#it’s a traditional medieval ink recipe! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ivan-fyodorovich-k · 2 years ago

Text

Isekai where a 21st century traditional Catholic wakes up to find himself in medieval Europe.

The people in the village in which he awakens are completely unintelligible to him, speaking some kind of old high German dialect. The people around him find his 21st century English even less intelligible. They conclude that he is probably ill, though because of his strange clothes he is perhaps a traveler, but if he were a traveler, when and how did he come? And indeed, speaking such a strange language, from how far? Someone sends for the local priest to weigh in, particularly to ascertain whether he has a demon.

Excited at the prospect of speaking with an educated man, and himself a meticulous student of Latin (as all good trads are), the trad Catholic soon learns that the local priest finds the trad’s accent in Latin incomprehensible. The priest’s strengths as a student are, in fact, far less than the trad’s; his Latin was never very good, even at its peak. He has never been able to converse in Latin, always struggled to compose original thoughts in the alien tongue, and struggles to read it. He has been relying on rote memorization for years in order to fill his various offices, and on the rare occasions the Bishop has visited the town the priest has been admonished to improve and failed to do so. The trad motions for a pen and paper hoping to write rather than speak, but the motion is unintelligible to most of the people present as they are illiterate. At any rate the only pens and paper in the area are jealously guarded by the monks at the nearby monastery, who are constantly struggling to maintain adequate supplies of these rare luxuries.

Soon the trad is offered food and drink; he consumes both with some difficulty, their coarse texture and unusual flavor proving a challenge. As nobody is able to communicate with him and he seems distressed but not violent, the priest and local people are unable to decide whether he is a guest, a lunatic, and/or possessed, and leave him in an upstairs room--locked--for the night.

The next day he develops severe dysentery and food poisoning from the previous day’s meal, the local microbes being utterly foreign to his constitution, and some locals take this as an ominous sign. Nevertheless a physician is sent for, who arrives two days later, and his efforts to treat the trad just make things worse. Every food or fluid given the trad only exacerbates his symptoms.

Soon the trad, tormented by fleas and other vermin that infest his mattress, dies of severe dehydration. The locals debate with the priest how he should be buried. On the one hand, he seemed quite happy to see the priest, at least at first, and though he seemed to become quite sad, it was argued this could have been disappointment that he could not make himself understood. At any rate, someone with a demon probably would have been much more hostile to the priest. But on the other hand, he did reject all of the food they gave him, and his inability to tolerate the beer he was offered proved downright insulting to some of the monks. In the end they decide to give him the benefit of the doubt, and he is given a Christian burial in the churchyard.

The priest relates this story to the local monastery and they consider whether to record it, but most of the monks’ free time has been devoted to experimenting with beer recipes for several years and consequently even the best Latinists among them long ago drank away most of their skill at original composition. They too have been primarily relying on memorization as they go about their secondary duty of scrawling manuscripts for the various lords and nobles in the region, most of whom are barely literate themselves but feel having a book or two projects a good image to visitors.

Indeed, as they are far behind in their manuscript duties, a recent batch of beer having been found ready sooner than expected, the monks conclude they cannot spare the parchment or the ink to write anything down anyway.

Meanwhile the trad’s presence, itself a vehicle for microbes to which the locals have no immunity, results in an unusually severe influenza outbreak, which the priest explains as God’s punishment for the community’s gluttony, drunkenness, and promiscuity. As the priest himself is known to frequent the local brothel, the people of the area agree this is the most likely explanation.

A few weeks later, one of the local monks who declined to record the appearance nevertheless idly draws a rough image of the sick, bedridden trad in the marginalia of a Book of Hours he’s been copying, letting his attention drift because his eyes are fatigued both by the monotony of the work and by the haze of his current hangover. Many centuries later this surviving leaf becomes a moderately popular meme image on twitter, with 7,000-some likes and retweets.

#middle ages #trad catholic #tradcath #catholicism #catholic

65 notes · View notes

tipsycad147 · 3 years ago

Text

What is Dragon's Blood ink?

by Michelle Gruben

Dragon’s Blood ink is one of those magickal ingredients whose name sounds straight out of a fantasy novel. Needless to say, it doesn’t contain the blood of real dragons. Rather, the name refers to a red-tinted ceremonial ink formulated with resins, herbs, and fragrances. Dragon’s Blood ink—along with its cousins, Dove’s Blood ink and Bat’s Blood ink—is traditionally used to empower written spells, pacts, and petitions.

Dragon’s Blood ink owes its name to a bright red-colored resin that is obtained from various plant species. In ancient times, the crushed resin was used as a pigment in both the West and the East. (It was also prescribed medicinally, especially for bleeding disorders.) In the medieval era, Dragon’s Blood found its way into the disciplines of ritual magick and alchemy.

So-called “blood” inks sold today do not contain animal blood. But their names are a throwback to one of the oldest magickal tropes—the spilling of human or animal blood to empower magick spells. As these rituals would have been practiced in secret, we don’t know a lot about the history of blood magick. The pact signed in blood is a common element of the Faust legends, which can be traced back to the 6th century. Medieval grimoires contain numerous references to animal ingredients, suggesting that animal sacrifice was a reasonably common component of magick at that time.

Nowadays, of course, blood magick carries a certain stigma, and most Witches don’t feel that it’s ethical to involve poor defenseless critters in their magick spells. (Anyway, real blood doesn’t make a great writing material. It coagulates quickly, turns brown, and fades when exposed to light.) Fortunately, there are lot of options to choose from when selecting ink for writing rituals.

Making Your Own

Commercially prepared Dragon’s Blood inks are available, and most of them are perfectly suitable for ritual use. However, some people prefer to mix their own magickal inks. An online search will reveal many recipes for the stuff. A typical formula includes powdered Dragon’s Blood resin, gum arabic (to thicken the ink), and a water and/or alcohol base. Some also include herbal extracts or scents to correspond with the purpose of the ink. Keep in mind that homemade Dragon’s Blood ink will not have as smooth a texture as commercial inks, and may clog a quill or nib pen. It may also be necessary to shake or re-mix the ink before each use, as the resin particles will settle out.

