One year while working as volunteer staff for the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop on Martha’s Vineyard we discovered a local farm, Morning Glory farm, with locally grown produce, including fresh cranberries from nearby Cape Cod Massachusetts, and Carver (in Eastern Massachusetts), both places where commercial cranberry bogs are carefully cultivated, and the wild native cranberry…
Mistletoe
Mistletoe, while celebrated at Christmas for reasons that are, historically speaking, distant enough to be unattributable to a specific cause, is unfairly held in disdain the rest of the year. The green small-leaved white-berried plant, dismissed as a parasite most of the year, is, at Christmas, gathered in small bunches, woven with ribbons, and suspended…
December from Walters W. 425
December calendar images typically feature a pig slaughter, a common labor for December. In the case of the fragmentary prayer book from The Walters museum, Walters W. 425, a pig being butchered was the image for November. December calendar images, when they don’t feature a hog being butchered, often feature a boar hunt….
November from Walters W. 425
The November calendar page from The Walters Walters W. 425 features gold scrolling leaves in the margin, with a small Sagittarius astrological sign in a medallion in the margin. The November calendar has a very conventional scene depicting the labor of the month; Walters W. 425 f. 11r shows a man and a woman slaughtering a…
October from Walters W. 425
Walters W. 425 calendar pages for October, f. 9v and the primary image for the labor of October, Walters W. 425 f. 10r, both have greenery in their marginalia, though f. 9v also includes some striking blossoms, including a Heart’s Ease or Pansy, and a flower that looks very much like a Chrysanthemum, and one that might…
More on the Bristol Vulgate Cycle fragments about Merlin
Fragments of a medieval Merlin manuscript in Old French discovered two years ago in a Bristol’s central library have been more thoroughly examined. The fragments, found in a binding, are from the Old French Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail Cycle. While the Vulgate Cycle was composed circa 1220-1225, the fragments are dated to 1250–1275 via paleographic analysis, with…
September from Walters W. 425
This September calendar image from the fragmentary prayer book The Walters museum MS. W. 425 f. 9r is a fairly typical labor for September in colder climates. A man is walking behind a two-horse plow. The marginalia includes a rondel with scales, the astrological symbol for Libra, more flowers, and a bird. I confess I…
August from Walters W.425
This August image from the fragmentary Walters Museum prayer book Walters W. 425 f. 8r features the astrological symbol for Virgo, the virgin, in the roundel on the top right, more flowers, and a very typical labor for August, threshing grain. The barn is open, allowing the chaff from the dried grain, which looks like…
July from Walters W.425
The two most common labors for July depicted in the calendar images of Books of Hours (and in psalters and prayerbooks like W.425), are mowing hay, and harvesting wheat with a scythe. This image from f. 7r of Walters Museum prayer book fragment W.425 shows a fairly typical scene of two men in a field…
The British Library on Medieval Killer Rabbits
From the British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog: Vengeful, merciless and brutally violent… yes that’s right, we’re talking about medieval bunnies. Rabbits can often be found innocently frolicking in the decorated borders or illuminations of medieval manuscripts, but sometimes, for reasons unknown, these adorable fluffy creatures turn into stone-cold killers. These darkly humorous images of medieval…