̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - 16th century

Trinity College prayer book belonged to Thomas Cromwell, new research suggests

ta385 — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Hever Castle curator, Alison Palmer, recognised the bejewelled, silver gilt binding of Trinity’s Book of Hours from the famous portrait of Thomas Cromwell painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1532-3, which hangs in the Frick Collection in New York. Palmer then worked with colleagues Kate McCaffrey and Dr Owen Emmerson to uncover the mystery of the book’s ownership.

̽��ֱ��researchers followed a provenance trail that links the book from its donor, Dame Anne Sadleir, directly back to Thomas Cromwell. A team of experts have reviewed the new evidence and are confident that this is the very same book in the Holbein painting and that it belonged to Thomas Cromwell.

̽��ֱ��Hardouyn Hours is thought to be the only object from any Tudor portrait to survive to this day.

̽��ֱ��team established that the book, printed in Paris by Germain Hardouyn in 1527 or 1528, would have been among the books left by Cromwell to his secretary and protege Ralph Sadleir.

̽��ֱ��book came to Trinity from Dame Anne Sadleir who married the grandson of Cromwell’s secretary. Anne was the daughter of the eminent lawyer Sir Edward Coke, a member of Trinity. She donated this Book of Hours, along with Trinity’s best-known manuscript – ̽��ֱ��Trinity Apocalypse – to the College in 1660.

Trinity’s Librarian Dr Nicolas Bell has collaborated with researchers at Cambridge and beyond to find out more about the Hardouyn Hours.

Based on a note in the front of the book, the gems on the covers and clasps were thought to be jaspers or jacinths, but analysis by Joanna Symonowicz, a doctoral researcher working with Dr Giuliana Di Martino in the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, has used Raman spectroscopy to identify them as grossular garnets.

Michèle Bimbenet-Privat, formerly curator of metalwork at the Louvre in Paris, has confirmed that the silver gilt edging was made by Pierre Mangot, goldsmith to King Francis I of France. Mangot, who had moved to Paris the previous year from Blois, also made items for members of the Boleyn family. Mangot’s hallmark is the letter ‘M’ and a lower case ‘a’ tells us that the binding was made between December 1529 and 1530, in Paris, only a year or two after the book was printed.

̽��ֱ��Holbein portrait celebrates Cromwell’s appointment as Master of the Jewel House which may explain why the Hardouyn Hours features so prominently.

Dr Nicolas Bell said: “This book of devotional prayers is remarkable for its unusually grand binding, covered with velvet, jewels and highly decorated silver gilt borders, all of which date from the time it was printed and illuminated. It has been enormously exciting to position this luxurious creation in the very centre of the court of Henry VIII, where we know that both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn owned copies of the very same edition.”

Kate McCaffrey, from Hever Castle, said: “We now believe that Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, and Thomas Cromwell all owned a copy of the same prayer book… We are confident that this discovery will shed new light on the often-troubled relationship between these giants of the Tudor court.”

Dr Tracy Borman said it was: “ ̽��ֱ��most exciting Cromwell discovery in a generation – if not more.”

Hever Castle recently exhibited Catherine of Aragon’s 1527 prayer book (on loan from the Morgan Library in New York) alongside Anne Boleyn’s 1527 Book of Hours.

̽��ֱ��Hardouyn Hours will be on loan to Hever Castle for their exhibition Catherine & Anne: Queens, Rivals, Mothers which runs until 10 November 2023. This is the first time that the book has ever been lent by Trinity College since it was received on 10th August 1660.

̽��ֱ��Hardouyn Hours, a jewelled fifteenth-century prayer book in Trinity College Library belonged to Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to King Henry VIII, new research has found.

̽��ֱ��most exciting Cromwell discovery in a generation – if not more.

Tracy Borman

Thomas Cromwell painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1532-3. ̽��ֱ��Frick Collection

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Katherine Parr did not persuade Henry VIII to found Trinity College Cambridge

ta385 — Tue, 17 May 2022 05:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��story that Trinity College Cambridge was only founded because Henry VIII’s last wife, Katherine Parr, pleaded with him to do so, has become part of the folklore of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. It resurfaced again in Cambridge News this month, along with the claim that it was only the queen’s intervention that stopped Henry from closing down some or all of the Cambridge colleges.

But research by Richard Rex, Professor of Reformation History at Cambridge, now shows that this much loved and repeated tale is misleading. Rex’s study, published in ̽��ֱ��Journal of Ecclesiastical History, reveals that numerous powerful people at Court helped to defend the university from the potential threat posed by the king in his final few years, and that Henry had already decided to establish Trinity before the university lobbied Katherine Parr.

̽��ֱ��university’s fears centred on the Chantries Act of 1545, which empowered the king to take over, at will, any of the ‘colleges, free chapels, chantries, hospitals’ or other religious foundations with which his kingdom abounded. In principle this power could certainly have swept up the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge to swell the royal coffers.

But as Professor Rex explains: “While the Chantries Act did indeed give Henry the power to suppress any college or church foundation he chose, it’s clear that the university’s friends at Court did all they could, from the start, to ensure that this new power would not be used against Cambridge or Oxford.”

“Even before the universities knew what was going on, they were given different treatment from the rest of England and Wales as the new law was put into effect.”

Cambridge did write to Katherine Parr, among others, to lobby against the potential threat to their interests. But her reply only confirms what other sources studied by Rex also make clear: that Henry had already taken the decision to found Christ Church in Oxford and Trinity in Cambridge.

Parr’s letter, dated 26 February 1546 and preserved in Corpus Christi College’s library in Cambridge, assures the university that the king:
‘being such a patron to good learning doth tender [i.e. favour] you so much that he will rather advance learning and erect new occasion thereof than to confound those your ancient and godly institutions’.

