30-day challenge, day 19 - for Coronation ETA link to text

Sigillum rex, for Matthewe Baker: text by Robert de Canterbury, calligraphy and gilding by Genevieve. Goat(?) parchment, logwood black ink with a quill, Miniatum size and transfer gold, outlined with a crow pen.

I haven't used a quill in some months, but I really wanted these pieces to be as completely medieval-made as possible (didn't quite make it, the size and transfer gold are modern, though the gold is real). The results weren't as smooth as they could have been with a metal nib, but frankly I was pleasantly surprised they were as good as this.

One silly mistake: I use my slope almost all the time for scribing, and I forgot you need a flat surface to lay the size on the parchment, otherwise it pools at the lowest point. So I can see a pool of size in the foot of the P, where it gathered overnight.



One very cool aspect: Robert made me an inscrbing tool for making lines in parchment.

Somewhere, I've read, that the lines you see in manuscripts aren't pencil - they're silverpoint. The scribes used a silver-tipped 'pencil' to indent the lines in the parchment. What you now see is the effect of tarnished silver embedded in the parchment, which has turned dark with years. But initially, you would not have seen it.

So Robert took a piece of broken arrow (lots of them in this house) and inserted a nail in one end, to create a slightly blunted point. It's sharp enough to make a line, but not so sharp that it breaks the surface of the parchment.

You can just see the shade of these lines on the pic.

There's a large space at the bottom, so that it could be folded and sealed, as well as signed. I'll have to ask Matthewe to bring it to an event, to ensure this happens, because I know I didn't manage to convey that before it was given out.

ETA: link to the full text on Robert's wiki

curse of Coronation

...is the post event plague.

Today is my third day off work with a cough. Coughs make me nervous since my round of whooping cough (see entries Jan-May 2008). I'm probably well enough to work, but I find the commute takes a lot out of me, and when I'm on the edge of being ill, I'm better off taking an extra day before tackling the trip again.

On the plague front, I blame goncalves, though Sir Vitus was struggling with something flu-ey, which hopefully was no longer contagious.

The year Vitus was knighted at Coronation, both he and Robert got 'flu from little Typhoid Maria Clara, Vitus' girl, who was coming down with something on the way home.  Poor J, aryanhwy's husband, was looking pretty wrung out too.

Thank god for 'flu jabs. Given the option, perhaps I'll avoid enclosed winter events in future, though we are going to Investiture next month.

However, I did make it out the door to the library earlier this week (or else would have expired of boredom) and briefly Cornelissens today (on way home from an MD appt), where I bumped into armillary. He's offering a bookbinding class at a Thamesreach revel next month, and was looking for supplies.

We agreed to swap some of his rabbit-skin glue (one of the few gilding-related adhesives I don't yet possess) for some parchment - it's even used parchment, perfect for binding books with. :-).

I was kicking myself just before Coronation: I had to restart one of my scrolls, on parchment, because I'd misjudged the spacing and could not fit the whole text. It was my own danged fault, because  I know better than to start scribing late in the evening, because I'm likely to make mistakes...like spacing errors.

I was going to keep it as a test piece for scraping - see how much I could scrape well, and recover the margins for bookmarks or samples. However, it's rather charming to think my mistake will end up bound into a book.

Winter reading

Two books, in completely different styles, that I'm enjoying right now - one is bleeding-edge modern, the other is a perfect accompanyment to Downton Abbey.

Reamde, by Neal Stephenson: It's hard to read anything after reading one of his books, it's so...thick, dense, complete. It's by times disconcerting, violent, funny, thought-provoking. I haven't read all his books - I managed 1 of the 3 books of the Baroque Cycle - but thoroughly enjoyed Zodiac, Snow Crash, and The Diamond Age.

For all the variety of people crammed into this book, Stephenson manages to seem to like almost every character, and make them sympathetic - perhaps all but one are presented in a way that you could love and appreciate them all.

I won't get into the plot which is extraordinary and involved. Suffice to say that if you know anything about online gaming, America and its beloved Second Amendment, airplanes, international espionage, the Internet, southeast Asia, or extremism...it's worth delving into. extemporanea, I think you'd love it.

I've mentioned Catriona McPhereson before. I'm now halfway through her latest whodunnit Dandy Gilver and a bothersome number of corpses (not yet on her Dandy Gilver website - the author has a new googlesite here, so she may be trying to get away from the genre, or at least give herself room to grow).

The books are set after the Great War, before there was any inkling of having to rename it World War I, and it is crammed full of details about life somewhere between nobility and genteel poverty, with maids and butlers and cooks in the house in Perthshire, and two boys at Eton, but not enough money to buy quite as many gowns and French lingerie as before the war. You can mentally clothe the characters in outfits from Downton Abbey, and charge off across Scotland by train and motor-car.

The charm is the wit of the main character Dandy, who bumbles through cases by being a clever woman in a 'good' marriage and social setting that leaves little to challenge her; the stories rely on historic events and social expectations of the time. If I knew more of early 20th c clothes and manners I might be able to find mistakes (I avoid most medieval whodunnits now), but as it is, I'm cheerfully ignorant, and enjoy the stories enormously.