[SCA-AS] Weaving (Artssciences Digest, Vol 54, Issue 2)

[Sydney Walker Freedman]

Flip, how did you figure it out.  I've been wondering how it was
historically done, too, and you've reminded me to keep looking.  i'll let
you know if i come across anything.

Lady Cecilia de Cambrige

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. [Fwd: TMR 07.10.30 Streitman and Happe,	Urban Theatre
>       (Symes)] (jenne at fiedlerfamily.net)
>    2. Weaving (Saint Phlip)
>    3. Re: Weaving (Heleen Greenwald)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 16:05:17 -0600 (CST)
> From: jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
> Subject: [SCA-AS] [Fwd: TMR 07.10.30 Streitman and Happe,	Urban
> 	Theatre (Symes)]
> To: "East Kingdom A&S List" <EK_AnS at yahoogroups.com>,	"Arts and
> 	Sciences in the SCA" <artssciences at lists.gallowglass.org>
> Message-ID:
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> ---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
> Subject: TMR 07.10.30 Streitman and Happe, Urban Theatre (Symes)
> From:    "The Medieval Review" <tmrl at indiana.edu>
> Date:    Mon, October 29, 2007 8:08 am
> To:      tmr-l at indiana.edu
>          bmr-l at brynmawr.edu
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Streitman, Elsa and Peter Happe, eds. <i>Urban Theatre in the Low
> Countries, 1400-1625</i>. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern
> Europe, 12. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. Pp. xii, 320. &#8364;70.00. ISBN:
> 9782503517005.
>
>     Reviewed by Carol Symes
>          Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-
>          Champaign
>          symes at uiuc.edu
>
>
> The essays gathered in this volume make an important contribution to
> the related studies of theater and urban life. Many open windows onto
> a world in which scripted drama was only one manifestation of a
> culture that was inherently performative and representational, and the
> cumulative effect of this scholarship (some of which has never been
> accessible in English before) is to demonstrate that the understanding
> of plays and pageantry is inextricably bound up with the history of
> communities and their modes of communication. Indeed, the very
> richness of the Low Countries' historical record stands as a challenge
> to conventional narratives of theater's history, which tend to reify
> modern generic categories, national boundaries, and temporal
> divisions. The mere fact that one cannot describe this region and
> period using familiar geographic and historiographic terminology is
> instructive. Readers whose knowledge of the Netherlands and its
> theater has hitherto begun and ended with the Middle English
> translation of <i>Elckerlijc</i> (<i>Everyman</i> ) will be
> enlightened.
>
> Although its editors assert that the book's "chronological scope is
> extensive" (24), most essays deal with the role of Chambers of
> Rhetoric (<i>rederijkerskameren</i>) in the production and publication
> of plays over a century and a half, from the early sixteenth to the
> mid-seventeenth centuries. This period certainly deserves close
> attention, but the editors' suggestion that it can be taken as
> normative is problematic, for it conveys the misleading impression
> that there was little theatrical activity in the region earlier on,
> and that only four surviving antecedents of early modern drama deserve
> consideration (Lille's annual procession on Trinity Sunday, first
> attested in 1270; the so-called Maastricht or Ripuarian <i>Passion
> Play</i> from the fourteenth century; and two surviving Marian
> pageants from fifteenth-century Brusssels). On the one hand, this
> narrow focus fails to account for the urban theater of cosmopolitan
> Arras, which was producing and preserving a wide spectrum of
> vernacular entertainments as early as the twelfth century and which
> had a demonstrable impact on other towns in the region, notably
> Bruges, Gent, Saint-Omer, Cambrai, Tournai, Valenciennes, Mons, and--
> farther afield-&#8211;London and Paris. (Arras is firmly situated on the
> book's excellent map but is mentioned only fleetingly in the text).[1]
> On the other, it obscures the age-old connection between dramatic
> formulae and the traditions of forensic and didactic rhetoric so ably
> dissected by Jody Enders, whose <i>Rhetoric and the Origins of
> Medieval Drama</i> (Ithaca, 1992) receives a lonely mention in a
> single essay. The volume's implicit argument would have been more
> forcefully advanced by a forthright acknowledgment that the Low
> Countries' theatrical vocabulary had long been rooted in political,
> social, and economic realities. As Galbert of Bruges observed in 1127,
> the peaceful governance of Flanders not only fostered trade but led
> its urbane inhabitants to devise "all manner of ingenious and studied
> arguments," so that "it came about, in fact, that everyone became
> proficient in rhetorical skills, some by diligent study and some by
> nature." [2]
>
> The book is divided into five sections. The first, "Precursors," opens
> with Carla Dauven-van Knippenberg's "Borderline Texts: The Case of the
> <i>Maastricht (Ripuarian) Passion Play </i>." The text under
> reconsideration (Den Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek 70 E 5, fols.
