̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - craft

A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

tdk25 — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 08:50:40 +0000

Later, an eyewitness recalled that officials thought the Duchess had fainted at the sight of blood trickling from her husband’s mouth. Only the Archduke himself seemed to realise that she, too, had been hit. “Sophie dear! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” Franz Ferdinand pleaded. Then, “he seemed to sag down himself,” the witness remembered. “His plumed general’s hat… fell off; many of its green feathers were found all over the car floor.”

̽��ֱ��assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, had such seismic repercussions in precipitating the First World War that it is easy to disregard the curious little detail of feathers on the floor. In such context, they seem trivial. Rewind a few moments more, to the famous final photograph of the couple leaving Sarajevo town hall, and the plumage sprouting from the Archduke’s hat looks positively absurd; as if amid all the other mortal perils of that day – the bomb that narrowly missed his car, the bullets from a semi-automatic – he somehow also sustained a direct hit from a large bird.

Today, we generally associate feathers with women’s fashion, and a peculiarly ostentatious brand at that, reserved for Royal Ascot, high-society weddings and hen parties. Among men, wearing feathers is typically seen as provocatively effete – the domain of drag queens, or ageing, eyelinered devotees of the Manic Street Preachers.

Yet a cursory glance at military history shows that Franz Ferdinand was far from alone in his penchant for plumage. ̽��ֱ��Bersaglieri of the Italian Army, for example, still wear capercaillie feathers in their hats, while British fusiliers have a clipped plume called a hackle. Cavaliers in the English Civil War adorned their hats with ostrich feathers.

“Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men,” observes Cambridge historian Professor Ulinka Rublack. “Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.”

Rublack is beginning to study the use of featherwork in early modern fashion as part of a project called ‘Materialized Identities’, a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Basel and Bern, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

To the outsider, its preoccupations (her co-researchers are studying gold, glass and veils) might seem surprising. Yet such materials are not just mute artefacts; they sustained significant economies, craft expertise and, she says, “entered into rich dialogue with the humans who processed and used them”. Critically, they elicited emotions, moods and attitudes for both the wearer and the viewer. In this sense, they belonged to the ‘symbolic universe’ of communities long since dead. If we can understand such resonances, we come closer to knowing more about how it felt to be a part of that world.

Rublack has spotted that something unusual started to happen with feathers during the 16th century. In 1500, they were barely worn at all; 100 years later they had become an indispensable accessory for the Renaissance hipster set on achieving a ‘gallant’ look.

In prosperous trading centres, the locals started sporting hats bedecked with feathers from parrots, cranes and swallows. Headgear was manufactured so that feathers could be inserted more easily. By 1573, Plantin’s Flemish–French dictionary was even obliged to offer words to describe people who chose not to wear them, recommending such verbiage as: ‘the featherless’ and ‘unfeathered’.

Featherworking became big business. From Prague and Nuremberg to Paris and Madrid, people started to make a living from decorating feathers for clothing. Impressive efforts went into dyeing them. A 1548 recipe recommends using ashes, lead monoxide and river water to create a ‘very beautiful’ black, for example.

Why this happened will become clearer as the project develops. One crucial driver, however, was exploration – the discovery of new lands, especially in South America. Compared with many of the other species that early European colonists encountered, exotic birds could be captured, transported and kept with relative ease. Europe experienced a sudden ‘bird-craze’, as birds such as parrots became a relatively common sight on the continent’s largest markets.

Given the link with new territories and conquest, ruling elites wore feathers partly to express their power and reach. But there were also more complex reasons. In 1599, for example, Duke Frederick of Württemberg held a display at his court at which he personally appeared as ‘Lady America’, wearing a costume covered in exotic feathers. This was not just a symbol of power, but of cultural connectedness, Rublack suggests: “ ̽��ֱ��message seems to be that he was embracing the global in a duchy that was quite insular and territorial.”

Nor were feathers worn by the powerful alone. In 1530, a legislative assembly at Augsburg imposed restrictions on peasants and burghers adopting what it clearly felt should be an elite fashion. ̽��ֱ��measure did not last, perhaps because health manuals of the era recommended feathers as protecting the wearer from ‘bad’ air – cold, miasma, damp or excessive heat – all of which were regarded as hazardous. During the 1550s, Eleanor of Toledo had hats made from peacock feathers to protect her from the rain.

Gradually, feathers came to indicate that the wearer was healthy, civilised and cultured. Artists and musicians took to wearing them as a mark of subtlety and style. “They have a certain tactility that was seen to signal an artistic nature,” Rublack says.

