mmcnealy | Entries tagged with book review

For my birthday last month I was given an Amazon gift certificate, and I used it to buy several interesting research books, one of them came today.

Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation,by Gerald Strauss

Its a collection of writings from the period of 1430-1530, and includes sermons, poems and proclamations about a variety of topics. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in Early Modern Germany, it contains some real gems.

But now for the fun quote from the book,
From the Chronicles of Sebastian Franck, 1531, p 215-218
Concerning the Arrival of Two Plagues in Germany in the Time of Emperor Maximilian. To Wit: The Terribile Affliction Called "The French Disease" And the Destructive Landsknechte

"The same emperor's reign also witnessed the arrival of that useless breed of men called Landsknecht, a plague upon our land which invades us uncalled for and uninvited, seeking and causing war and visiting misfortune upon us all. Landsknecht are not citizens who respond to their lord's call to war. Such citizens are proper soldiers and loyal militiamen. They do what they are obliged to do out of a sense of duty and obedience, not gain. For Landsknecht, on the other hand, I find no excuse or justification, seeing that they are an unchristian, cursed tribe whose trade consists of gouging, stabbing, pillaging, burning, murdering, gambling, drinking, whoring, blaspheming, willfully killing husbands and fathers, persecuting peasents in war and peace, stripping fields and demanding tributes. They are harmful not only to others, but also to themselves. In truth, they are a plague and pestilence on the whole world. "

Current Mood: amused

While hunting around to find more information on modern weight equivalents I found this great book on Google Books,

Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg By Thomas Max Safley

On Page 181 it has a list created in 1572 of what an orphanage of 200 children would be estimated to cost. It includes the amount of linen and other fabrics needed and the cost per ell for each, as well as food costs and costs for sewing, cobbler and food.

Its all itemized, so you can see what the orphan's diet would have been like.

Nicest part? The book is all in English!

This one's going on the ILL list for sure!

The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

I have a love/hate relationship with this book. On the one hand, it has lots of great details in it like when Felix (the son) travels with his father to visit the old family farm in the Alps to show the relatives just how good they've made it. On the last leg of the journey, he wears a red silk doublet, red pantaloons and a fuzzy velvet hat. He also gets heatstroke because he's hiking up a mountain in summer in red silk!

Or the stories about the students in Thomas's school, or the baker who died in a fire because he was too fat to escape out his house windows... Or that there was a fashion for yellow dresses in Basel brought from Strausburg by a particular person. Or details about the practical jokes they used to play on each other. Or the business and legal aspects, or training in being a doctor, childhood, etc.

It just has lots of great stuff, rich detail and soap opera-y true life stories to keep you entertained for a while. It shows what life was really like in Switzerland and other parts of Europe in the early to mid 16th century, for both rich and poor. Thomas the father started out as a goat herd, traveled around Europe for ten years trying to learn to read and he ended up a professor and a printer (along with several other careers along the way)

On the other hand, the author drives me crazy with his sideline editorializing and his failure to just quote the raw material straight up. He paraphrases most everything and the scholar in me wants the straight text.

Bottom line: Buy it. Its cheap, entertaining and has lots of real life details that will help you flesh out your persona whether male or female.

Current Mood: amused

My copy of Un banquier mis à nu : Autobiographie de Matthäus Schwarz, bourgeois d'Ausbourg by Philippe Braunstein arrived today.

It is a fascmile of the BnF copy not of the original, but its in full golorious color and a real treat for the eyes!

The book is hardbound and comes in a protective cardboard sleeve.
The first part of the book is the color facsmile of the costume book of Matthais Schwarz, then the second part is a text section with the original picture captions translated into French and a small amount of commentary.

The costumes themselve are very well drawn, and some of the details are quite easy to make out.

This is definitely worth adding to your research library, especially at $26

Besides historical clothing, the study of historical merchants and markets is somewhat of an obsession of mine, I love seeing how commerce worked in the past. I was very happy then to get this book, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe, by Peter Spufford came in the mail today. At $20 for a used copy, its a screaming deal for the artwork alone, however the text is quite good and gives great insight into how goods were created, moved from producer to market and the people involved in the process.