> 233v-247v) furnishes a wonderful illustration of the chauvinistic
> contortions performed by modern academics at the expense of medieval
> artifacts: probably not from Maastricht, possibly not a Passion play,
> and only partially scripted in the Ripuarian dialect of the Lower
> Rhine. Assigned by nineteenth-century Dutch philologists to Germany
> (specifically Cologne) and by German philologists to the Limburger
> town of Maastricht in the Netherlands, it has since been firmly
> replaced in its manuscript context by J. Peter Gumbert, who
> demonstrated that the play was deliberately copied alongside a
> collection of Middle Dutch homilies known as the <i>Limburgse
> Sermoenen</i> in the early decades of the fourteenth century, and that
> it also shares space with vernacular sermons and mystical writings
> testifying to the influence of Hadewijch of Brabant (fl. c. 1250) and
> Beatrijs of Nazareth (c. 1200-1263). The codex itself thus invites
> renewed consideration of the play's participation in a contemporary
> culture of vernacular piety. In addition, the political circumstances
> of its composition can be teased out of the macaronic mixture of
> German and Dutch elements, most strikingly apparent in the Middle
> Dutch ballad sung by Mary Magdalene, which strongly resembles lyrics
> composed by Duke Jan I of Brabant (c. 1254-94), the victor in the War
> of the Limburg Succession (1280-1288). Hence, Dauven-van Knippenberg
> theorizes that it may have been inserted into the play by German-
> speaking supporters on the losing side, as a comment on the decadence
> of the Brabantine court. Puzzlingly, however, she concludes that this
> new understanding of the play's codicological and historical contexts
> unfits it for study as drama--that somehow the fact that it is "not
> just" a play must mean that it was not intended for performance (49).
> That "we have no corresponding records of performance" and that "the
> manuscript shows no signs of having been used for performance" are
> hardly damning proofs of antitheatricality, however; the same could be
> said of nearly every extant play text prior to 1400. In this case, as
> in so many others, one cannot expect medieval dramatic documents to
> exhibit the characteristics "usual" in the scripts of later eras.
>
> The other designated "precursor" of urban theater in the Dutch
> vernacular is discussed by W.M.H. Hummelen in "<i>Pausa</i> and
> <i>Selete</i> in the <i>Bliscapen</i>," with reference to the first
> and last installments of what was originally a seven-year dramatic
> cycle celebrating the Seven Joys (<i>bliscapen</i>) of Mary,
> inaugurated in Brussels in 1448 and performed by the Archers' Guild in
> the Grote Markt after a festive procession held annually in honor of
> the Virgin. Hummelen mines the texts of these two plays (first
> "discovered" in 1962 and 1882, respectively) for insights into the
> meaning of two seminal terms which occur very frequently in later
> scripts, and performs a clever analysis of the directorial
> interventions added to the rubrics of one original manuscript. He
> concludes that <i>selete</i> was used to designate occasions when
> singing alone was called for, while <i>pausa</i> indicated a need for
> instrumental music--as distinct from occasions when stage directions
> call indiscriminately for either one or the other, or both. He also
> stresses the fact that all of these musical interludes would have been
> executed <i>ad libitum</i>, with only occasional descriptors guiding
> musicians or metteurs-en-sc&#232;ne in the selection of appropriately
> "beautiful" or "joyous" material. His careful use of textual sources
> shows how conventions changed over time, and calls attention to the
> important fact that much of what we would like to know about medieval
> staging practices was never written down.