If you choose to make your own ink, buy the highest quality Dragon’s Blood resin you can find. Grind it as finely as possible (most favor a mortar and pestle over a mechanical grinder) and strain the finished ink through a fine cloth or coffee filter. As some ink ingredients are toxic when consumed, be sure to store your finished ink in a labeled container away from kids and pets.

If making inks from raw materials too involved—and let’s face it, being a busy Witch doesn’t have to mean making inferior magick—there are ways to abbreviate the process. Adding ritually charged oils and elixirs to purchased ink is one way to “mix in” your own juju without starting from scratch.

Using Dragon’s Blood Ink

Dragon’s Blood resin has the property of enhancing most any magickal working, and Dragon’s Blood ink is similarly versatile. Prepare a sheet a paper (preferably parchment) and write out your command, desire, or oath. Dragon’s Blood is a really an all-purpose tool, but is most traditionally employed for spells of protection, luck, courage, and power. The best timing for a Dragon’s Blood spell is during the waxing moon and the day/hour of Mars or Jupiter.

What about the pen? In Hoodoo and rootwork traditions, magickal ink is always applied with a feather quill. But most commercially prepared inks can be easily used with a metal nib pin, too. A carved stick or even a cotton swab will do in a pinch. And if your canvas is big enough, you can even use your finger! Magickal sigils written on the body in ink will last for a few days—a perfect way to carry your intention with you. (But check for safety first, especially with homemade inks. Baneful (i.e. toxic) herbs should not be applied to the skin by inexperienced folks, and allergy tests are always a good idea.)

Types of “Blood” Ink

In our store, Dragon’s Blood is a best-seller—and it’s definitely the best choice if you’re only going to buy one magickal ink. But if you do a lot of written magick, you may want to stock up on these varieties:

Dove’s Blood

Dove’s Blood ink is traditionally used for spells involving love, desire, blessings, reconciliation, friendship and loyalty. It’s also used to seal pacts and promises. Its magickal heritage stretches back to Ancient Greece when a pair of doves (Her favorite bird) would be sacrificed to Aphrodite by love petitioners. Dove’s Blood ink is attributed to Venus. Usually it is a dark pink or red ink with essences of Venus herbs (e.g. Rose, Jasmine, or Geranium).

Bat’s Blood

Bat’s Blood ink is a prized tool of the Witch with a lot of enemies! It’s traditionally used for spells of binding and protection, and for casting and removing curses and jinxes. It is attributed to Saturn and (in the case of aggressive magick) to Mars. It may be red, purple, or black, depending on the maker. Herbal additives may include Myrrh, Cinnamon, and other spicy or bitter botanicals.

Butterfly’s Blood

Probably the rarest of the bunch, Butterfly’s Blood ink is reserved for inscribing sacred words and talismans. Occasionally it is used in petitions to request insight or divine guidance. It is an orange/gold ink and was originally made from precious Saffron. Correspondences for Butterfly’s Blood are Mercury and the Sun.

Photo: Trio of magickal ink by Espiritu.

https://www.groveandgrotto.com/blogs/articles/what-is-dragons-blood-ink

8 notes · View notes

hueynomure · 4 years ago

Note

Happy Worldbuilding Wednesday! Since today I am a bit sick, let's talk about healthcare and medicine. Is it accessible to all? Are medicines man-made or do natural remedies preferred? Are there mage healers? Do i get some soup if im sick (tag @fields-of-ink)

Depends a lot on the nation, as each culture has strong magical traditions and different approaches to medicine. Every community has some traditional medicine, however, and most cultures have specific roles dedicated to communal healthcare. That’s gonna be a long one, @fields-of-ink, so sit comfortably and get a nice beverage at hand:

Elves (nomads or refugees): Their close-knit communities, while poor, usually have an excellent healthcare due to their traditions. Fleshcrafting works wonderfully with most injuries, and other forms of biomancy increase the potency of medicine coming from herbs and animals. They’re rarely trusted by other races because of the abuse of those powers in the height of their crumbled empire, sadly.

The tribes of the Gwenceth treasure both herbalism and the cycle of life and death. If the druid of your tribe declares your illness is the herald of Death... well, the best you can get is some magical hastening of your demise, with a drought to ease the pain. Otherwise, you chances are pretty good! In the Gwenceth there are places and plants with all kinds of effects, and depending on the time of the year you might be as good as new in a good sleep’s time. Otherwise you can rely on a plethora of natural recipes, or a common spell that makes the illness run its course faster at the price of compressing all the discomfort you’d feel in a few hours if you so choose.

Draconic Empire: Most of them are hardline darwinists, unfortunately. The draconids of the colder regions have a bit more regard for the ill, but the widespread dogma is “you’re either tough enough to survive or you’re not, coddling won’t help”. A few rituals said to improve your chances are similar to medieval ordeals, from ritual combat to extensive fire branding, but their usefulness is strongly doubted outside the empire as anyone able to survive those rituals must be pretty healthy to begin with.

Learra: Learran medicine is the closest to alchemy (as in proto-chemical), and Learra is probably the nation where mundane medicine is the most advanced. Alchemical medicine is usually more available in the bigger cities, but there is the occasional alchemist in rural areas; medicine is usually for sale, but the gift of basic medicine to the populace is a common form of charity and a sign of respectability in the upper classes.

Immgrad: Before the invasion, the Dawn Harts made sure every major cities had a number of graduate healing mages and/or healing artifacts at its disposal, with some of them making rounds in villages to take care of the worse incidents and ilnesses.