Like most fads, this enthusiasm eventually wore off. By the mid-17th century, feathers were out of style, with one striking exception. Within the armies of Europe what was now becoming a ‘feminine’ fashion choice elsewhere remained an essential part of military costume.

Rublack thinks that there may have been several reasons for this strange contradiction. “It’s associated with the notion of graceful warfaring,” she says. “This was a period when there were no standing armies and it was hard to draft soldiers. One solution was to aestheticise the military, to make it seem graceful and powerful, rather than simply about killing.” Feathers became associated with the idea of an art of warfare.

They were also already a part of military garb among both native American peoples and those living in lands ruled by the Ottomans. Rublack believes that just as some of these cultures treated birds as gods, and therefore saw feathers as having a protective quality, European soldiers saw them as imparting noble passions, bravery and valiance.

In time, her research may therefore reveal a tension about the ongoing use of feathers in this unlikely context. “It has to do with a notion of masculinity achieved both through brutal killing, and the proper conduct of war as art,” she says. But, as she also notes, she is perhaps the first historian to have spotted the curious emotional resonance of feathers in military fashion at all. All this shows a sea-change in methodologies: historians now chart the ways in which our identities are shaped through deep connections with ‘stuff’. Further work is needed to understand how far these notions persisted by 1914 when, in his final moments, Franz Ferdinand left feathers scattered across the car floor.

Inset image: Hendrick Goltzius, soldier, c. 1580; credit: ̽��ֱ��Rijsmuseum, Amsterdam.

Today, feathers are an extravagant accessory in fashion; 500 years ago, however, they were used to constitute culture, artistry, good health and even courage in battle. This unlikely material is now part of a project that promises to tell us more not only about what happened in the past, but also about how it felt to be there.

Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men. Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.

Ulinka Rublack

Achille Beltrame

Assassination of the feather-hatted Archduke Franz Ferdinand

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Animal, vegetable, mineral: the making of Buddhist texts

amb206 — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 08:00:00 +0000

A yak will provide most of the things humans need to survive: meat and milk, fibre and fuel, traction and transport – and, last but not least, warmth and companionship. A traditional Tibetan recipe for making a luxurious blue-black paper goes a step further: it lists fresh yak brain, along with soot and a small amount of hide glue. Mixed into a glutinous paste, these ingredients create the glossy surface used to stunning effect in illuminated manuscripts.

Buddha’s Word: ̽��ֱ��Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond, an exhibition at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), explores not just the cultural and religious significance of the texts used in Tibetan manuscripts but also the production of these manuscripts – from the making of paper using locally available plants through to the sourcing of pigments used for writing and painting – as well as their transmission across mountains and oceans.

̽��ֱ��interdisciplinary exhibition is the outcome of a number of AHRC-funded projects that made it possible to explore the vaults of Cambridge libraries and museum, connect literary artifacts to their place of origin, and the living traditions of book making, and in some cases discover the significance of objects that have long been kept hidden in boxes and never put on display before.

Suspended above the entrance to Buddha’s Word is an oblong book wrapped in bright orange cloth. This is a Buddhist text. “Its presence reminds us of the Tibetan pilgrims’ practice of walking underneath book shelves in the monasteries they visit to get the blessing from the sacred scriptures,” said Dr Hildegard Diemberger, curator of the exhibition with colleagues Dr Mark Elliott and Dr Michela Clemente.

“It also reminds us of a story narrated in many Tibetan texts telling of the miraculous arrival of the first Buddhist scriptures. At the dawn of the Buddhist civilisation, a text fell from heaven and was received by a king. Unable to read it, and unsure what to do, he placed it in a casket and worshipped it. ̽��ֱ��scripture dispensed its blessings and the king’s youth and vigour were restored.”

Diemberger went on: “Tibetan stories and ritual practices highlight the power of the written word and connect the Land of Snow to the wider context of Buddhist civilisations in which books containing the words of the Buddha and of Buddhist masters have travelled widely and shaped the spiritual and material world of many peoples.”

Buddha’s Word and the accompanying catalogue provide a window into the world-wide scholarship that explores the techniques and technologies developed by Tibetan craftsmen and scholars to illustrate and disseminate the teachings of Buddha. “In creating the displays we’re telling multiple interconnecting stories about the production and dissemination of texts right up to the present day when Buddhists have embraced the opportunities offered by digital media and the internet,” said Diemberger. “We’ve also made exciting connections across time and space as we’ve traced objects in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� collections back through their trajectories to their sources.”