>
> The first article in section two, "Politics and Religion," is Gary K.
> Waite's "Rhetoricians and Religious Compromise during the Early
> Reformation (c. 1520-1555)," a satisfying account of the methods used
> by <i>rederijkers factors</i> (the playwrights of the Chambers of
> Rhetoric) to help "their lay contemporaries understand the issues"
> that were being hotly debated--and occasionally more hotly punished--
> in the first decades of the Reformation. He argues, compellingly, that
> these influential dramatists, who were often "lay experts on
> religion," used the public sphere of their late-medieval towns to
> present ideas and doctrines tailored "to fit the unique culture and
> economy of the urban landscape of the Low Countries" (79-80). The
> result was an array of subtle plays that facilitated debate within
> communities where "political peace, economic growth, and religious
> tolerance ranked at least as highly as the call for religious change"
> (102). He suggests, indeed, that the influential reformer David Joris
> was nurtured within the thriving Rhetoricians culture of Bruges, where
> his father had been an actor, and that he brought that tradition of
> composition and performance with him to Antwerp and to his theological
> writings. Here is an essay that exemplifies how much a deep
> contextualization of dramatic fictions can reveal about reality.
>
> Complementing Waite's study is Wim Husken's "'Heresy' in the Plays of
> the Dutch Rhetoricians," which also emphasizes the eclecticism of
> Dutch reform movements. It reveals that Rhetoricians reacted
> creatively and courageously to the increasingly strident but largely
> ineffectual attempts to ban their activities, which culminated in the
> official prohibition of 26 January 1560 and which may have spurred
> even more subversive performances. Examining the scripts made
> available in print prior to that date, Husken inventories some of the
> techniques used by playwrights to express controversial opinions even
> in this relatively regulated medium, concentrating on accusations of
> 'heresy' that can actually be read as referring to representatives of
> the Church and not (as has been assumed) to Protestant reformers. He
> thereby calls for closer and more sophisticated readings of the
> surviving texts, which may reveal even more powerful strains of
> religious dissent than have hitherto been uncovered &#8211; and which may
> have befuddled contemporary censors as well as modern scholars.
>
> In the lead essay of section three, "Literary Traditions of
> Rhetoricians Plays," Bart Ramakers offers a radical re-assessment of
> what allegorical drama was, how it functioned, and how it was received
> by contemporaries. In "Dutch Allegorical Theater: Tradition and
> Conceptual Approach," he questions some fundamental assumptions about
> medieval dramatic genres, which (he rightly asserts) cannot be
> understood as separate from the genres of public oratory and
> argumentation, notably preaching and disputation (it is he who cites
> Enders). As he points out, all are based on monologue and dialogue,
> the building blocks of "everything that is said on stage"--and, for
> that matter, in real life (128, 133). Furthermore, allegory's visual
> impact must also be understood in terms of public display. In short,
> Ramakers argues against the stubborn notion that allegory is
> essentially a lesser form of dramatic representation, both less
> immediate and less theatrical. He makes a passionate case for the
> intellectual demands and payoffs of allegory--for playwrights, actors,
> and audiences--and for its place in the "public oratory of the town."
>
> The remaining two essays in this section are devoted to drama's
> literary relationships. Peter Happe's "Pyramus and Thisbe:
> Rhetoricians and Shakespeare" compares and contrasts the treatment of
> Ovid's story as lampooned in Shakespeare's <i>A Midsummer Night's
> Dream</i> (first printed in quarto in 1600) and as moralized in two
> earlier Dutch plays: the <i>spel van sinnen</i> performed by the
> Haarlem Rhetoricians around 1518 (extant in their manuscript
> collection of plays) and the illustrated <i>Pyramus ende Thisbe</i>
> first printed at Antwerp around 1520 (and reprinted at Gent in 1573
> and at Rotterdam in 1612 and 1616). Happe shows how the Dutch
> playwrights of the sixteenth century expanded on both classical and
> Christian treatments in strikingly different ways and, in turn, shows
> that Shakespeare's more famous version of the story is part of a long
> tradition--as are his play's performers. Elsa Streitman's "God, Gods,
> Humans and <i>Sinnekens</i> in Classical Rhetoricians Plays" further
> demonstrates that many Dutch playwrights were experimenting with
> Christian interpretations of classical material, using humanist-
> inflected allegory in ways that bear direct comparison to contemporary
> English dramas like John Heywood's <i>The Play of the Weather<\> or
> John Redford's <i>Wit and Science</i>. Clearly, further comparison of
> the urban theaters that flourished in England and the Low Countries
> during this period could reveal some surprising links and borrowings,
> fostered by shared commerce and shared political objectives and
> increasingly facilitated by shared printing presses.