Free Cities: All of the above. Being a fuckton of cities spread all around a land-enclosed sea, they borrow a lot of recipes from nearby territories and combine them with their own. Usually each sick person is considered a community project and all matrons withing hearing distance from your home will take turns examining you and suggesting remedies. Obstinate illnesses will cause widespread arguments as a dozen methods are tried on you each day, and statistically one of them ends up working. I hope you like the attention!

I unfortunately don’t have the time to write the parts for the August Empire/Nerava and the Kreset Principate right now, but I think this is a rather weighty wall of text on its own :D if anyone interested in this last nations hmu whenever.

#wbw #Dragonslayers

4 notes · View notes

uchicagoscrc · 5 years ago

Text

Preservation Week

Before printing, manuscripts were created by hand and often elaborately decorated. From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, a range of substances were used to enliven and color manuscript text and visual images, often referred to as miniatures, accompanying text. Paints, dyes, inks, and metallic gilding were used and frequently produced stunning and vivid color pallets. “Recipes” and “formulas” varied regionally, from scriptorium to scriptorium, and throughout the years. Makers experimented, used available “ingredients,” and rarely documented their methods. Today’s conservators and material scientists study inks and other manuscript materials to understand how a manuscript was created. Being able to correctly identify substances allows those caring for manuscripts to both prevent damage and to address deterioration when it happens. Studying inks increases our understanding of beautiful manuscript traditions, and sometimes inadvertently uncovers unexpected insights into manuscript traditions beyond the ingredient lists.

In honor of the American Library Association’s National Preservation Week, enjoy these two articles about contemporary research in materials science and seeing how it helps conservators, preservationists, and scientists better understand and care for precious library holdings.

This article chronicles a discovery of lapis lazuli embedded in dental tartar on the teeth of female script and help document the roles women played in creating manuscripts: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/the-woman-with-lapis-lazuli-in-her-teeth/579760/.

Scientists stumped on the origins of a distinctive blue ink, discover a roadside plant in Portugal that left its marks throughout medieval times: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/folium-medieval-ink?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=atlas-page&fbclid=IwAR0RBcs9pKQNdz5bfbXYUDD-w3mQPlSl_BYIQZ8wcZCwyfTr5JfpvBNH45w.

#ALA #Preservation Week #lapis lazuli #female scribes #mediieval ink #blue ink #medieval manuscripts

6 notes · View notes

peaceheather · 6 years ago

Note

Tell me more about your beautiful medieval calligraphy. That's how I first found your blog. Do you do it professionally? Do you like doing it for fun? Is it hard to learn how to do?

Oh wow! I love getting asks about my calligraphy!

I’m a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, which studies and recreates some aspects of medieval life and culture, although some of it might be a bit romanticized. We like our antibiotics and hot water, for example, and ignore anything involving persecution. We can play with anything that happened anywhere in the world before the death of Queen Elizabeth, and while admittedly most of us focus on European cultures and events, there are communities who recreate North African cultures, and active chapters in Korea and China that I know of.

Anyway. In the SCA, members can earn awards for their volunteer service to the organization, their skill at arts/crafts/research, or their prowess at any of our various athletic activities from archery to sword fighting. We have kings and queens whose almost sole purpose is to hold court to give out awards to people at events.

But we’re not going to print off our award certificates on a computer or make a cheesy photocopy. Oh ho ho, no. We’re going to tap a “scribe” on the shoulder and ask them to make you an illuminated manuscript page, with the text of your award on it. We call them “scrolls” which is in no way accurate, but then we also illuminate them like bestiaries or books of hours or whatever, and we write them like royal proclamations or decrees. So artistically they’re something of a mishmash, much like the Society itself.

I’m a scribe. I made my first award scroll in April of 2000, and I’ve been scribing off and on ever since. In the Society, I’ve also earned one or two awards for my skill, my service as a scribe, and my skill/service as a teacher of scribal arts. For a few years I even ran a local scriptorium, though that’s now defunct.

Calligraphy and illumination are two separate skill sets, and a lot of people choose to do just one or the other. Personally, I’m a bit of a control freak and like to oversee all the aspects of making a scroll, so I’ve learned to do everything from layout and calligraphy to gilding, painting, and even some simple bookbinding. I’ve worked with feather quill pens, medieval-recipe ink, genuine 23-karat gold leaf, pigments that were used in period and made according to medieval recipes, and handcrafted animal-skin vellum, and handmade paper. I’ve also used plenty of modern materials, too, though, and I’m not too snobby about which I use as long as the materials are of good quality. (Oh my GOD, the first time someone gifted me really high quality paints! I was blown away by how much better my work got.)

Like any skill, calligraphy does take practice, but I’d first learned it as part of an art class in junior high, back in the early 80s, so picking it back up wasn’t *too* hard. I am left-handed, though, so I had to alter my technique somewhat... I write all my words upside down now, to keep my hand from smearing the ink. Most of what you need, though, is a relatively steady hand, and patience. Especially patience. I know an older scribe who’s developed a tremor in his hands, and he’s found that if he takes slow deep breaths and just works slowly, most of the tremor disappears and he can scribe just as he always has. I also know vision-impaired scribes who use magnifiers and bright light, and keep themselves close to their work.

(There are non-traditional “scrolls”, too, made of clay or carved into stone or wood, or even embroidered. I remember seeing one scroll that was stitched in Braille so that the recipient could “read” it with his fingers. I don’t really do any of that type of work though. I’m not a woodworker or carver; I just don’t have the skillset for it.)

You also asked if I do calligraphy/illumination professionally, and the answer is “sometimes”. I do take commissions for art every now and again, though it’s not a skill that seems to be in high demand outside of writing people’s wedding invitations. Just last year, however, I copied Bible verses for someone to hang on her wall, did an inspirational letter from a 16th century monk to a friend and illuminated that, created someone’s faculty nameplate for their office door, and even made custom Christmas gift tags for someone to put on their presents over the holidays. The going rate for calligraphy is sometimes as high as US$55 an hour, though I typically charge less than that because the people who come to me can’t afford super high rates, and I’m not a full-time professional anyway.