A wide range of beautiful exhibits that found their way to Cambridge from various parts of Asia over the 19th and early 20th century are on display, including some of the world most ancient extant Buddhist illuminated manuscripts. Together they provide an insight into the variety and beauty of Buddhist literary artifacts, setting Tibetan book culture in its wider context.

For the first time in the UK, the public are also able to see the tools and processes used to create sacred texts that are both spiritually significant and visually stunning. They include examples of the moulds, mallets and stirrers used to make paper, and the printing blocks and cutting tools needed to produce prayer flags as well as pens and pen cases.

“ ̽��ֱ��objects we have taken out of store for the first time include an iron pen case given, along with other items, to MAA by Alexander (Sandy) Wollaston, a doctor on the 1921 British Everest Exhibition, and we can imagine it being used by a local official in Kharta or one of the other valleys north of Mount Everest. Other objects come straight from the living context like the bamboo pen recently donated to the exhibition by a hermit living in the Sherpa area to the south of Mount Everest,” said Diemberger.

̽��ֱ��curators have invited experts from throughout the world to contribute their insights into the craftsmanship of manuscript production. Among them is James Canary of Indiana ̽��ֱ��, who has travelled extensively in the Himalayan region researching Tibetan book craft. In an article for the catalogue, he focuses on the production of mthing shog manuscripts – those in which a burnished blue-black surface provides the background to sacred writings.

“To prepare the black mixture, the craftsman kneaded by hand the brains of a freshly slaughtered yak, sheep or goat combined with the very fine powdered soot and a small amount of cooked glue hide,” explained Canary.

“If there is too much brain material in the mix the paper will have an oiliness that will resist later writing and can also develop saponification problems, resulting in a white soapy bloom. ̽��ֱ��paste is painted on the surface of the paper which is then burnished with a piece of conch shell or a bead to make a lustrous surface for the calligraphy.”

On display in the exhibition is a modern mthing shog manuscript by the late Sonam Norgyal, one of the few artists to have maintained the tradition to the present day. Collected by Canary, its gold lettering on a rich background is a fine example of a technique known to scholars as chrysography.

Wood, birch-bark and palm leaf predated paper as a writing surface in Tibet: palm-leaves, which do not grow in Tibet, have had a long lasting impact on the physical characteristics of Tibetan books; the majority of them is in fact made of narrow long sheets of paper that remind of the ancient palm-leaf manuscripts with which Buddhist teachings travelled from India to Tibet and across Asia. It is thought that the craft of paper-making spread from neighbouring countries at a time when Tibet developed a powerful empire and record keeping became a critical undertaking. Research suggests that from at least the ninth century Tibetans began to collect plants growing locally to make paper.

A number of plants in the Thymelaeaceae family have stems and roots with conductive tissue that is strong and fibrous – ideal for making string and paper. Several early medical treatises listing plants used for medicinal purposes also mention their suitability for paper making. ̽��ֱ��widespread use of some of these plants, according to reports by British visitors to Tibet, continued right up until the 1920s - and even today a few printing houses and paper-making centres make use of plants gathered locally to make specialist products.

Research by paper specialist Agnieszka Helman-Wazny ( ̽��ֱ�� of Arizona) shows that the hand processes of making paper from plant material has changed little over the centuries with each sheet being made separately. Paper pulp is prepared by beating the plant material on a stone with a wooden mallet. ̽��ֱ��resulting fibrous mass is mixed with water and poured into a mould. This mould is ‘floated’ in water and tipped to and fro until its contents are evenly distributed. ̽��ֱ��mould is then removed from water and left to dry.

“Further processes were often used to make a smooth surface for writing and to produce particular types of paper. Tibetan paper makers often glued several sheets together using a paste of boiled wheat flour or animal-based glue,” said Helman-Wazny. “They were extremely resourceful in their exploitation of materials to make books and used ramie, hemp and mulberry bark as well as stone, metal and rock.”
Tibetan artists and painters used pigments and colourants obtained locally from minerals and plants.

One of the star items in the exhibition are two pages/folios of the 1521 Royal Edition of the Mani bka’ ‘bum (One hundred thousand proclamations of the Mantra), a treasure given to Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library by Lt-Col Laurence A Waddell in 1905 following the Younghusband Military Expedition to Tibet. A non-invasive analytical technique called reflectance spectroscopy, carried out by experts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, revealed that the colours seen in the figures it depicts were achieved using a red obtained from cinnabar, blue from azurite, indigo from woad, and yellow from arsenic, a chemical that had the added benefit of protecting manuscripts from insect damage.