The book contains many b/w illustrations and some color of merchants, tradesman, goods and people going about on business. The illustrations are mainly from French and German sources, with some Italian as well.

Besides the great art work, the text gives a nice overview, with some great little details, of how goods were produced, bought and sold, moved to market, who bought them and the life of the merchant on the road. The author also gives a nice realistic assessment into period descriptions of cloth and materials, and helps provide some much needed perspective into the expense of some items. All and all, its a great overview book into mercants, markets, money and goods. I highly recommend it.

Great little factoids from the book:
- Merchants used a parchment roll itinerary listing the names of towns, and the distances between them, that were on the road from one major city to the next. (p.54)

- By the 1370's merchants from Ulm, Augsberg and Nuremberg were buying raw Syrian cotton in Milan and Venice and selling it to southern German fustian makers located in Ulm, and between Ulm and Augsburg. At the beginning of the 16th century, 50,000 pieces of linen and 100,000 pieces of fustian were inspected and stamped in Ulm. (p.254)

Current Mood: energetic

This is the book with the Linen clothing in it, definitly a get from ILL. Edit: I just looked for it online. You can get copies for as little as $10 used and about $20 new from Amazon and www.bookfinder.com.

The Medieval Health Handbook (Tacuinum Sanitatis) by Luisa Cogliati Arano, translated and adapted by Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook from the original Italian edition.

Published in 1976, ISBN 0-8076-0808-4 Library of Congress number, 75-21725

Basic Description:

This book is about 5 different illuminated manuscripts that were created in the Po Valley (Northern Italy) between 1380 and 1420. While the manuscripts are originally from Italy, they were quickly dispersed through conquest and the Paris manuscript was acquired this way in the 1420's. The current locations of the manuscripts are Vienna, Casanatense (Rome), Paris, Liege and Rouen.

While the text is based on an earlier Arabic manuscript that came through Sicily, the manuscript text doesn't follow it exactly and the artistic style of the illuminations ranges from France to Bohemia.

Fun Notes!

Some of the manuscripts have these great women's gowns with polka dotted bodices and plain skirts. They look very similar to Regency styles (ala Jane Austen) with big puffy sleeves!

There are lots of scenes from everyday life, indoors and out, in this book.

From the text

On Linen Clothing:

Linen Cothing (Vestis Linea)

Nature: Cold and dry in the second degree. Optimum: The light, splendid, beautiful kind. Usefullness: It moderates the heat of the body. Dangers: It presses down on the skin and blocks transpiration. Neutrailization of the Dangers: By mixing it with silk. Effects: It dries up ulcerations. It is primarily good for hot temperments, for the young, in Summer and in the Southern regions.

Included in the Vienna, Casanatense, Paris, Liege manuscripts, but not in the one from Rouen

The linen clothing shown in the illumination is white/grayish color and the scene shown is one of a tailor's shop. In several other places throughout the book, specifically in the summer and scenes of harvesting grain, both men and women are in white clothing. The men are literally in their undershorts and shirts and the women have the skirts kilted up pretty high.

Current Mood: excited

Today is supposed to be my "Write the stupid final paper" day, but I think it would be a whole lot more interesting to sit around and surf the net for cool looking books that I'd like to check out from the library.

For all you Italien Ren mavens out there, here's a book for you:

"The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy" by Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Yale University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-300-07629-0

I literally stumbled across this book at the library while looking for something else. It is loaded with lots of detailed images of interior scenes that give lots of good detail. Most are from the late 1400's to early 1500's, but there is one particularly wonderful image of a baptism processional scene from Venice in the mid to late 1500's, the costume details are wonderful in this book.

My two cents on the Birbari vs Herald debate..... Birbari gives cutting layouts and hardly any pictures, also misses some large developments in Italian fashion and pretty much seems to skip the matter of headgear that's not a veil. Herald doesn't give pattern cutting layouts, but does offer up reasonably good text and very detailed pictures, some of them showing styles of Italian clothing that I hadn't run across in my art trolling sessions.

Current Mood: listless

Juggling life, liberty and happiness

Funny quote for the day

Cool book find! Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg

Book Review: The Beggar and the Professor

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Seriously procrastinating and Italian Ren book

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