Do I like doing it for fun? Absolutely! There’s something very calming about putting a piece together and working through each of the steps. There’s a bit of instant gratification that goes on when I’m gilding and all that shiny appears. And there’s something inspiring, to me at least, to know that I’m carrying on an art tradition that goes back millennia. It’s also entertaining to try and match a scroll to the recipient’s medieval “persona”, and try out art and manuscript styles from different centuries and cultures. I’ve done everything from 7th century Celtic/Anglo-Saxon to 15th-century Flemish... and then I’ve also done “fake alphabet” scrolls that were in English but appeared Arabic at first glance, for example, or even wonky letters that looked a little like characters from Japan or China. I even have one that I did in hieroglyphics! That was fun.

If you’re ever interested in checking out the Society for Creative Anachronism yourself, just go to their home page and see if you can find a chapter near you. If you want to see more of my work, try my blog, Little Fiddly Bits. And if you want to support my work or commission me, you can reach me via Ko-fi.com/peaceheather or drop an ask in my box here.

Thanks so much for asking!

#about me #ask me anything #calligraphy #scribal #sca #society for creative anachronism #Anonymous

19 notes · View notes

ana-yanka · 5 years ago

Text

Reconstruction of a Cuir Bouilli Coffret

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285833635)

A 15th-century Flemish enclosed garden in cuir bouilli. Production, degradation and conservation issues of a small painting on leather

Authored by: Lieve Watteeuw and Marina Van Bos

“ABSTRACT An early 15th-century figurative cuir bouilli coffret lid, with remains of original polychromy, belonging to the town museum in Nivelles (Belgium), was studied and conserved in 2013. Cuir bouilli is the medieval Norman-French term for ‘boiled leather’. The technique was widespread in Flanders and Paris in the High Middle Ages. The scene depicted is an ‘enclosed garden’ with the Virgin and Child. The cuir bouilli artefact has been severely damaged by environmental conditions and previous restorations. There are large lacunas in the deformed and hardened leather support, as well as in the pictorial layers. This paper explores the historical context of the artefact, the production of the material, its use and conservation history. Results of reflectance topographic imaging (RTI) are followed by physicochemical analyses and the treatment protocol to stabilise and validate the importance of this lost technique of medieval leatherworking.”

“The technique of cuir bouilli or boiled leather was popular in Italy, Germany, Paris and Flanders in the High Middle Ages, not only for cup, bottle and relic cases, armour (including parade shields), bookbindings and bookboxes, but also for covering and decorating small, highly sophisticated coffers with chivalric love scenes and other subjects. Paris and Flanders were known for the production and export of these luxury goods through trade routes that reached across Europe (Didier 1978, Cherry 1982). Cuir bouilli objects were produced by specialist leather workers, associated with the guild of the cordoeaniers (Middle Dutch term derived from the French word cordouanier), and needed skilful craftsmanship.”

“Cuir bouilli is a process used to change flexible, vegetable-tanned leather into rigid, moulded and often intricately shaped objects (Davies 2006). For shaping of the vegetable-tanned leather, heat and moisture were used, as indicated by the term ‘boiled leather’. No written medieval sources describing the production of decorated cuir bouilli objects survive, so knowledge of the process relies on the important studies of the Scottish leather historian John William Waterer (Waterer 1981 and 1986). More recently, Davies and Payton (2001) described at least three different ways to make cuir bouilli. Experimental reconstructions of cuir bouilli objects, using different recipes, by a group of leather conservators and craftsmen (Neno et al. 1995, Carlson 2003), found that the leather used would be half or fully tanned and that, in response to different requirements, a large range of methods, materials and techniques could be used in varying combinations.

The hypothetical production stages for relief images like the Nivelles cuir bouilli panel could be as follows: the vegetable-tanned leather, made supple with moisture and heat, was stuffed, shaped and nailed to the rigid wooden coffer support. The stuffing material was probably modelled beeswax or stearin wax. To shape the leather, to create its topography, ‘cushions’ were possibly made by lacing a thread through an awl hole and attaching the flexible leather and stuffing to the rigid wooden support on the bottom. Then the decoration was done: lines were incised through the upper layer of the leather (epidermis) with different thicknesses of knives or needles. Contours were created with deep v-shaped cuts (e.g. the St George figure), decoration with thin incisions (e.g. the leaves of the trees) and final details with a needle point (e.g. the eyes of the figures). On the Nivelles panel, an iron-gall ink was very probably applied to darken the surface (see the analytical results below). For the incision and pouncing stage, the leather was probably kept heated and moistened for suppleness. Once dry, the leather would be hard and rigid. Next, gold and silver foils were applied (e.g. on the halo and the crown of the virgin, on the armour of St George and on the sky background). This was followed by pouncing the leather in the sky with heated metal hand tools, or punches (e.g. the little round shapes in the upper area). Finally, polychrome layers were painted on the leather with a brush and finished with small red and white dots (e.g. the little red dots for the cherries or apples (?) in the trees). No varnish was added by the cordouaniers, but probably a wax layer.”