Developments continue. Tibetans and the worldwide community of Tibetan scholars have enthusiastically embraced the opportunities offered by digital media and the internet to collate and open up access to manuscripts that lie scattered across the world. Just as past technologies – such as printing – provided a means for circulating Buddhist teaching so are digital technologies being increasingly explored and used today. In the words of the well known Tibetan lama Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche:

I’ll be doing prostrations every morning to this computer.
Thank you so much
You are giving all of us a huge gem,
a jewel and a gem.

Inset images: detail of Mani bka' 'bum (Tibetan 149) (Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library), example of mthing shog by late Sonam Norgyal (James Canary); manufacture of daphne-bark paper in Bhutan (Karma Phuntsho).

̽��ֱ��wide-ranging objects on display at Buddha’s Word, an exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, show how Tibetan book makers used the resources around them to produce manuscripts conveying the messages of a faith in which texts themselves are sacred objects.

In creating the displays we’re telling multiple interconnecting stories about the production and dissemination of texts right up to the present day when Buddhists have embraced the opportunities offered by digital media and the internet.

Hildegard Diemberger

Maria-Antonia Sironi

Buddhist books are paraded through the valleys and invited to bless the environment

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Making the cloth that binds us: spinning, weaving and island identity

amb206 — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 08:00:47 +0000

There’s a theory in the fashion world that a period of austerity or recession heralds a return to the comfort and familiarity of tried-and-tested classics. In this way, we seek solace in what we think of as our heritage. Certainly, many of the collections in the shops for this winter feature designs that have their roots in the craft-based industries of the rugged islands in the north Atlantic that gave their names to some of the styles most closely associated with traditional British clothing – Harris, Shetland, Fair Isle. Today these iconic styles are widely copied by mass market producers while the craft industries which developed them struggle to remain viable, the weaving of tweed on the islands of Lewis and Harris being a notable exception. However, they continue to define the way the places and people of the isles are thought of. For the practitioners too, making plays an important social role in how they see themselves.

For thousands of years, the process of becoming an adult was for most people rooted in what they did, in craft-based activities, learning through making. Craft brought people together. Traditionally this crafting was especially important in the rural communities of the north, where seasonal demands meant that people spent a large amount of time working on their own. It was often joked, for example, that husbands and wives were only seen together in some of these tasks such as the rooing (plucking the wool) of sheep, or carding (untangling) the wool. Centres of making became centres of meeting. For young people growing up in these societies, the environment itself was their classroom and the community their teacher as they absorbed the practical skills needed to enable them to making a living from the resources around them.

Ben Cartwright is a member of the ̽��ֱ��Material Culture Lab in Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Archaeology. ̽��ֱ��Material Culture Lab is a small group of researchers dedicated to the social study of things from the past. He is interested in the ways in which cloth production was linked to social identity for the island populations of Atlantic Scotland between 600 AD and 1200 AD. This was a period of considerable social change. It begins with the birth of the Viking Age, the creation of various chiefdoms in the Northern and Western Isles who interfered with political events of the age, notably through the creation of the Earldom of Orkney which acted like a firebrand across the skies of the early Viking world. Historically, the sagas record Earls raiding and taking possession of territory as far down as the Isle of Man. Earlier Irish sources record the activities of war bands of mixed Scandinavian and Hebridean descent as ‘foreign Gaels’.

̽��ֱ��ebb and flux of these piratical Chiefdoms end in what in Atlantic Scotland might be called the early middle ages, when the Isles functioned as colonial possessions of the Kings of Norway, who subjugated their troublesome neighbours across the sea. Modern sailing yachts make the crossing in the annual race from Bergen, Norway, to Lerwick, Shetland, in less than 24 hours; in the Viking Age the same voyage would have taken at least two days and nights on the open water and involved far greater danger. Modern crews rely on all manner of engineered man-made fabrics for canvas, rope and notably sailcloth, as well as their protective clothing; in the past all of these items were made by hand from natural materials.

Cartwright’s research explores the ways in which the crafts of spinning and weaving, as ‘learnt bodily histories’ (performing the task requires the learning of certain repetitive body movements and behaviours), contribute to community and individual identity. He is interested in how these crafts shape the means by which people behave and present themselves to themselves and others - not least in the clothes they wore.