Even though the processes for establishing the twin foundations were delayed so that the colleges only came into being a month or two before Henry’s death at the end of January 1547, key parts of the plan were already in place as early as summer 1545.

Rex said: “Katherine Parr was undoubtedly a patron of learning and in particular of the ‘new learning’ of the Protestant Reformation. But the idea that she had a crucial role in the foundation of Trinity is romantic fiction with only the slenderest basis in the historical record.”

Rex’s study undermines other long-held assumptions based on chronological errors, including that Cambridge’s lobbying secured the favourable appointment of university insiders Matthew Parker, John Redman and William May as commissioners to survey its Colleges for the king.

In fact, their appointment preceded any known Cambridge lobbying by about a month and, Rex argues, this came about thanks to ‘the unsolicited intervention of the university’s friends at court’. Rex found supporting evidence for this among Matthew Parker’s papers in Corpus Christi’s library, which still bears Parker’s name because he left the College his magnificent private collection of books and manuscripts.

Rex, himself a student at Trinity in the 1980s, made these discoveries while working with Colin Armstrong (another Trinity alum) on a chapter for a forthcoming book about the college’s history.

̽��ֱ��popular narrative which emphasises Parr’s influence and that of Cambridge lobbyists originated in a book published in 1884 by J.B. Mullinger entitled ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge from the royal injunctions of 1545 to the accession of Charles the First. Mullinger was a historian and librarian at St John's College Cambridge. But Rex concludes that he both misread and misdated the patchy original sources which describe these events.

He said: “When I started this work, I simply wanted to nail down the traditional story by checking the sources and footnotes. It had been retold so often by so many good historians that I had no reason to doubt it was true. But I found that the whole thing was a mess, the chronology didn’t make any sense. So I set about trying to put the record straight.”

“ ̽��ֱ��fact that Cambridge and Oxford were, from the start, set apart from the rest of the country in the implementation of the Chantries Act is just one among several indications that Henry VIII already had something special in mind for them.

“Henry’s plan to establish lasting memorials to himself in both universities had probably been in his mind since mid-1545 at the latest. ̽��ֱ��‘Cambridge version’ of events appears to have been an academic flight of fancy. Our lobbying efforts weren’t quite as influential as we once liked to imagine.”

“Strangely, a fashion has grown up of attributing too much of what Henry VIII did to the influence of those closest to him – Wolsey, Cromwell, Anne Boleyn, or Katherine Parr. Like anyone, Henry was liable to be influenced by those around him. But the big decisions – and the founding of Christ Church and Trinity were big decisions – were his.”

Reference
R Rex, ‘ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Chantries Act of 1545’, ̽��ֱ��Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2022); doi.org/10.1017/S0022046921001494

King Henry VIII had already made up his mind to found Trinity College Cambridge and Christ Church Oxford before Cambridge lobbied his queen, a re-examination of 16th-century sources suggests. Professor Richard Rex's study undermines a popular 'Cambridge version' of events, sheds new light on the Chantries Act and emphasises the king's ability to take big decisions.

Henry’s plan to establish lasting memorials to himself in both universities had probably been in his mind since mid-1545 at the latest

Richard Rex

̽��ֱ��Master and Fellows, Trinity College Cambridge

Henry VIII statue on the Great Gate of Trinity College Cambridge

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

Arms and the man: how a culture of warfare shapes masculinity

amb206 — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 11:10:05 +0000

Brawls tend to take a familiar pattern. Verbal insults are traded and physical violence erupts. Something like this happened in the graveyard of a church in Florence on 30 March 1561. It began when a man named Niccolo di Piero Parenti called another man, Piero di Domenico, un asino (an ass). Both men soon drew their swords. Two others joined the fray – and Piero was wounded (his big toe was badly cut) leaving him unable to walk properly.

A remarkably detailed report of this encounter between a pair of hot-headed Florentines appear in the annals of the Otto di Guardia e Balia, records kept by the magistrates responsible for overseeing criminal affairs and law enforcement in Tuscany under the Medici, the dynasty which ruled this domain for close to three centuries.

Few scholars have investigated the archives of the Otto di Guardia which represent a vast and under explored historical source. But in 2015 Victoria Bartels, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, spent two months studying these hand-written records. It was an undertaking that required not just a grasp of 16th century Italian but the determination to track down the meanings of dozens of obscure or archaic terms – from verbal jibes to items of armour. She was amused to discover that the insult poltrone translates as ‘armchair’ and means something akin to slob.

Bartels’ research into the usage of weaponry in Renaissance Florence forms one strand of a dissertation in which she will explore the relationship between men and armour (as well as martial fashion trends) in the 16th century. Her quest to understand more about the ways in which men used these items as masculine signifiers during this period takes her on a voyage into art, literature and archival documents that have survived more than 400 years of history.

Late Renaissance Italian culture was characterised by warfare. ̽��ֱ��so-called Italian Wars involved much of Europe and a preoccupation with armed struggle and violence was reflected in pastimes (such as jousting) and in male deportment and dress. Weapons (like those drawn in the graveyard in March 1561) were prohibited in 16th century Florence in order to maintain peace. But exceptions could be made and the contents of the Otto di Guardia archives suggest that many were.

As well as holding records of thousands of incidents of violence, the Otto archives also contain a huge collection of letters called suppliche (supplications) that petition the Duke for exonerations, sentence reductions, or the granting of certain privileges. Among these documents are numerous letters in which men wrote to ask the Otto for permission to wear or carry, in public, weapons that were banned.

Speaking today, at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston, Bartels will show for the first time how these letters shine a light on the ways in which Renaissance men used weapons and armour in their daily lives to promote a masculine image – and how entrenched the notion of honour was in early modern society. ̽��ֱ��supplications are rich in information not only about what offensive and defensive arms men sought to wear but where in town they wished to go and how they wanted to be seen.