“Shape and tool identification with reflectance transformation imaging (RTI)

For better plotting and understanding of the moulding of, and incisions in, the cuir bouilli, the panel was digitized with omnimulti-directional lighting. The technique of the RICH Project portable mini-dome is based on reflectance transformation imaging (RTI), a technique of imaging and interactively displaying objects under 260 varying lighting conditions to reveal surface phenomena (Watteeuw et al. 2013). The shaded and the sketch filters were able to reveal the image and its topography very exactly. The xyz height profile and measuring tool monitored 40 mm depth variance in the panel. The highest point of the topography is the arm of the Virgin, the lowest points are the outer edges. The main v-shaped incisions are 1 mm wide and 0.85 mm deep (e.g. the contour lines of the figure of St George), smaller lines are 0.7 mm wide (e.g. the horizontal lines in the fence) and, finally, the incisions creating St George’s fine hair are 0.5 mm wide and less deep at 0.4 mm. The circular hand tool, or punch, used for the background has an inner diameter of 1.8 mm. The little circles were hand pressed with great regularity, as 21 of them show a variation in depth of between only 0.87 and 0.89 mm. The observations with the RTI technique gave remarkably precise information on the craftsmen’s tools: it was possible to define with certainty three different knives used to incise the image, and one small hand punch used to complete it.”

“For 130 years, the object was stored in an overly dry environment. This caused the leather to shrink and break in several places, specifically in the most fragile areas where the incisions in the leather are deepest. The cross section of a sample (SEM backscattered image) documents the extreme fragility of the leather. The surface wax layer on top of the leather became tacky and brownish.”

“XRF measurement of the silver foil on the armour of the knight. As the x-ray beam penetrates the silver foil, not only is the foil measured but also the underlying layers (Mn, Fe, Cu and Zn are indicative of the iron-gall ink used to darken the leather).”

“Non-invasive x-ray fluorescence analysis was used to reveal the craftsman’s palette. In addition, some small samples were taken for complementary μ-Raman analysis and to illustrate the paint-layer buildup.

All red parts in the painted scene are vermillion based. The red paint layer is applied directly onto the leather support as evidenced by a paint cross section. The flesh tones contain vermillion in combination with lead white. Lead white is used for the white dots on the angel’s robe and for Mary’s veil. Lead white in combination with orpiment is used for the pale yellow dress of the Virgin. Analysis of the yellow colour of the fence also shows the presence of orpiment. Moreover, orpiment was present in all analysed vegetation areas (like the leaves of the trees or the grass). Although now hardly discernible, the original colour must have been green, meaning that a blue pigment must be present as well as the yellow orpiment. Indigo was recommended by Cennino Cennini: ‘A mixture of some of this color (orpiment) with Bagdad indigo gives a green color for grasses and foliage’. The presence of indigo was confirmed by subsequent μ-Raman analysis of a sample taken from the leaves of the tree in the upper left corner. The bright paint layers were enhanced by gold and silver leaf. Silver leaf was used for the armour of St George.

The silver leaf, which has now turned almost completely black, originally added to the splendour of the object. A cross section of a sample from the background at the top revealed two layers of metal: the underlying one is gold leaf, the upper one is silver leaf. It is hard to deduce why these two layers were superimposed onto the leather. In some areas of the cuir bouilli panel, no paint is applied, meaning that the colour of the leather forms part of the completed image. As evidenced by XRF analysis, the leather was darkened using iron-gall ink (elements Fe, Cu and Zn). These analyses revealed that the pigments used for painting on the leather are closely linked to the palette used for panel painting in the Low Countries at the beginning of the 15th century. In this context, the Nivelles enclosed garden is a rare addition to the corpus of works in the so-called pre-Eyckian painting tradition.”

“After high-resolution documentation and material analyses, tests were executed to evaluate the flexibility of the extremely hard leather by local relaxation with the ultrasonic mister and Gore-Tex patches. These tests produced no results, as the hardened leather has no hygroscopic characteristics left.”

“The first examples of decorated cuir bouilli containers apparently date from the 12th century and the technique flourished until the 17th century. In Italy, there was a large production of cases for cups and books (e.g. missal cases); in Germany, Bohemia and Hungary the technique was largely used in the 14th and 15th centuries for bookbindings.”

#sca #cuirbouilli #leatherwork

0 notes

shadowyartisanking-blog · 7 years ago

Text

How ISO Certification Helps An organization Compete

How ISO Certification Helps A company Compete

Sriracha, for the few of you who don’t know, is the type of Asian-type sauce with strong garlic and salt tones, a hint of sweetness on a purple chile pepper base. I'm guessing the orange sauce is the spicy Jalapeno pepper jam. Inside have been the two premiere flavors, Chocolate and Praline. Scrooge finds himself saddled with an extra passenger when he discovers Bubba Duck frozen in a block of ice inside a cave. In the occasion you prefer to dedicate a Sunday afternoons cleansing all of the rag to seek out a superb deal, read extra for much more nice tips about how to save lots of money on knick knacks by way of offers, a robust method. Publisher: Cbazaar This banarasi georgette saree could be very enchanting with a lot of intricate and appealing work in it. The success of a leader is completely dependent upon the success of the individuals who work for them.

As an illustration, there will probably be some students who will opt to prepare for different levels and the training workers have to prepare on how they may meet the needs of all shoppers. There is a big selection of these and you must take day out to do an intensive research on which clasps will fit your necklace designs the best before you purchase any of those in bulk. Smack it up with a Cheese MAXX crust and belief me, it would be the best thing you may need tasted in a long long time. I was nervous I wouldn't have time to get my scorching dog. Food holidays are form of a joke—there's one for nearly day-after-day of the year and they will get oddly specific (looking at you, Spilled Milk Day). So once i first came across this chocolate dessert pizza recipe, I will admit that I was on the lookout for a recipe for CiCi's chocolate pizza. I am at all times searching for adventures! Yes, this is it, one in all my high five cookbooks! What I mean of the primary one above means that it is the primary emf detector on the top of the web page.

If this would not sound notably positive to you, go get a Whataburger hamburger and you may see what I imply. Nothing. And that i imply nothing within the espresso planet can trade the perka-perka-perka sound of a coffee machine. Can an employee change into his or her own personal chief, motivating himself to do an excellent job even when it seems like nobody higher up cares? Car manufacturers as an example know that children affect what parents buy but much more importantly, they know that if they'll "hook" a toddler on their brand name whereas younger, they might have a customer for life. You might go for the daring colours and sleek finishes which can be standard with contemporary designs, or go together with a more traditional stain or painted finish. And statistics have proven that those with undesirable credit score scores are extra most prone to be involved in accidents.