>
> The fourth section of the book, "Urban Dramatic Culture," features
> articles by three prominent Anglophone scholars of Continental
> medieval drama. Alan Knight's "Guild Pageants and Urban Stability in
> Lille," the fruit of many years' research in the archives of that
> border town, provides a much-needed perspective on the development of
> urban theatrical traditions over a relatively <i>longue duree</i>.
> "Rhetoricians and the Drama: The Francophone Tradition," by the late
> Lynette R. Muir, is a fitting testament to its author's lifelong
> engagement with the drama of French-speaking lands, and brings
> together some of the scattered evidence for the composition,
> organization, and production of late-medieval plays. In "Worthy Women
> of the Old Testament: The Ambachtsvrouwen of the <i>Leuven
> Ommegang</i>," Meg Twycross looks closely at the extraordinary
> cavalcade performed annually at Leuven on the Feast of the Nativity of
> the Virgin (8 September) and recorded for posterity in the local
> history of Willem Boonen in 1593-94. Working from Boonen's description
> and drawings of this remarkable event, which featured thirty-four Old
> Testament heroines and their entourages on horseback, Twycross
> explains how spectators were "enticed into a mode of interactive
> reading" which invited them to "crack" the code of its riddling
> iconography (238).
>
> The final section, "Performance and Material Culture," consist of two
> essays: "Accommodation and Possessions of Chambers of Rhetoric in the
> Province of Holland" by Th. C. J. van der Heijden and F.C. van
> Boheemen, and Femke Kramer's "Producing Late Medieval Dutch Plays
> Today." The former surveys what can be known about the actual chambers
> in which Rhetoricians met, the furnishings of those rooms, and the
> other properties they contained. (In addition to printed and
> manuscript collections of plays, many groups owned Bibles and works of
> history, both vernacular and Latin. Somewhat surprisingly, the Latin
> translation of Josephus's <i>Jewish Wars</i> appears to have been a
> staple reference.) The latter surveys recent productions of medieval
> Dutch plays.
>
> Overall, this valuable collection of essays is not well served by its
> introduction, as I have already indicated. Given its intended
> audience, it should have attempted to define Dutch terms with
> accuracy; for example, <i>factor</i> would be more faithfully rendered
> "wright" or "playwright" than "official poet" (15); and <i>spelen van
> sinne</i> are not the same as English "moralities" (16), as Waite
> (101) and Ramakers (133-134) show. The introduction should also have
> explained what the Chambers of Rhetoric were, how they came into
> being, and how they governed themselves (the few sentences on page 12
> are too brief and too sketchy to be helpful). Instead, it consists
> largely of an "Historical Prologue," featuring an inadequate and
> confused summary of high politics and religious debates in a place and
> time where, admittedly, politics and religion were notoriously
> complicated. And it makes several troubling assertions about the
> relationship of plays in performance to plays in manuscript, and about
> the relationship of dramatists to the printed publication of their
> works, repeating canards (e.g. "The Reformation was predicated upon
> the spread of print," 13) that have been challenged by many scholars,
> including some of the volume's own contributors. It would have been
> better to have used this space to deal thoughtfully with the larger
> questions raised by a book for which the editors otherwise deserve
> praise. These questions are important: the very "nature of the drama
> produced by this urban society" (9), the relationship between what was
> written down and what was performed, the reception of plays in
> production and in print, the interaction between theater and lived
> reality, the effects of entertainment on public policy (and vice
> versa), the shared techniques and ambitions of both dramatic and
> political actors. Happily, English-speaking scholars interested in
> such questions now have access to an urban milieu that is both similar
> to that of neighboring territories and strikingly distinctive: in its
> social porousness, its political indeterminacy, its spiritual
> diversity, its susceptibility to public opinion, and its resistance to
> categorization.