“ ̽��ֱ��supplications are very specific in what they set out – and these details are what make them so valuable. In order to be given permission to bear arms a man had to specify with some precision what items he wanted to carry, when he wanted to be able to carry them, and why. ̽��ֱ��letters include a plea from a Portuguese priest who asks for permission to carry a dagger, and his man servant to carry a sword, for protection against a rowdy group of farmers and youths who are demanding his removal from a small parish church,” says Bartels.

“As a historian interested in the cultural history of arms and armour, it’s fascinating to hold in my hands letters that describe a whole range of situations and discuss both the usage and significance of these objects. ̽��ֱ��accounts written by notaries follow a template of sorts. However, each story is tailored to the individual behind the request. Although the level of detail varies, these documents provide historical information that we might not otherwise encounter. Every piece of material included, or withheld for that matter, assists us in our quest to understand period norms.”

Successful supplicants were awarded licenses by the Otto. Bartels’ research in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze led to the discovery of one such license – a copy of a document issued in March 1557. ̽��ֱ��license in question was granted to a painter called Maestro Giovanni Fiammingo Pittore. It gives his address and age (35 years) and describes his appearance (“black hair, black bushy beard, white in the face, medium stature”) and gives him permission to carry “an armed jacket, sword, and dagger”.

It is interesting that Maestro Giovanni was a painter and, as such, attuned to the powerful symbolism of arms and armour. ̽��ֱ��irony of portraying civilians equipped for combat was not lost on another artist. In 1584 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo wrote that “merchants and bankers who have never seen a drawn sword and who should probably appear with quill pens behind their ears, their gowns about them and their day-books in front of them, have themselves painted in armour holding generals’ batons” (translation by Carolyn Springer).

Portraits and inventories reveal how a culture of warfare, tied up with notions of chivalry revived from earlier times, permeated deep into the male psyche and into male fashion – especially among the elite. An inventory of the guardaroba (wardrobe) of Lorenzo de’ Medici, as shown by Mario Scalini, itemised various pieces of armour including the de facto ruler of Florence’s leg armour that he wore around the city for decorative purposes.

Jousts, melees, and other tournament games were fabulous excuses for donning steel. ̽��ֱ��author Antonio Bendinelli recorded a tournament held in 1574 for Don Juan of Austria. Bartels says: “He discussed the appearance of each contestant over a span of 45 pages, commenting on the colour and material of their armour, clothing, and plumes. In contrast, he summed up the actual joust in just 20 lines, as historians Richard and Juliet Barker have pointed out.”

Looking manly, and impressing the opposite sex, meant adopting a martial style. ̽��ֱ��celebrated Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini suggested that cavaliers wore mail armour to impress women and, in 1538, the artist himself is recorded as possessing an entire wardrobe of mail. However, being perceived as overly militaristic also had its drawbacks. In Baldassare Castiglione’s ̽��ֱ��Book of the Courtier (1528), a female character explains to a surly, overly militaristic man: "I should think that since you aren't at war at the moment and you are not engaged in fighting, it would be a good thing if you were to have yourself well greased and stowed away in a cupboard with all your fighting equipment, so that you avoid getting rustier than you are already."

For statesmen, the consequences of going without armour could be deadly. In 1476 a grim fate befell the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who was assassinated in one of the city’s churches. “We know from a courtier’s account that the Duke had decided against wearing his corazina [upper body armour] the morning of his death because it made him look portly,” says Bartels. “His decision was a revealingly human, but fatal, trade-off between form and function. His desire to look slim and dashing in public may have cost him his life.”

16th-century notions of gender welded manhood and masculinity with arms and armour. In a letter written in 1572, Antonio Serguidi noted that Duke Cosimo I wept with pride when he saw his youngest son Giovanni kitted out in armour, and holding a pike and mace. ̽��ֱ��putting on of armour was a mark of adulthood – and, perhaps, was a rite of passage with no return. ̽��ֱ��showy masculinity of martial dress, however, trod a delicate line along a sliding scale – with restraint at one end and acts of violence at the other.

Citing the scholars Lyndal Roper and John Tosh, Bartels suggests that a man’s level of manliness was never fixed but existed in a state of flux. “Violence, albeit in appropriate circumstances, appears to have been one method of demonstrating one’s masculinity. Yet to receive the benefits of this cultural capital, violent acts had to be performed publically under socially agreed terms, and especially in front of other men,” she says.

“Arms and armour seem to have been visible manifestations of this concept. Even if men didn’t fight, the objects they carried made it look as though they would and likely influenced their comportment and behaviour. Today we see these items in static museum displays – but to those who saw them worn their potentially lethal function was never in doubt. However, these same objects simultaneously conjured up notions of civility and chivalry, making the symbolism of arms and armour somewhat contradictory, similar to the period’s understanding of masculinity itself.”

̽��ֱ��gaining and defence of honour – whether for an individual, for family or for state – was the ultimate goal of the Renaissance man. ̽��ֱ��Otto di Guardia’s archives in Florence reveal that Niccolo, who engaged in a brawl with Piero almost exactly 455 years ago, was the only person to be charged with a crime. He was ordered to pay a fine for the insulting word he used and for the injury to his opponent’s foot. Though others joined the fracas, they were let off.

As Bartels explains: “Niccolo was convicted because he sullied the honour of Piero. As seen in other parts of Europe at this time, the authorities were sympathetic to fighters who were provoked by the spewing of verbal insults.”

Victoria Bartels will give her talk, ‘Men of Steel‘, today at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston. She is contributing to a session called ‘Encountering the Renaissance, Honoring Gary Radke III: Regulating and Shaping Gender and Sexuality’.

