Tuesday 1 October 2013

Tough luck.

I am currently preparing that one-hour lecture about archaeological textiles... and one of the things I want to mention is, of course, textiles and gender.
For that, I was planning to include a few pictures of men spinning - and I also knew where to get them from... I thought. Unfortunately, the database of Corsair is being re-structured at the moment, and while it's possible to get at most pictures, you cannot get at all of them. There is a MS in the library that has two pictures of men spinning with spindle and distaff (MS 358, fols. 20v and 40r), and just that one seems to be inaccessible. Well, I'll make do with a few other pics.

However, the search of spinning pics made me wonder. Have you found any special spinning pictures as in "not the usual"? Such as top-whorl spindles, men spinning, uncommon ways to hold a spindle, and so on? (I'm not going for the "hit the guy with your distaff" variation here, though they can be really amusing.)

If so, please share them - I'd be very interested to see some more of the spectrum that is shown on medieval illustrations. You could post them on your blog and add a link to the comments, or if you prefer, send them to me by email (katrin at pallia dot net) and I will post them here. (Just for stating the obvious: Please include the usual data where the pic comes from, for copyright reasons as well as for letting others know where to find it.)

3 comments:

Miriam said...

There is a wealth of this sort of thing at http://15thcenturyspinning.wordpress.com/

I distinctly remember one video she linked of a man from the Afghanistan/Pakistan area spinning in-hand, across-the-body.

a stitch in time said...

Thanks Panth - that is a nice hint (and nice pages, too). I was, however, looking for medieval pictures that are special, not modern ones - sorry, I should have been more clear with my wording in the blog post.
Still, it's very nice to see that modern pics and videos are also not following one set pattern, but have very different spinning styles.

Sara said...

Presumably you know this image/blog?

http://www.essexvoicespast.com/the-medieval-spinsters/

Man at the wheel is the last picture on the page.

V. Vallinheimo mentions a 'Cosmographia' by Sebastian Muenster, 1544, with an image of a spinning guy.

But prob no news :)