>
>
> NOTES
>
> [1] Carol Symes, <i>A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in
> Medieval Arras.</i> Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007.
>
> [2] Galbert of Bruges, <i>De multro, traditione, et occisione gloriosi
> Karoli comitis Flandriarum,</i> ed. Jeff Rider, Corpus Christianorum
> continuatio medievalis, 131 (Turnhout, 1994), c. 1 (7). "Qua pacis
> gratia legibus et justitiis sese regebant homines, omnia ingeniorum et
> studiorum argumenta ad placita componentes ut in virtute et eloquentia
> rhetoricae unusquisque se defensaret cum impetitus fuisset, vel cum
> hostem impeteret qua colorum varietate oratorie fucatum deciperet.
> Tunc vero habuit rhetorica sua exercitia et per industriam et per
> naturam." A similar observation is made still earlier, in the
> <i>Disputatio de rhetorica</i> attributed to Alcuin and dedicated to
> Charlemagne (c. 794): see <i>The Rhetoric of Alcuin and
> Charlemagne</i>, ed. Wilbur Samuel Howell (New York, 1965), 68-70 (cc.
> 2-3).
>
>
> --
> -- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
> jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 08:17:10 -0500
> From: "Saint Phlip" <phlip at 99main.com>
> Subject: [SCA-AS] Weaving
> To: "Arts and Sciences in the SCA"
> 	<artssciences at lists.gallowglass.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<30aedccb0711060517m263e015dyaf3b316cffe8dea4 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> OK, folks, I need some help from our fabric people.
>
> I want to make a tunic, in the Byzantine style, with the whole thing
> woven of a piece- sleeves, neck slit, the whole shot. I've figured out
> how _I_ can do it, using my fairly limited knowledge of weaving, but
> I'd dearly love to know what sort of loom would be used in period, and
> how it would work.
>
> Can someone direct me to resources, preferably on line, that would
> show various period types of looms, and how they were used?
>
> --
> Saint Phlip
>
> Heat it up
> Hit it hard
> Repent as necessary.
>
> Priorities:
>
> It's the smith who makes the tools, not the tools which make the smith.
>
> .I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary
> notices I have read with pleasure. -Clarence Darrow
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 08:35:04 -0500
> From: Heleen Greenwald <heleen at ptd.net>
> Subject: Re: [SCA-AS] Weaving
> To: Arts and Sciences in the SCA <artssciences at lists.gallowglass.org>
> Message-ID: <3452F564-61F9-4270-A3C4-48B441BCF264 at ptd.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Wish I could help cuz!... please share the info when you get it.
> Thanks
> Phillipa
> "My furs are not in storage, or draped across the bed,
> they're hanging from the cage door, waiting to be fed."
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 6, 2007, at 8:17 AM, Saint Phlip wrote:
>
>> OK, folks, I need some help from our fabric people.
>>
>> I want to make a tunic, in the Byzantine style, with the whole thing
>> woven of a piece- sleeves, neck slit, the whole shot. I've figured out
>> how _I_ can do it, using my fairly limited knowledge of weaving, but
>> I'd dearly love to know what sort of loom would be used in period, and
>> how it would work.
>>
>> Can someone direct me to resources, preferably on line, that would
>> show various period types of looms, and how they were used?
>>
>> --
>> Saint Phlip
>>
>> Heat it up
>> Hit it hard
>> Repent as necessary.
>>
>> Priorities:
>>
>> It's the smith who makes the tools, not the tools which make the
>> smith.
>>
>> .I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary
>> notices I have read with pleasure. -Clarence Darrow
>> _______________________________________________
>> Artssciences mailing list
>> Artssciences at lists.gallowglass.org
>> http://lists.gallowglass.org/mailman/listinfo/artssciences
>>
>
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> End of Artssciences Digest, Vol 54, Issue 2
> *******************************************
>


Pax Christi,
Sydney