskridge

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

A German heraldic crest for a tournament. Sold at auction by Pierre Bergé & Associés.
A German heraldic crest for a tournament. Sold at auction by Pierre Bergé & Associés.

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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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #13: Persian Plants in Miniature: What are the Plants in Persian Illuminations?

September 30, 2016 by mollyeskridge

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?

Hollyhock. Detail of Shāh-Mozzafar, "The Two Wrestlers". Sandovar, p. 104.
Hollyhock. Detail of Shāh-Mozzafar, “The Two Wrestlers”. Sandovar, p. 104.

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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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #12: Untwisting the Answer: A Trick for Tablet Weaving on Modern Portable Looms

September 1, 2016 by mollyeskridge

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

Tablet weaving in progress. By Lionel Allorge (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or FAL], via Wikimedia Commons
Tablet weaving in progress. By Lionel Allorge (Own work) [GFDL , CC BY-SA 3.0 or FAL], via Wikimedia Commons.

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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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #11: Jewish Carolingian Fighters: The Jewish Fighting Freeholders of Carolingian Southern France

August 2, 2016 by mollyeskridge

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

Fighters on horseback, from the Mishnah Torah of Maimonides, MS. A77, folio 1, 16v, from the Library of The Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Fighters on horseback, from the Mishnah Torah of Maimonides, MS. A77, folio 1, 16v, from the Library of The Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

“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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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #10: Fibonacci – A Master By Any Name

July 3, 2016 by East Kingdom Gazette

Our tenth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Lady Rosina von Schaffhausen, of the Shire of Quintavia. She introduces us to a fascinating figure from the 13th century – the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, known most familiarly to us as Fibonacci.  (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Fibonacci – A Master By Any Name

The Latin phrase filius bonacci, in the first line of the Liber Abbaci manuscript (above) gave rise to Leonardo da Pisa's modern nickname, Fibonacci.
The Latin phrase filius bonacci, in the first line of the Liber Abbaci manuscript (above) gave rise to Leonardo da Pisa’s modern nickname, Fibonacci. (National Library of Florence)

Imagine being an Italian merchant in the early 13th century, traveling around the Mediterranean. You visit fascinating places, eat new and unusual foods, see many exotic sights, and trade many of the goods passing through the region.
However, you have a problem. The basic addition and subtraction you need to do to keep your account books you can handle, using the tools you have available, Roman numerals and an abacus. But doing any sort of multiplication or division is difficult. And you need to multiply, or divide, or sometimes both, to do all sorts of important things. You need them to determine how much cinnamon your pepper is worth, how much of your profits each of your investors should receive, how much your cut is, to calculate currency exchange, and to determine how much interest you have earned on the loan your city forced you to give them to build their navy. The methods you know seem much more difficult to deal with than the Arab merchants’ system.
On your next stop at home, a friend is raving about the new system of Hindu reckoning in a book written by one of your compatriots, and you resolve to find a copy and learn this new system…
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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #9: Making green paint medievally with spring irises and fall buckthorn berries

May 2, 2016 by mollyeskridge

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

Iris flower and buckthorn berries
Iris flower and buckthorn berries. Photo by Adrienne d’Evreus.

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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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #8: Matthew Paris and the Volcano

April 1, 2016 by East Kingdom Gazette

Our eighth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Sir Michael of York of the Barony of Carolingia. He examines a catastrophic climatological event with both modern and historical records, and in the telling introduces us to a very interesting chronicler. (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Matthew Paris and the Volcano

Matthew_self_portrait
Self-Portrait by Matthew Paris (c.1200-1259).
Photograph by the British Library. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In the middle of the 13th century, a massive volcanic eruption occurred in Indonesia. The effects of this eruption changed the weather around the world for years. Modern climate research combined with recent archeological evidence and the medieval chronicles of Matthew Paris paint a haunting picture of a world-wide disaster that has no parallel for the previous several thousand years.
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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #7: Life Before Toilet Paper

March 1, 2016 by East Kingdom Gazette

Our seventh A&S Research Paper comes to us from Baroness Charitye Dale, of the Barony of Settmour Swamp. She examines a question that would have affected our personas practically every single day – how did people manage before toilet paper? (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Life Before Toilet Paper

Ancient public toilets in Ephesus
Ancient public toilets in Ephesus

There are some things in our society that are so basic, so integral to our lives that we cannot imagine going without.  Toilet paper is one of these items.  Since 1857, when toilet paper first became commercially available, we have used it to cleanse after using the bathroom.  This begs the question; what did people use to clean themselves before toilet paper? This work will provide an overview of what people used to cleanse themselves after defecating in Rome, China, Japan, India, the Islamic states and various areas of Europe between 400 C.E. and 1600 C.E.
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Arts & Sciences Research Paper #6: The Perception of Greek Women through Archaic and Classical Literature

February 1, 2016 by East Kingdom Gazette

Our sixth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Hypatissa Anna Dokeianina Syrakousina, of the Barony of Stonemarche; she is using the lens of literature to further our understanding of the perception of Greek women in history. (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)

Good Wife; Bad Wife:  The Perception of Greek Women through Archaic and Classical Literature

There is a great deal to be learned about previous cultures through the literary evidence they have left behind. In the case of the early Greeks, classicists and historians have a remarkable amount of material to work from, ranging from epic poetry to political discourses. Within the confines of poetry and theater, a great deal of information can be extrapolated about society, including the contemporary points of view on women and their roles. This paper will argue that the female characters in the works of Homer, the Homeric Hymns, and Aeschylus, are portrayals of the contemporary ideal Greek woman and her insubordinate opposite. Examination of these characters begins with the “good wife,” in which the women of Greek literature take passive roles, “the bad wife”, the characters that take on aggressive roles, and an analysis of the Greek audience, and the messages they could have been receiving when experiencing these bodies of work.

Penelope unraveling her weaving
Penelope Unraveling Her Weaving. Detail of an Attic Red-figure skyphos, 440 BC, from Chiusi, by the Penelope Painter. Public Domain

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