Inset images: Titian, Portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, 1536-38 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence); Parrying dagger with scabbard, Italy or Germany, ca. 1590 (Wallace Collection).

̽��ֱ��trappings of violence were embedded into the culture of 16th century Europe. Victoria Bartels, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, has conducted research in a Florentine archive to show how, even at a time when the bearing of arms was prohibited, men negotiated ways to sport their daggers and swords in public.

Violence, albeit in appropriate circumstances, appears to have been one method of demonstrating one’s masculinity. Yet to receive the benefits of this cultural capital, violent acts had to be performed publically under socially agreed terms, and especially in front of other men.

Victoria Bartels

Left: Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Gentleman with His Helmet on a Column, ca. 1555-56. Middle: Giovanni Battista Moroni, ̽��ֱ��Gentlemen in Pink, 1560, Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo. Right: Moretto da Brescia, Portrait of a Man, 1526, Oil on canvas.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

How artisans used colour printing to add another dimension to woodcuts

amb206 — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 16:59:06 +0000

̽��ֱ��fearsome dragon is dead, its body contorted and mouth hanging open. Above it, a triumphant St George sits astride a splendid horse. He wears full armour, his legs thrust forward, spurs glinting and lance held high. Atop his helmet, impossibly elaborate plumes and feathers cascade upwards and outwards. In the background, a city perches on a mountain top, silhouetted against a glowering sky.

This opulent image, worked in black and gold on a blue background, is one of the earliest European examples of colour printing used in fine art. It was created in 1507 by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) at the request of his patron, Friedrich III, Elector of Saxony. Artisans working for Cranach, whose initials are worked into the design, used two wood blocks (black and gold) to print his masterful design of a horse and rider on to paper pre-painted with indigo. ̽��ֱ��medieval imagery contrasts with the strikingly modern Renaissance technology.

Cranach’s print is one of 31 German Renaissance woodcuts and a single drawing currently on display at the British Museum in an exhibition of early colour printing. All come from the British Museum’s collection but few have been shown to the public before. Together, they chart the ways in which advances in early print technology opened up new avenues for artists in creating a sense of movement, depth and opulence not possible in black and white.

̽��ֱ��exhibition German Renaissance Colour Woodcuts has been curated by Dr Elizabeth Savage (Faculty of English and Department of History of Art). Her pioneering research into archival collections in Germany and the UK, combined with her detailed grasp of the medium of woodblock printing, challenges accepted thinking about the use of colour in woodcuts, a craft-based technology associated almost exclusively with black-and-white or monochrome images.

When colour does appear in early woodcuts (for example St Dorothea and the Christ-Child, c.1450-1500) it has generally been applied by hand as a secondary process, often as a wash to draw attention to a significant aspect of the design. Given the considerable technical difficulties of colour printing using wood blocks, it was long assumed that colour printing did not develop on any significant scale until 1700, when Jakob Christoff Le Blon (1667-1741) invented a way to print all natural colours using only blue, red, yellow and black. His method became our CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, ‘key’ (black), following his order. Scholars thus assumed that early colour prints were extremely rare and judged them to be unrepresentative ‘outliers’.

Close analysis of colour images by Savage now reveals that, throughout the 1500s, thousands (and perhaps tens of thousands) of colour prints were in circulation in European countries. Furthermore, the range of colour woodblock prints in production varied from costly images, commissioned and collected by wealthy patrons, to more affordable ‘mass-produced’ prints designed to decorate the surfaces of furniture and the interiors of homes whose owners hankered after the latest styles of intarsia and marquetry – effects created by laborious and highly skilled inlay techniques.

One reason why so many colour prints have hidden in plain sight is that colour can be mistaken for paint. When the surfaces of prints are examined by an expert eye a different story may emerge. For instance, the pressure of the press often leaves tell-tale marks like indenting the design into the paper, forcing ‘ink squash’ into a raised outline, even giving the paper an almost sculptural relief. Savage collaborated with Gwen Riley Jones, a specialist in imaging gold at the ̽��ֱ�� of Manchester, to document the surface texture of the portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519) by Hans Weiditz (c.1500–c.1536). It can now be identified as the sixth image printed with gold in early modern Europe.

̽��ֱ��development of colour printing may have been technology-led, emerging from the workshops in the German cities of Augsburg and Strasbourg, among others, where competitive, innovative printers developed new ways to make their books stand out. But, in order to flourish, these advances required the backing of rich and powerful individuals whose status was closely tied to the conspicuous (and competitive) consumption of the latest in luxury goods, from textiles to prints.

“ ̽��ֱ��British Museum holds one of the world’s largest collections of colour prints, including unique examples from late medieval and early modern Germany. Early printers vied with each other to achieve stunning colouristic effects – 500 years before the advent of Photoshop,” says Savage. “We think of prints as being exactly repeatable black outlines on white paper, but some survive in many as 30 very different palettes. Their printers developed inks in royal blues, baby pinks, dusky oranges, lush greens, rich burgundies to create endless variety and unprecedented three-dimensional effects.”

Three prints, displayed side by side, illustrate how rivalry between members of the ruling elite stimulated important developments in colour printing. When in 1507 Friedrich III in Wittenberg sent images by Cranach of “knights printed from gold and silver” to his friend and competitor collector, the imperial advisor Konrad Peutinger in Augsburg, he created a friendly contest between two major artistic centres with artists and artisans stretching their skills to the limit in the quest for the most impressive image.

In response to the receipt of Cranach’s St George, Peutinger sent Friedrich a pair of larger colour woodcuts of St George and Maximillian I on horseback designed by Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1473–1531). With these woodcuts, Peutinger demonstrated that his Augsburg artists and craftsmen were able to outdo Frederick’s ostentatious effort. “Friedrich and Peutinger’s glittering exchange jump-started colour printing on a scale that we are only now beginning to appreciate,” said Savage. “It’s mind-boggling that one of Peutinger’s technicians corresponded directly with the Holy Roman Emperor about colour printing. Like Cranach’s nearly 24-karat gold printing ink on flimsy paper, it suggests the incredible value of these vivid breakthroughs.”

