For our November museum visit, we headed to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World for “Madinat al-Zahra,” their exhibit of artifacts from the tenth-century capital of Islamic Spain.
This is a culture that I don’t know particularly well — Islamic, but two thousand miles west of the Middle-Eastern settings we typically think of.
Continue reading Museum Visit: Islamic CordobaIn my continuing quest to (not actually) deliver a perfect lemon to the vicereines of Østgarðr (see also, and also), I cast around for a reasonably-simple period-esque project and found the inspiration right at my doorstep, in the bounty of my sidewalk garden.
Lemon balm is a citrus-scented member of the mint family, which grows in profusion in the bevy of containers that are home to my tiny greenspace — in fact, it grows so aggressively that I need to cut it back frequently to keep it from crowding out the other showier plants, and it was while I was trimming it that I realized I could put it to a productive use.
Continue reading Lemon-Balm OxymelFor our April museum visit we headed to the Grolier Club, an exclusive club for antiquarian book dealers and collectors, for their exhibition “Judging a Book by Its Cover,” which includes a number of impressively-bound fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century volumes as well as more-recent items.
It was interesting to be reminded of the historical separation between printing and binding, with many books being printed and sold without covers, which their owners then paid to have added by other specialists. There were also numerous examples on display of books which had been repeatedly rebound — for example, to replace attractive but less-durable cloth covers with harder-wearing leather panels, or to combine several small books by different authors into a single larger volume.
Continue reading Museum Visit: Elaborately-Covered BooksOur February museum visit was a trip to the Morgan Library for an exhibition on the intersection of money, merchants, and morality in medieval Europe.
It was interesting seeing evidence of the tension caused as the post-Roman and early-medieval way of life was disrupted by the reintroduction of coinage, long-distance trade, and a market economy that set the stage for the modern world.
Continue reading Museum Visit: Money and MoralityOur April museum outing was a return to the Met Cloisters to view the gardens in spring bloom. Our party of eight was mostly locals from Appleholm, joined by one of our friends from the other side of the city.
Although there were the usual array of art and artifacts on display, as well as a special exhibit of household furnishings, the highlight of the trip for me was the outdoor spaces of the gardens and surrounding cloisters. The combination of inside and outside space, both enclosed and open, provides a wonderful sense of in-betweenness that we rarely encounter in the modern city.
Continue reading Museum Visit: Springtime GardensWe continued our series of museum outings with today’s visit to the Morgan Library and Museum for “She Who Wrote,” an exhibit of Mesopotamian artifacts focused on the role of women in these bronze-age civilizations.
Continue reading Museum Visit: Bronze Age MesopotamiaToday we visited the “Ritual and Memory” exhibit at the
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
Although I’ve been summarizing the exhibit as focusing on the “Bronze Age Balkans,” the artifacts on display covered a wider range of time, from the Copper Age through the Iron Age, and of space, from the Balkan mountains to the Carpathian mountains. Continue reading Museum Visit: Bronze Age Balkans
Alienor and I ventured out today to see the “Threads of Power” exhibit at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, exploring the development and social significance of lace, including examples of needle and bobbin lace from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, courtesy of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen.
Although the fabric examples were impressive, the thing that particularly caught my attention were a few fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples of “pattern books” — printed collections of designs to be used as source material by people working with fiber and fabric. Continue reading Museum Visit: Pattern Books
For Halloween this year, I composed a bit of doggerel entitled “The Ghastly Province, or Samhain in Østgarðr,” which owes an obvious debt to Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
Lady Zahra de Andaluzia did a lovely job of laying it out for inclusion in the Provincial newsletter, and Lady Kunigunde Wedemann was kind enough to contribute an original illustration which tied into the theme; I thank them both for making my silliness look presentable, and for allowing me to share the results here.
