i'll find a blog title when i find a name

Marginalia on my jacket! This was such an impulse project but I’m very pleased with how it turned out!

Details:

the images had me convinced that they are scans from a book and if I didn’t figure out which one I knew this was going to be living rent free in my mind but no one had called it out in the notes nor did the Hat Shop cite their source

luckily, I was able to just make out enough of the title in some of the addition images to track it down The Mode in Hats and Headdress by Ruth Turner Wilcox

Creatures from the Kennicott Bible, an illuminated manuscript copy of the Hebrew Bible, copied in A Coruña, Spain in 1476 by the calligrapher Moses ibn Zabarah and illuminated by Joseph ibn Hayyim 🔮🦇👼🏼🐉🐻🐊🐒🦚🪞

It is regarded as one of the most exquisite illuminated manuscripts in Hebrew and one of the most lavishly illuminated Sephardic manuscript of the 15th century. According to the historian Cecil Roth, one of the most outstanding aspects of this copy is the close collaboration it shows between the calligrapher and the illuminator, rare in this type of work.

In 1476, Isaac, a Jewish silversmith from Coruña, son of Salomón de Braga, commissioned an illuminated Bible from the scribe Moses ibn Zabarah who lived in Coruña with his family on behalf of his patron. He spent ten months to scribe the Bible, writing two folios on a daily basis. Illumination of the manuscript was the responsibility of Joseph ibn Hayyim, who is remembered thanks to this work.

Medieval garden vase, ready for the kiln!

I found a botanical manuscript and was possessed

This snail is a Landsknecht and he is dressed accordingly

I’m writing a book of history. When I did all that research on brutalism, I realized not for the first time but more fully and completely than ever before the extent to which historical fact is often really disruptive to the stories we tell about it. Most “history” doesn’t even survive the barest investigation of the facts because most “history” is political storytelling.

“brutalism is communist” is one of the biggest stories about Brutalism, and it’s why people both love and hate it, but it’s really not true. Communists invented the word Brutalism to mock American tenement housing which by the mid 50s was collapsing and lacked anything resembling modern amenities. They contrasted it to “the new humanism,” the soviet school of architecture’s high ceilinged, centrally heated, public transit accessible public urban housing. Those apartments built under Stalin are still in high demand in Moscow and st. Petersburg because the architects and the builders did a good job. They’re old, but still decent places to live. Brutalism was a slur for designs that centered cost-cutting over safety or liveability. Meanwhile, architects like Miese or Le Corbusier were designing buildings that centered neither the occupant nor the financier, and were pushing this radical view that material science could make architecture the new great center of artistic expression. “Béton Brut” or raw concrete became the medium of the post war reconstruction because it was cheap but you could mold it into anything. architecture could experiment structurally with techniques that had previously been limited to sculpture and you could get buildings that truly seemed to defy gravity.

The Brut of art brut and Béton Brut was confused with the Brutal conditions of cheap american tenements and then reclaimed homophonically by a bunch of edgy British architects to make a style that is permanently misunderstood even by the people who like it because it was born from this condensation of two separate meanings of the word “Brut(e).” Brutalism only gets its socialist associations in the 70s and 80s when tory politicians started mongering conspiracies about the inherent socialism of public housing (cheap, made of concrete) because poor people lived there. the “commie block” of eastern europe was far more common in yugoslavia than russia until the late 60s and 70s when brezhnev built more of them for, again, cost reasons.

All art is political. All of it. And politics has been moving at the speed of sound even since the first proto-human said “you can’t sit with us” at the lunch table. Renaissance faires are a kind of public art that exists because of a political movement that killed or destroyed the careers of thousands of queer people and communists. Those people, working in hollywood, were trying to live lives, be free, and change minds about what society could accept and when they were blacklisted by HUAC and Joe Mccarthy and Ronald Reagan, they went out into the woods and made their own party so they could stay working and living and making art.

“Historical accuracy” was not the goal. Surviving a political purge was the goal. Now, not everyone who studies history cares about the same things. My roommate in grad school was working on lightbulbs. Just lightbulbs. nothing else. It would have killed me, to be honest. He loved it. But if you are going to complain about historical inaccuracies in the folk tradition that was created to survive a political purge you better damn well be right about what you’re fucking talking about.

The find was made by local hobby archaeologist and licensed metal detectorist Constantin Fried on a field near Petershagen and turned over to the appropriate governing body, the LWL-Archäologie für Westfalen, in 2023. Since then, it has been subjected to a variety of analysis methods. We now know that it worked, that the internal mechanism is made of iron, and that it probably dates to the 3rd or 4th century BC. Here, have some cool pictures:

Yes, that is how it was found. Come to Germany and bother a farmer enough that he lets you walk over his field, and you too could find 1,600 year old gold artefacts! (Don't actually do this, the farmers will get mad at you and the archaeologists don't like it either. You need a license for metal detectoring in many German states and fieldwalking with the intent to find and keep archaeological material as a private person is illegal, yes, literally.)

This is the large-scale brass reproduction made by one of the restorers at LWL-Archäologie. Since the original was found with a single gold link, it was possible to reconstruct the chain that would have held the lock to whatever it was supposed to hold closed (probably a small box, maybe a jewellery box). In order to work, the chain would have needed a minimum of six links. Also not found but added to the reconstruction: The key.

There's still a lot of unsolved questions around this find: Where is it from? Was it actually used as a lock, or did its owner wear it as a piece of curious jewellery? The lock seems to have been forced at least once, was this because someone stole the contents of the box it was locking, or was something stuck in the mechanism and the owner couldn't get at their stuff? And maybe most interesting of all: How was it made? Because, as far as we know, the Romans did not have magnifiying glasses, and this thing is TINY!!! It's TINY!!!!

Sources (apart from the article link I'm reblogging):

Tagesschau, Archäologische Sensation. Goldenes Minischloss aus der Römerzeit gefunden (article uploaded Jan 28, 2025).

Hans Talhoffer Chinchillas

Harnisfechten Chinchillas

Joachim Meyer Longsword Chinchillas

Fantastical Snail Marginalia Chinchillas

Olympic Epee Chinchillas

Salvator Fabris Rapier-in-the-Nude Chinchillas

Napoleonic Saber Chinchillas

Arabic Shamshir Chinchillas

18th Century Smallsword Chinchillas