That extraordinary, short-lived, pre-Reformation heyday is thought to be the whole story, but Savage’s research recasts it as a short chapter. Dozens of colour impressions of German prints were known, by just a few artists, from the 1510s. This exhibition hints at the thousands of colour prints, circulating in perhaps tens of thousands of impressions, which were made and used across Germany. Rather than dying out before the Reformation, later European adaptions attest that the craft knowledge and market demand survived for generations and even spread abroad.

All prints are team efforts, with the artist normally considered the main producer. In the exhibition curated by Savage, the printer is the star player. Two colour impressions by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and one by Hans Holbein (c.1497–1543) are on display, but neither ever designed a colour print. Instead, printers commissioned others to design and cut tone blocks to accompany the great masters’ ‘normal’ woodcuts. As a woodcut, Dürer’s portrait of Ulrich Varnbüler (1522) is a 16th-century German masterpiece; as a colour print, it’s a triumph of 17th-century Dutch marketing.

̽��ֱ��exhibition’s focus on printers, not artists, expands an apparently small and sporadic fine art movement into an ever-growing wave. Savage said: “People prayed with them, collected them, learned from them, decorated with them, upgraded cheap wooden furniture with them. Few were as stunning as Cranach’s golden, saintly knight, which is precisely the point. We’ve forgotten that colour woodcuts were normal, not exceptional, in the ‘golden age’ of print.”

German Renaissance Colour Woodcuts is on display in Room 90 on the fourth floor of the British Museum until Wednesday, 27 January 2016.

Inset images: Anonymous (German), St Dorothy of Caesarea and the Christ-child in an Apple Tree, c.1450-1500, British Museum 1895,0122.18, presented by William Mitchell © ̽��ֱ��Trustees of the British Museum and courtesy of the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care, ̽��ֱ�� of Manchester; Attr. Hans Weiditz, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, 1519, British Museum 1862,0208.55 © ̽��ֱ��Trustees of the British Museum and courtesy of the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care, ̽��ֱ�� of Manchester; left: Albrecht Dürer, Ulrich Varnbüler, 1522, British Museum 1895,0122.739, presented by William Mitchell, centre and right: later editions printed with new tone blocks by Willem Jansz. Blaeu, c.1620, British Museum 1857,0613.345 and 1857,0613.345, © ̽��ֱ��Trustees of the British Museum.

An exhibition of early colour printing in Germany shines a light on the ways in which technology jump-started a revolution in image making. ̽��ֱ��British Museum show is curated by Dr Elizabeth Savage, whose research makes a radical contribution to an understanding of colour in woodcuts.

Friedrich and Peutinger’s glittering exchange jump-started colour printing on a scale that we are only now beginning to appreciate

Elizabeth Savage

Cranach George 1895,0122.264 37044001

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��astronomer and the witch – how Kepler saved his mother from the stake

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 10:30:43 +0000

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) is one of the world’s most famous astronomers. He defended Copernicus’s sun-centred universe and discovered that planets move in ellipses. A planet, NASA mission and planet-hunting spacecraft are named after him.

Yet in recent years Kepler and his family have appeared as dubious, even murderous people. In 2004 for example, a team of American journalists alleged that Kepler systematically poisoned the man he succeeded at the court of Rudolf II in Prague: Tycho Brahe. He may well be the scientist with the worst reputation.

But the majority of slurs concern the astronomer’s mother, Katharina. Arthur Koestler’s famous history of astronomy, ̽��ֱ��Sleepwalkers, where Katharina features as a “hideous little woman” whose evil tongue and “suspect background” predestined her as victim of the witchcraze.

Kepler, 1610.

Then there’s John Banville’s prize-winning historical novel Kepler, which vividly portrays Katharina as a crude old woman who makes a dangerous business of healing by boiling potions in a black pot. She meets with old hags in a kitchen infested with cat smells. Outside in her garden lies a dead rat. Kepler desperately tries to hide his mother’s magical arts from his wife as they visit and Katharina searches for a bag filled with bat-wings. This horrendous mother is scary, disgusting, and probably a witch.

There is something behind these hints: the portrayals stem to the astonishing fact that 400 years ago, when her son was at the very height of his scientific career, Katharina Kepler was accused of witchcraft. It is because of this that it has become commonplace in Anglo-American writing to depict Kepler’s mother as a difficult, bizarre and half-crazed old crone.

But what is the real story? Kepler certainly must rank as one of the most influential scientists to come from a disadvantaged background. Whereas Galileo’s father was a noted scholar of music, Kepler’s was a soldier who kept running away from the family. His parents argued and the only brother close to him in age suffered from epilepsy. This made it difficult for the brother to attend school or learn a trade.

Johannes Kepler, by contrast, soon emerged as an extremely talented boy. He was picked up by one of the most advanced Lutheran scholarship systems in Germany at the time and lived in boarding schools. He once fought against a boy who insulted his father, and was in his teens when the father disappeared for good.

Kepler’s model of the solar system.

Kepler wrote bleak little characterisations of his parents and paternal family around the time that he finished university. He also wrote about himself as a flawed young man, obsessively interested in fame, worried about money, unable to communicate his ideas in a straightforward way. These pieces of writing have principally served as evidence who want to depict Kepler and his family as horrendous, even murderous.