Fortunately, Red Lobster now provides far more than simply seafood, with just a few rooster and steak platters added to make the menu higher rounded and more prone to please. When the fans have a will, Buffalo Wild Wings has a technique to make wonderful issues happen. He assured me it was incredible so I tried it and let me tell you, it is a summer time drink you by no means considered, however ought to have. MR: It is very apparent that the three of you've gotten such a love of R&B. Granted, I love their tacos. Our Peach Harvest kicked out our sweet Summer season! Writer: Leah Delaney Postcards can truly be relied on to carry out your advertising and link marketing plan. Publisher: Jessica Peloski This article is about the hermit crab bath. Whereas finding out accountancy, chances are you'll come across a number of terms that you just might not be familiar with.

The most effective musical acts from everywhere in the world come and perform right here. The very best check for these parts is to get the tractor as much as operating temperature and then shut it off with a heavy implement attached, like a plow or brush hog. We determined to every get certainly one of their particular canine. Properly, the occasion can definitely be a grand one if you'll be able to deliver alongside good cocktails. The greeting is returned with the other social gathering repeating the identical. Together with know-how, funding, supply of uncooked supplies, import and export of multilateral cooperation, as if the identical relationship between the United States and the European Group. There are privateness laws. There are also many cheap lodge, cheap telephone card or calling card deals in Australia. long john silvers near Its outlook is stronger now, however there are dangers if Delta is acquired and jobs are lower.

Graffiti has been there for the reason that medieval occasions in Roman and Greece Empire. The gamers are armed with superior, highly effective weapons and other equipment, and are transported to essentially the most harmful spots around the world, the place the enemies are ready for them. They're very stylish and easy to take care of. As we celebrate the birth of our nation, I discover myself grateful -- grateful that I am free from a dictator and grateful that I'm free from addiction. Having it skinny sliced, chilled, and stacked high on this sandwich was the perfect technique to get pleasure from it for brunch. Understanding how the International Organization of Standardization works is a technique to be a aggressive, efficient, and sensible climber. The ‘fortunate cookie’ season also involves life by way of a brief animated film about how one act of kindness can go a good distance. The quality of Xerox Phaser 8560N comes from its strong ink know-how. Development in design & expertise and elevated competition as a consequence of emergence of small gamers in cardiac pace-makers manufacturing is further fuelling the market progress. This machine blends and freezes all by itself, and makes quaint icecream in thirty minutes with simply the push of a button.

0 notes

douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years ago

Text

HOW TO MOVE TO GET STARTUP IDEAS

Computers are precise and methodical. It's embodied in the name. Saying I'm not going to say you should come work as their employee, when they didn't get jobs themselves? During the term of one mayor. If they seem to be some material even in fast food.1 I'm sometimes accused of meandering. Slashdot.2 Probably not.

Those of us on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. They are a perennial topic of heated discussion on Slashdot. Know nothing about business This is another variable whose coefficient should be zero. It gives the acquirer an excuse to work on Y Combinator so much. The way to deal with your parents' opinions about what you should do is start one. You might think that responsible corporate governance is an area where you can't go too far in any law, and this remark convinced me that Sarbanes-Oxley, few startups go public now. Nor will investors hold it against you, as long as you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing.

But the aim is never to be convincing per se. On the other hand, the extra million dollars would give them a lot more appealing to most of us than pandering to human weaknesses. Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and take note when a third book mentions that Normans were not, like most of what big companies do is boring, you're going to have to deal with stuff like patents and investors. But I know they exist. They gave it a name that was a joking reference to Multics: Unix. Considering that the summer founders what surprised them. Gradually our machines consist more and more surprising. Oddly enough, the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power. Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups.3 The space of possible choices is smaller; you tend to have to work as part of a grand tradition. We can find office space, thanks; just give us the money.

If you step on the toes of the coal industry, you'll hear about it. But be careful what you ask for. Whatever our long-term success rate ends up being more like an older brother than a parent. To sue a startup would take, and you'll find you have much less spare time than you might expect, it winds all over the country indeed, the world and afterward they went wherever they could get more funding—which generally meant Silicon Valley. What should they do research on composition? Hope for the best programmers are overall. I don't think that would mean less opportunity, because satisfying current needs would lead to more. Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule.4 Who are you to write about. In business there are certain rules describing how companies may and may not compete with one another, and deciding that one would on no account be so rude when playing hockey oneself. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer. But elegance is not an end in itself.

To almost everyone except criminals, it seems likely enough that it would be worthwhile having actual continuations, if it is true, is another question. Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. So here's the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. And in addition to the cost of compliance, which is the most influential people. Recently it hasn't been. And so if you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. So it is in business.5 So what if they fail? It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries.6 One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex.7 Are you the current leader?8 When languages are designed for other people have the attitude of a governess: they try to prevent you from taking one apart to see how it worked.

Notes

In a startup at a blistering pace in the foot. An influx of inexpensive but mediocre investors almost all do. As far as I make this miracle happen?

They want to invest, it would destroy them.

Applets seemed to us. In the Daddy Model that it also worked for spam.

There is nothing more unconvincing, for example. It would be great for VCs if the VC knows you well, but even there people tend to be recognized as an idea where the richest and most pharmaceutical startups the second phase is less than a VC fund they outsource most of his peers will get funding, pretty much regardless of how you wish they were actually getting physically taller. Tell the investors.

There is nothing more unconvincing, for the ad sales department. Even now it's hard to say yet how much we really depend on Aristotle more than you think you'll need, maybe 50% to 100% more, the technology business. You have to make money; and not end up reproducing some of these groups, just their sizes. But while it is.

Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried to attack the A P supermarket chain because it depends on a hard technical problem. Disclosure: Reddit was funded by Y Combinator never negotiates valuations is that it's no longer needed, big companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'd be proportionately more effective, leaving less room for startups is that it will become as big as a consulting company is their project. A lot of money around is never something people treat casually. As Clinton himself discovered to his time was 700,000 or a funding round.

When governments decide how to execute them. Unfortunately the payload can consist of dealing with recent art that would help Web-based applications, and so effective that I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing on people who are both genuinely formidable, and also what we'd call random facts, like angel investors. Only a fraction of VCs even have positive returns.

When I talk about the subterfuges they had to push founders to do more than we can teach startups a lot of investors caring either.

0 notes

rozebucket98-blog · 7 years ago

Text

The Unsolvable Mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript

The word “ink” is a child of the Latin incaustum, which means “having been burned.” In the Middle Ages, people thought that ink burned its way into parchment, because iron-gall inks go onto the page pale, then darken. This is not what’s happening, physically, but it makes sense as a metaphor: a medieval manuscript, because it was made by hand, is necessarily an original, even when it is a copy of something else. It cannot be standardized any more than a thing can be unburned.

The Voynich Manuscript is a special kind of original. We know, thanks to carbon dating, that it was put together in the early fifteenth century. But no living person has ever, as far as we know, understood it. Nobody can decode the language the book is written in. It has no title and no author. A new facsimile, edited by Raymond Clemens and published by Yale University Press, draws attention to the way that we think about truth now: the book invites guesses, conspiracy theory, spiritualism, cryptography. The Voynich Manuscript has charisma, and charisma has lately held a monopoly on our attentions.

The manuscript is two hundred and twenty-five millimetres tall, a hundred and sixty wide, and five centimetres thick. Yale’s new facsimile is somewhat larger, as it includes wide white margins for the amateur cryptographer’s own marginalia. The manuscript’s Renaissance-era cover (it was rebound) is made of what the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Yale, calls a “limp vellum.” The book has resided at Yale’s library since 1969.

Turn the covers—as Umberto Eco once did; it was the only book in the Beinecke’s famous collection that he cared to see—and you are greeted by writing in brown ink accompanied by strange diagrams and paintings of plants. The writing will not be decipherable to you. The book was made in the ordinary medieval way, but the script—the form of its letters, the language itself—was apparently invented by whoever made it. Some call the language and its script “Voynichese.” The letters loop prettily, and the text runs from left to right, top to bottom.

The first half of the book is filled with drawings of plants; scholars call this the “herbal” section. None of the plants appear to be real, although they are made from the usual stuff (green leaves, roots, and so on; search a word like “botanical” in the British Library’s illuminated-manuscript catalogue and you’ll find several texts that are similar to this part). The next section contains circular diagrams of the kind often found in medieval zodiacal texts; scholars call this part “astrological,” which is generous. Next, the so-called “balneological” section shows “nude ladies,” in Clemens’s words, in pools of liquid, which are connected to one another via a strange system of tubular plumbing that often snakes around whole pages of text. These scenes resemble drawings in the alchemical tradition, which gave rise to a now debunked theory that the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Roger Bacon wrote the book. Then we get what appear to be instructions in the practical use of those plants from the beginning of the book, followed by pages that look roughly like recipes.

Voynich is not a word from the book but, rather, the name of an eccentric book dealer, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, who bought the manuscript, in 1912. When Voynich purchased the text, it was accompanied by a letter by Johannes Marcus Marci (1595-1667), of Prague, who claimed that the book had been “sold to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II at a reported price of 600 ducats and that it was believed to be a work by Roger Bacon.” (Voynich would later say that the seller was the occult philosopher John Dee; Clemens points out that he was nudged toward this hypothesis by a historical novel.) The book appears to have bounced around Prague for a while—in 1639, a person named Barchius described it as “a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of writing in unknown characters,” and guessed that “the whole thing is medical.” The book’s historical trail vanishes in 1670, up until the time that Voynich purchased it.

Yale’s new edition affords Voynich a profile, by Arnold Hunt, which turns out to be warranted by his strong and odd personality. Voynich was born in 1864, in Telšiai, to a Polish family. He supposedly spoke twenty languages fluently. He was arrested in Kovno, in 1885, for his membership in the Proletariat Party, a social-revolutionary group, and sentenced, without trial, to exile in Siberia for five years. He got a lot of reading done there, and then he escaped, travelling widely and ultimately bartering his waistcoat and glasses for a spot on a boat from Hamburg to England. There, he became part of the intellectual circle that surrounded the Russian agitator Sergei Kravchinsky, known as Stepniak. Once his adventuring days were over, Voynich became a book dealer—a good one, although he once accidentally (one hopes) sold a forgery to the British Museum. “Voynich in later life would sometimes point dramatically to the wounds he had received” on his youthful adventures, Hunt notes: “Here I have sword, here I have sword, here I have bullet.”

In 1903, the Jesuits decided to sell a group of texts from the Collegio Romano collection to the Vatican; the sale took nine years to complete. For reasons unknown, and under conditions of total secrecy, Voynich managed to procure some of the books before they entered the Vatican Library. One of them was the Voynich Manuscript. Voynich believed that his impenetrable book contained authentic wisdom—or, at least, he said so during publicity kicks in the States, trying to make his treasured book famous. “When the time comes,” he told the Times, “I will prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of twentieth-century science.”