“My work looks not just at the ways in which skills and traditions were passed down across the generations but also the central role that crafts played in terms of how people created a community – something that you might describe as ‘islandness’. Craft brings people together, creating a social space where ideas are swapped and made sense of, quite literally with the hands. As apprentices learnt new techniques, which, especially at the loom, could be painful and body altering, it also changed their minds, the way they thought and saw the world around them. They took on and participated in re-making community narratives, the stories, gossip and opinions that made sense of their place in the world. Bringing the past into the present,” said Cartwright.

“To study these communities of makers, and how their ideas changed over time, I look at the objects from the period, such as loom weights and spindle whorls. Lumps of stone, that are so often ignored, can be measured to show the qualities of what they were used to produce, yarn and cloth, and how techniques of making differed over time. A history of learnt body techniques provides a different way of looking at how social ideas shifted or remained. New clothes, styles and sails needed new ways of making, and reasons or motivation to make them. We need new clothes because we want to look like x or y, usually a social ideal or a fashion. We learn to move our fingers in new ways because we want new clothes. These changes were made sense of in relation to their own social histories and the events in the world around them.”

Survival in northern climates depended on the fabrication of materials that protected from wind, rain and cold. Craftsmen looked to the landscape to provide materials for the looms, stones to use as loom weights, fibre to spin into yarn, vegetable matter to use in dyes. ̽��ֱ��demands from the loom would have sent people out into different parts of the environment at different times of the year, creating a rhythm of interaction. “Anyone who has spent time in the Isles will tell you how animate a presence the wind and weather can be. To fulfil these tasks people needed the right clothing, and other items from sacking all the way through to sails,” said Cartwright.

“Cloth is much more than functional: it is imbued with the spirit of those who make it and those who wear it, use it, or sleep beneath it. There’s evidence in the Viking Age that the processes of spinning and weaving were tied into the spirituality and belief systems of the time. We know many myths and ideas, sometimes carved onto spindle whorls, gave religious and historical importance to the activity. And it is very likely that the spinners and weavers would have known and ‘re-spun’ these ideas, giving significance to what they were doing. They were re-weaving the spiritual world for their families and communities, clothing them in meaning.”

̽��ֱ��transformation of a greasy fleece or flax stems into a garment was an intensive practice often involving thousands of hours of labour. ̽��ֱ��skills required to do this involved a sensory engagement with materials in terms of what it is possible to do with them, how they behave and how to manipulate them, processing raw materials into items of desire, twisting colours together in a way that mirrors the subtle beauty of the landscape. “Many of these ideas would have been passed down, from generation to generation. Body techniques full of meaning, superstitions and practices acted as a social skill set. How these changed - or didn’t - is key to understanding how the islanders created a sense of ‘us’ in this period of social upheaval,” said Cartwright.

Clothing is one of the ways in which people, or groups of people, make themselves distinctive. This is likely to have been as true a thousand or so years ago as it is today. When people take on different roles, new clothes give them new ways of behaving. ̽��ֱ��tailoring, material, and weave of the cloth restrict or emphasise certain movements that made up a social system of manners. Ways of being structured the social relations central to a creating sense of home, and an ‘us’.

Cartwright summed up: “You could even say that the clothing wears the body, gives it certain habits. And just as fashion trends change today as the results of influences both within and beyond communities, so they would have done so in the past. Though seemingly remote to our modern road-based way of thinking, and sometimes cut off from surrounding places by storms, the islands of Atlantic Scotland were in the middle of one of the busiest shipping, and therefore of all transport, routes of the age– and this interconnectedness reveals itself in some of the material choices of the Islanders. Not least at the loom.

"It was this ability to participate in the historic changes of the age, that re-forged the political maps of Britain and Ireland, as well as maintain a distinctive localised identity, a ‘heritage’ bound up in cloth, that makes the islanders of the time so fascinating.”

Ben Cartwright, a member of Cambridge’s Material Culture Lab, is an archaeologist whose research focuses on the ways in which the crafts of spinning and weaving are embedded into the historic culture of the islands of the North Atlantic and remain an important part of island identity.

Craft brings people together, creating a social space where ideas are swapped and made sense of, quite literally with the hands.

Ben Cartwright

Shetland Museum and Archives, Lerwick, Scotland

From fleece to the fibre of local identity: the man in the foreground wears a traditional Fair Isle jumper for working with sheep

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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