Yet these writings need to be put into context. Kepler wrote them very early in his life, and he did so in order to analyse his horoscopes. ̽��ֱ��whole convention of astrology was to point to character problems, rather than to laud lovely people. Kepler was a deeply Christian man, and one of his most impressive characteristics is how optimistic he soon began to feel about the world he lived in, against his odds and despite looming war. He built his own family and deeply cared about his wife and children. Kepler was confident about the importance of his discoveries and productive, even though he was never offered a university position.

Statue of Katharina Kepler in Eltingen. Harke, CC BY-SA

Then came the accusation against his mother. ̽��ֱ��proceedings which led to a criminal trial lasted six years. ̽��ֱ��Imperial mathematician formally took over his mother’s legal defence. No other public intellectual figure would have ever involved themselves in a similar role, but Kepler put his whole existence on hold, stored up his books, papers and instruments in boxes, moved his family to southern Germany and spent nearly a year trying to get his mother out of prison.

Local records for the small town in which Katharina Kepler lived are abundant. There is no evidence that she was brought up by an aunt who was burnt for witchcraft – this was one of the charges which her enemies invented. There is no evidence either that she made a living from healing – she simply mixed herbal drinks for herself and sometimes offered her help to others, like anyone else. A woman in her late 70s, Katharina Kepler withstood a trial and final imprisonment, during which she was chained to the floor for more than a year.

Kepler’s defence was a rhetorical masterpiece. He was able to dismantle the inconsistencies in the prosecution case, and show that the “magical” illnesses for which they blamed his mother could be explained using medical knowledge and common sense. In the autumn of 1621, Katharina was finally set free.

Johannes Kepler and his mother lived through one of the most epic tragedies in the age of the witch-craze. It’s high time to re-evaluate what kind of man Kepler was: he does not deserve to be the scientist with the worst reputation. And nor does his mother deserve to be portrayed as a witch.

̽��ֱ��Astronomer And ̽��ֱ��Witch by Ulinka Rublack is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press on October 22.

Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Ulinka Rublack will be giving a talk at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on Wednesday 28th October.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History, discusses the reputation of astronomer Johannes Kepler and his mother Katharina, and the criminal trial for witchcraft that lasted six years.

Great Comet of 1577, which Kepler witnessed as a child.

For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Wondering what to pack for university? A guitar, perhaps, for the “refresshynge of the witte”?

amb206 — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 11:40:14 +0000

Sometimes, it’s only when you arrive at college that you realise precisely what is vital for student life. In a letter dated 18 June 1562, a servant wrote that his master, an undergraduate at Oxford, needed “a gitterne and bowe and arrows the whyche I thinke to be necessarye for hym…” ̽��ֱ��servant’s name was Thomas Madock and his master was John Somerford. Madock’s letter is addressed to Charles Mainwaring of Croxton, who was probably Somerford’s guardian.

Gitterne is an old word for guitar – alternative spellings (a ‘foreign’ instrument guaranteed a great proliferation) include gittern, quinterne and even gyttron. As instruments that were highly portable, and relatively easy to learn to a modest standard, guitars became increasingly popular in the second half of the 16th century, vying with and eventually overtaking other stringed instruments such as the lute.

Madock’s letter is one of many details that make Christopher Page’s latest book ̽��ֱ��Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History compelling reading for anyone interested in the ways in which people acquire and use things, and their skills with those things, to define and maintain their place in society – and, of course, to have fun.

In researching the book, Page has scoured archives that range from the patent rolls of Bloody Mary in the National Archives at Kew to household inventories on the Isle of Wight. In doing so, he creates a rich and often entertaining picture of the Tudor world seen through the lens of a ‘newfangled’ musical instrument. He looks not just at the history of the uptake of the guitar, and its contribution to courtly and popular music, but also at representations in art and architecture, most notably its appearance among the decorative motifs of the exquisite Eglantine Table (a piece of furniture made in Italy to celebrate marriages between powerful English dynasties).

Page’s book is the second in a three-part series devoted to the history of the guitar from 1547, when Henry VIII died, to 1837 and the accession of Victoria. It shines a light, in particular, on the rise of guitar-playing as one of the constructs of masculinity. Madock’s comments that a gittern and bows and arrows are “necessarye”, and that his charge is “verye desirous” to obtain them, are revealing: the implication is that without these must-have items his master is unable to fulfil his potential as a gentleman of not just means but also taste and talent.

̽��ֱ��bows and arrows requested in Madock’s letter were for sport. Most towns would have had a butt – an area for the practise of archery – a fact recorded by names of streets and fields. Laws requiring archery practice date back to the 13th century: England needed men trained to use the longbow. By the 16th century, archery was recreational. But, along with fencing and dancing, music-making and archery were accomplishments expected of well-born and aspiring young men.

̽��ֱ��guitar’s emergence as a fashionable plaything was rapid. In the 1540s it was regarded as “strange”, derived from the French meaning ‘foreign’. Some years later the first traces of imported guitars appear in the records kept by the Port of London: a list of stringed instruments includes the duty to be paid on “Gitterns the dosen”. Early on, the guitar trade was dominated by a single individual, a draper named John White who imported instruments from Antwerp. Soon the role of the gittern as part of a “young man’s lyfe” guaranteed a thriving trade in guitars and guitar strings.

Inventories held by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge suggest that in the period 1535-1605 around a fifth of its members (chiefly scholars and fellows but also domestic staff) owned a musical instrument. Mental health was taken seriously: music-making was an antidote to melancholy brought about by the rigours of study in a town pestilential in summer and perennially damp in winter. Music practice is described as a form of “pleasant learning” that brings real benefits to the young man “for the refresshynge of his witte”.

Music, according to the Tudor guitarist Thomas Wythorne, enlivened the spirits, bringing a “fors with it lyk unto A heavenly inspirasion”. Guitar-players had other advantages too. In the hands of an amorous young man, the guitar was a means of courting young ladies who would flock to the player “lyke beez to hunny”. In the Paris of the 1540s (far more fashionable than London) lovelorn serenaders did “nightly walke the streates before their louers gates, tearing the poor strings of their instruments”.