Voynich never cracked the code, if one indeed exists. In “Cryptographic Attempts,” another essay that accompanies the Yale facsimile, William Sherman notes that “some of the greatest code breakers in history” attempted to unlock the manuscript’s mysteries; the impenetrability of Voynichese became a professional problem for those in the code game. William Romaine Newbold, a professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in the early part of the twentieth century, “persuaded himself that the writing used both a cipher common from Bacon’s alchemical manuscripts along with a separate—and far more complicated—system best described as an anagrammed micrographic shorthand.” This system of cipher “requires transposition (changing the order of the letters), abbreviation (using a system taken from ancient Greece), and microscopic notation (whereby individual pen strokes within a single character, when magnified, serve as shorthand symbols for other letters).” This theory was initially endorsed by the eminent medievalist John Matthews Manly, who had worked as one of the U.S. Army’s chief cryptologists during the First World War. But it did not hold up to closer scrutiny, and Manly eventually concluded that Newbold’s “decipherments were not discoveries of secrets hidden by Roger Bacon but the products of his own intense enthusiasm and his learned and ingenious subconscious.”

The next great mind to apply itself to the manuscript’s code belonged to William F. Friedman, another Army cryptographer, who was among the first people to use computers for textual analysis. In 1925, Manly connected Friedman and his wife, Elizebeth, also a cryptographer, with the manuscript, sending them photographs. They worked on the project for forty years. Friedman and his colleagues broke Japan’s code Purple during the Second World War, and Friedman became the chief cryptanalyst for the War Department and head of the Signals Intelligence Service in the forties and fifties. The historian David Kahn called him the “world’s greatest cryptologist.” By 1944, Friedman had formed the Voynich Manuscript Study Group with some colleagues.

The group never cracked the code. The Friedmans did, however, provide an enigmatic message about the manuscript in an article in Philogical Quarterly, “Acrostics, Anagrams, and Chaucer,” published in 1959. The article included a long excursus on the pointlessness of looking for anagrammatic ciphers; a note revealed that the statement itself was an anagram. The authors had left the solution to the anagram in a sealed envelope with the P.Q. editor. After William died in 1970, that editor revealed the message along with a reprint of the piece: “The Voynich MS was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type.—Friedman.”

According to Sherman, the majority of those who have tried their hand at the manuscript’s code “have been amateurs, and many have more interest in conspiracy theories than cryptographic systems.” Nowadays, you can find people trying to crack the code on Reddit. There are many competing theories. Some suggest that the manuscript might be part of a “conworld,” or constructed fantasy—but then one poster responds, “I don’t see why someone would create such an expensive manuscript if this were the case.” Another Redditor asks, “Anyone else wondering if this is material from a lost Mayan codex?”

You can find serious scholarly work among the Redditors’ posts, but most of it is just fun speculation. It is interesting nonetheless, because it’s written in a voice that has shaped communal understanding in our time. Speculative knowledge flourishes in moments of uncertainty and fear. “They don’t want you to know the truth,” the speculators say to their faithful, on the left and on the right. 9/11 conspiracy theories are less frightening than the truth, which is that our lives are always in danger. Astrologers point to an invisible world, freeing its subscribers from the visible one that oppresses them. Tarot facilitates healing conversations. Whether code breaker or spiritualist or amateur historian, the Voynich speculators are linked by their common interest in the past, quasi-occult mystery, and insoluble problems of authenticity. When the book was featured in a recent episode of the Sherlock Holmes-inspired television show “Elementary,” Clemens writes, it stood in “for a mysterious but learned reference to past mysteries that somehow hold important meaning for the present.”

Readers will probably never stop forming communities based on the manuscript’s secrets. Humans are fond of weaving narratives like doilies around gaping holes, so that the holes won’t scare them. And objects from premodern history—like medieval manuscripts—are the perfect canvas on which to project our worries about the difficult and the frightening and the arcane, because these objects come from a time outside culture as we conceive of it. This single, original manuscript encourages us to sit with the concept of truth and to remember that there are ineluctable mysteries at the bottom of things whose meanings we will never know.

Dig Deeper: https://youtu.be/SQTzbk0qBpw

Digital Copy of the Voynich Manuscript: https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

Solved? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/has-the-voynich-manuscript-really-been-solved/539310/

*Dedicated to Maggie*

#octoberfiles voynichmanuscript day3

0 notes

tipsycad147 · 5 years ago

Text

What is Dragon's Blood ink?

Posted by Michelle Gruben on Feb 06, 2017

Dragon’s Blood ink owes its name to a bright red-coloured resin that is obtained from various plant species. In ancient times, the crushed resin was used as a pigment in both the West and the East. (It was also prescribed medicinally, especially for bleeding disorders.) In the medieval era, Dragon’s Blood found its way into the disciplines of ritual magick and alchemy.

So-called “blood” inks sold today do not contain animal blood. But their names are a throwback to one of the oldest magickal tropes—the spilling of human or animal blood to empower magick spells. As these rituals would have been practised in secret, we don’t know a lot about the history of blood magick. The pact signed in blood is a common element of the Faust legends, which can be traced back to the 6th century. Medieval grimoires contain numerous references to animal ingredients, suggesting that animal sacrifice was a reasonably common component of magick at that time.

Nowadays, of course, blood magick carries a certain stigma, and most Witches don’t feel that it’s ethical to involve poor defenceless critters in their magick spells. (Anyway, real blood doesn’t make a great writing material. It coagulates quickly, turns brown, and fades when exposed to light.) Fortunately, there are lot of options to choose from when selecting ink for writing rituals.

Making Your Own

If you choose to make your own ink, buy the highest quality Dragon’s Blood resin you can find. Grind it as finely as possible (most favour a mortar and pestle over a mechanical grinder) and strain the finished ink through a fine cloth or coffee filter. As some ink ingredients are toxic when consumed, be sure to store your finished ink in a labelled container away from kids and pets.

Using Dragon’s Blood Ink

Types of “Blood” Ink

Dove’s Blood

Bat’s Blood

Butterfly’s Blood

Photo: Trio of magickal ink by Espiritu.

https://www.groveandgrotto.com/blogs/articles/what-is-dragons-blood-ink

0 notes