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April from the Da Costa Hours
This illustration for the calendar page for April (MS M.399, fol. 5v) from The Morgan Library’s Da Costa Hours is a somewhat atypical scene for April, in terms of what most books of hours depict for the April calendar; the labors of April include, most often, scenes of courtship or, or the verdant spring in the form of flowers or spring planting or pruning. Here is a spring farmyard scene, with a cow being milked, a shepherd with lambs, a flock of sheep (and a single billy goat) exiting a sheepcote with some assistance from a man inside, a ewe nursing a lamb. In the background a woman in the…
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June from The Golf Book
The calendar pages for June typically feature the zodiac symbols associated with Cancer the crab. The labors for the month are often the wheat harvest (reaping), or cutting hay and raking it to dry first in windrows and then stacks, or sometimes, sheep-shearing. Sometimes calendar images for June show a fallow field being plowed and re-seeded, or, as the seasonal rhyme for the labors of the months notes “Junij And I wede my corne well I-now,” June was often a time for weeding. In this pair of leaves from the British Library’s Golf Book, on the left is an atypical but nonetheless appropriate scene showing a tournament, a formal series…
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Sheepish Idioms
As we move along the paths of technology and human invention, our skill sets and our language change along with our manner of life. But because so much of language, especially idiom, is built upon metaphor, as we lose understanding of past ways of living, those metaphors die, and become complicated literary allusions. Take, for instance “dyed-on-the-wool,” which Ngaio Marsh used in a punning title of her mystery novel, Died in the Wool. The idiom really is “dyed,” and dyed-in-the-wool means, according to the AHD, “Thoroughgoing; out-and-out: a dyed-in-the-wool populist.” You usually see the idiom used in a political context, as in “Kennedy was a dyed in the wool Democrat.”…