Guitars made an initial impact at the luxury end of the market. Henry VIII (responsible for the completion of King’s College Chapel and the founding of Trinity College) was probably the first named owner of one under the name of ‘Spanish viol’. His daughter Elizabeth I (who visited Cambridge and berated its scholars for their torn and soiled clothes) was presented with a boxed set of three as a New Years Day gift in 1559. ̽��ֱ��record of the gifts shows that she asked to have them brought to her. A portrait of her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, features a guitar, complete with musical score, in its elaborately decorative border.

̽��ֱ��instruments were also purchased by men of learning. ̽��ֱ��1591 probate inventory of Thomas Lorkin, Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge, included an extensive library of 631 volumes as well as “a lute with a case and 2 Gittornes”, with an overall value of 20s. Fourteen years later, the inventory of his son-in-law Edward Liveley, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, also included “In the studye… a gitterne in a case”.

As imports from Europe, guitars were both luxury goods (thus highly desirable) and foreign (thus potentially dangerous). Similarly, the social profile of the instrument trod a thin line between the exclusive and the popular. Once affordable, the guitar became a favourite with apprentices (who came from a wide spectrum of society). In Cambridge, the butler of Peterhouse College (as it then was) owned a guitar as well as a small number of books – an example of a townsman able to invest in his own improvement.

Sixteenth-century apprentices, like students today, were notorious for boisterousness. High spirits brought out some of the worst aspects of their elders. In 1554 a consortium of employers in Newcastle issued ‘An Act for the Apparell of Appryntyses’ to counter a woeful decline in moral standards. ̽��ֱ��wayward young men concerned were upbraided for their fancy clothes and beards, drinking and dancing, the pursuit of harlots, and playing “gitterns by nyght”.

̽��ֱ��last word should go to the wholesome-sounding Dennys Bucke, whose probate inventory was drawn up in 1584. Bucke was a yeoman – a tenant farmer renting good arable land in north Norfolk. Itemised room by room, his belongings point to the emergence of a middling sort with the financial wherewithal to lift themselves to a new level of prosperity. Few of Bucke’s things speak of luxury; most are practical. But he is the possessor of a gitterne.

̽��ֱ��presence in Bucke’s gitterne in his “parlor chamber”, along with “fower fetherbedds” and a “warming pann”, hints not just at a comfortable life for its recently departed owner and but also to a flourishing long-term future for the guitar itself as an instrument of the people. ̽��ֱ��guitar has never looked back.

̽��ֱ��Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History by Christopher Page is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Inset images: ̽��ֱ��guitar shown in marquetry on the Eglantine Table, now at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. Probably made to commemorate the marriage of Elizabeth (Bess) of Hardwick to George Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1567. Photograph by Marzena Pogorzaly (Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press); 'An instruction to the Gitterne', f. 15 r-v (Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press); Detail from a portrait of Robert Dudley ( ̽��ֱ��Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge).

What to take to university is a question foremost in the minds of thousands of freshers up and down the country. Christopher Page’s latest book ‘ ̽��ֱ��Guitar in Tudor England’ reveals that 16th century students faced similar dilemmas – though their packing lists were rather different.

In the hands of an amorous young man, the guitar was a means of courting young ladies who would flock to the player “lyke beez to hunny”

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press

Detail of one of the triumphal arches built for the entrance of James I to London in March 1603, devised by Stephen Harrison and engraved by William Kip. Photograph by Michael Fleming.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Men in stripes: spot the difference in early modern woodcuts

amb206 — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 08:16:05 +0000

Historians need to pursue parallel lines of enquiry to add an extra dimension to their research. Tillmann Taape, a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science, is much more interested in early printed books than in clothes. He never thought he’d be immersing himself in the fine details of 15th century men’s fashion as means of understanding the makings of early modern science.

Taape is studying medical manuals compiled by a surgeon-apothecary around the turn of the 16th century. Hieronymus Brunschwig’s works were published by Johann Grüninger who commissioned a highly skilled artist (name unknown) to produce dozens of detailed woodcuts to illustrate some of the earliest books printed in Germany. Brunschwig’s were the first books on surgery and medical distillation to be published in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

̽��ֱ��focus of Taape’s research is Brunschwig’s surgery manual, plague treatise and two books on distillation, all published in Brunschwig’s home town, Strasbourg. His scholarship will add to an understanding of medicine in the context of a world in which printing was just beginning to revolutionise the transmission of practical knowledge and thus to raise questions about who should have access to what kind of knowledge.

A big question for historians working on early medical books is: who did the author and publisher think would be likely to read and benefit from items that would have been costly to produce and correspondingly expensive to purchase? In the case of Bruschwig’s collections, the clues to unravelling this puzzle lie not just in the text – which he often addresses to the ‘common man’ – but also in the illustrations used to give the reader a quick idea of the topics covered in the book.

As Taape shifted his gaze from the books’ written content to the woodcuts, a succession of smaller but equally compelling questions crept into his mind: why are so many of the men depicted in the images wearing bold and vertical stripes, and what was the artist’s intention in dressing some men in stripes and others in plain garments?

At a time when people’s outer appearance was thought to reflect their inner character in a much more direct way than today, artists could use clothing as a visual ‘label’ for the different kinds of people they wanted to depict. Anyone with the proverbial feather in their cap, for example, would have been recognised as well-to-do, masculine and energetic.

̽��ֱ��striped garments in the woodcuts used in Grüninger’s books are a striking label, calculated to stand out. While the background and other sartorial details are captured in fine lines and delicate hatching, the stripes appear as unbroken, solid black or white shapes. ̽��ֱ��difference in clothes is underlined by an apparent division of labour in the images: striped people are often shown doing manual work, such as stitching up wounds, while figures in monochrome fur-trimmed robes stand well back.

