Jasper de l’Estoile — Giving Balls to the Girdle Purse

All throughout our time period belt bags were seen, and as we get later in years the kidney pouch appears to be everywhere. The suggested design of this ubiquitous item doesn’t make sense given the value of leathers, and the utilitarian purpose of the item. I have a theory that the extant examples and the drawings of the item reflect the environmental shaping effects on the item, and not the original construction of the item.

I intend to demonstrate that an efficient rectangular pattern and pouch usage will produce the same kidney shape we see in extant examples of the kidney pouches. This will include actual construction of kidney pouches and subjecting them to various levels of environmental exposure and usage. 

From there I will explore reasons that could lead to the adoption of a pattern that can waste >30% of the source material. 

The expected areas for exploration: 

  • What other products were being produced from the same leatherworkers?
  • Was there a resource constraint that prevented the efficient design, like hide size or quality? 
  • Was there a traditional source that the leather kidney pouch replaced, such as using stomachs or bladders? 
  • Was the shape a status symbol as much as the adornments were?

This project was prompted when I went looking for a belt pouch pattern to make some new pouches for my household, and saw how much leather scrap the available patterns would produce. In modern leathercraft getting 85% utilization out of a hide side is pretty average after trimming around tanning marks and hide defects. Losing another 30% to inefficient patterning was too much to just ignore. To illustrate the absurdity, a hide side today is $200 for an average 25 square feet, throwing away 8 square feet or more ($64+ worth) just feels senselessly wasteful, especially when a more efficient pattern could yield an additional 1-2 pouches per hide side. This illustration doesn’t include the additional labor costs and production complexities of curvier kidney shaped pattern design.

Thomas de Marr’ — Medieval Stove

My goal in this project is to explore the history and evolution of the medieval stove. In particular, how to use them to cook recipes that are period specific for brewing and by extension, cooking. I wanted to know how different methods of using fire could affect the process of boiling liquids in order to make mead, beer, hippocras and other brewing related recipes.  This quickly led to a wider investigation of kitchen set ups and uses throughout the medieval period for all cooking, not just brewing.  I am not alone in this project of creating a medieval kitchen for use and experimentation with, Bannock the Baker (Benjamin Baxter) built a cobb oven onsite with help from Ulf of Malbu (Doug Arntzen). Next, after consultation with them on placement of the stove unit, we built a wooden post and beam awning structure to protect the units and workers from the elements as it is an outdoor set up.  Once this was done, I was prepared to build my portion of the project which is the stove.

This stove was built on a site continuously used for medieval events with the goal of other people being free to use and experiment with it.  To that end I am getting three different trivets of the varying heights 2”, 4” and 6”. This will allow the cook to control how hot the cooking surface will be and free up the original trivet for use on the side with the raised hearth where the fire is used directly under it.

As part of the larger outdoor medieval kitchen our next step is focusing on preparation areas such as worktables under canvas awnings and iron hooks for lanterns.  This will help with nighttime operations and inclement weather.

Attached is my full documentation as a PDF.  My blog page has the documentation with more in depth demonstrations of period sources and videos of the creation and use of the stove.

The Medieval Stove video

Brewing on the stove

Documentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WuVFu3kv5gULzI0x1Gf7JOm6ObY_9M4g/view?usp=sharing

Eseld a Goarnic — The Mother and the Other: Early Midwifery as Liminal Space

As a scadian and a museum professional, I am interested in the minutiae of everyday lives, as well as in how ordinary material items can become extraordinary in context. In my research this past year into the witch trials of the early Protestant Reformation, I noticed a curious thing: many objects whose possession was considered evidence of witchcraft were, in fact, well-established midwifery tools. I became fascinated by this Rorschach test of early modern material culture: items considered sacred or profane depending on one’s biases. For Artifacts of a Life 2025, I researched and recreated eight objects that were mentioned both in midwifery texts and witch trial records.

The Protestant Reformation saw previously holy objects reframed as popish or pagan. For example, the use of birth girdles (prayer-inscribed belts wrapped around a woman’s body for protection in labor) was explicitly permitted by the Roman Catholic Church, but the 1530s sacking of the monasteries saw most of them seized and destroyed; those who continued to use them after their fall from grace were cast as suspicious and even criminal.

This project explores how the same objects, under different cultural lenses, acquire dramatically different meanings. All eight of my pieces were considered holy to some and wicked to others. Through researching and recreating them, I have demonstrated how, much as the laboring mother hovers between two states, the midwife herself occupies a similarly precarious cultural space.

Overall Documentation: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/images/b/bc/The_Mother_and_the_Other_Early_Modern_Midwifery_as_Liminal_Space.pdf

Girdle documentation: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/images/5/5d/Birth_Girdle_Documentation.pdf

Garb & supplies documentation: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/images/b/bd/English_Midwifery_Garb_%26_Supplies.pdf 

Aurelia Colleoni a’Buccafurno — German Brick Stitch Heraldic Bag

German Brick Stitch is a type of counted-thread embroidery that is done by counting the fabric threads before inserting the needle into the fabric.  The earliest seen German Brick Stitch dates back to the 13th century, but is most commonly seen from the 14th to the mid-15th century.  I designed and created a bag in this style using my heraldry and inspiration from an extant piece that is currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England.  It dates to the 13-14th century, believed to be made either in Germany or Spain, as brick stitch was used in both countries.  

Heraldic motifs were used for items such as bags, cushions, and clothing. I used Master Richard Wymarc’s chart of the extant piece as a jumping off point.  I took to photoshop and began to design the pattern to fit my heraldry.  It was important that the heraldry fits the stitching, and not the other way around.  Historically, in German Brick Stitch pieces, zoomorphic figures would all be facing the same way.

I tablet wove the edge to finish the bag.  This would have been a period way to hold the bag together and finish the edges of the bag.  I also decided to trim the opening of the bag this way as well.  For the handle, I attached a fingerloop braid.  The pattern I used was called “a grene of dorge of VI bowes,” documented from 1475.  It would have been slightly later in period than the original embroidery design, but I liked how the heart pattern matched my heraldry and decided to go for it.

Svafnir Thorvaldson — Playing with Pots: Puzzle Jugs of the Late Medieval and Renaissance

I made a puzzle jug inspired by a 16th/17th century example made in Urbino, Italy, currently housed in the Philadelphia Art Museum. Puzzle jugs are prank cups used to trick unsuspecting users into spilling their drink, or as a drinking game to see if they were clever enough to figure out the puzzle. These jugs have perforations in the top, so if you try to drink from the rim, you will spill.  There are multiple nozzles, at first glance it may seem a simple matter of sucking on one of the nozzles, but all are connected, so you cannot make suction without plugging the remaining nozzles. During the renaissance period, puzzle jugs like these were status symbols, as they were rare and required great skill to make. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries puzzle jugs became more basic and mass produced but often featured written challenges or riddles. 

I copied the approximate shape and decorative features such as: the incisions, the snake-like filigree, the handle shape, the nozzles, and the face at the bottom of the handle. I also copied the key features of a puzzle jug: a hollow rim, a hollow channel leading from the bottom to the rim, and extra nozzles.  A medieval potter working in a workshop would have had separate workers who specialized in throwing, decorating, and firing, before passing off the piece to a specialized majolica painter for glazing. I threw and decorated my puzzle jug, and left it as bisqueware.

Extant inspiration: https://www.visitpham.org/objects/92206

More information can be found in my documentation for St. Eligius:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PDvjtAfbJxwNRgRhMPYYPaoZ_NUojNmtHTdmf4EvGGo/edit?usp=sharing

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