Stripes clearly marked out a particular kind of person, so the next step was to find out what it meant to be stripy in the early modern period. “ ̽��ֱ��whole topic of stripes, and the messages they convey, set me off on a tangent that took me into the realms of art, fashion and social satire. To embrace stripes as a complex narrative of symbols, you have to look at cultural and political history, the ways in which social structures were perceived and conveyed in forms of dress as well as figures of speech,” says Taape.

A book called ̽��ֱ��Devil’s Cloth discusses stripes in Biblical references and medieval fiction right through to stripes in prison uniform, pyjamas and toothpaste. Its author, Michel Pastoureau, argues that stripes stood out because they were inherently offensive to the medieval eye which was used to decoding images layer by layer. “Pastoureau suggests that stripes defied this hierarchical gaze because they resist being distinguished into background and foreground. Instead, their contrasting colours appear in the same visual plane,” says Taape.

“Stripy clothes, moreover, were often literally cobbled together from different pieces of material, which could make them somewhat second-rate not only with respect to visual sensibilities, but also because they could be seen to go against the Bible. Stripes were in stark contrast with Jesus’s garment, woven in one piece, and laughed in the face of the decrees against wearing garments made from different materials, found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.”

But visual symbolism is rarely one-sided and, by the early modern period, stripes had acquired another set of connotations. Precisely because of their conspicuous or even unsavoury nature, striped clothes became a sign of courtly extravaganza, giving rise to a new fashion of elaborately tailored striped or slashed doublets and hose – perhaps rather in the way that more than four centuries later, punk, with its rebellious rips and subversive safety pins, was reimagined by couture.

Historians think that the 16th century fashion for stripes first appeared at the North Italian courts, and was brought to the streets of prosperous Germany by the Emperor's new infantry, the so-called lansquenets, who combined short doublets, often striped, with tight-fitting striped or mi-parti hose.

“Stripy clothes became particularly popular among the middling sort of citizens of free imperial towns, artisans and even wealthy farmers and landowners,” says Taape. “These people constituted a growing and increasingly self-aware middle layer of society, sandwiched between poorer day-labourers, who did not own any property, and the wealthy urban patriciate or landed gentry.”

Like checks and other bold geometric patterns, stripes are attention-seeking: “look at me!” In the setting of burgeoning European towns and cities, where artisans and merchants often formed part of the governing council, the new middle class of ‘stripy people’ represented a force to be reckoned with. As arrivistes they were, inevitably, satirised for their uppity, in-your-face presumption in treading on the toes of those higher up the social scale.

“ ̽��ֱ��literature of the late 15th century, notably social satire in the tradition of Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, associates this newly significant social group with striped clothes. In a sermon inspired by Brant’s satirical work, the Strasbourg preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg coined a new term for this kind of person – ‘striped laymen’ or gestreyflet leygen in the original German,” says Taape.

“ ̽��ֱ��phrase stuck, and so the 'striped layman' became a rhetorical statement as well as a visual one. His striped clothing identified him as being ‘half and half’, or in between, not just in terms of wealth and status but also in terms of education.”

Taape continues: “ ̽��ֱ��striped layman is literate in his local language but not in Latin – and, as he becomes more powerful, he emerges as a central figure in the visual rhetoric of Protestant pamphlets during the Reformation. Martin Luther wrote for an audience of precisely this kind of person. Although not a Latinate scholar of theology, the striped layman sought salvation in his own reading of Scripture in the vernacular without learned clergy as an intermediate.”

Brunschwig was more concerned with the common man’s health than the salvation of his soul. Each of his books contains a number of different woodcuts – but one particular illustration appears in all of them. It shows a teacher addressing a group of students who stand in front of him. ̽��ֱ��teacher, who is seated at a lectern, wears a fur-lined scholar’s robe. He is lecturing from a book positioned so that only he can see its contents, thus demonstrating his exclusive access to the text.

“Among his students, we see a young man dressed in stripes. While his fellow student listens demurely, cap in hand, this striped chap gesticulates as if he’s arguing a point with the teacher. What’s more, he’s holding a roll of paper, which could be a sheet of notes or a medical recipe. ̽��ֱ��picture suggests that this striped layman is literate and familiar with some of medicine’s written forms,” says Taape.

It was a nifty sales ploy on the part of Brunschwig and his publisher to put the striped layman centre stage. ̽��ֱ��customer, perhaps not yet always right, was often striped. “In the chapter of my PhD thesis that explores the dress depicted in the woodcuts, I argue that the middling man – the striped man – neatly symbolises the intended reader of Brunschwig’s works, although Brunschwig himself never explicitly comments on the depicted figures and their stripes,” says Taape.

“Just a few years later, however, the physician Lorenz Fries from Colmar, not far from Strasbourg, dedicated his Mirror of Medicine specifically to gestreiffelten leyen, ‘striped laypeople,’ who want to learn about medicine. Styling himself as something of a Luther of medicine, Fries makes explicit a trend which we already see developing in Brunschwig: the middling, half-educated layman as a reader of medical books which can help him to treat himself and his household.”

As a digression from his meticulous analysis of Brunschwig’s texts, Taape’s foray into the world of stripes was undoubtedly a lot of fun. But it also showed him that the visual culture of early modern print can still tell us new things if we can figure out how to decode images and read them alongside contemporary texts.

This article is based on a blog that appeared on the Recipes Project website http://recipes.hypotheses.org/5551

Inset images: Master (surgeon?) lecturing from a chair to four standing students, from Die hantwirkung der wund Artzeny by Hieronymus Brunschwig (Wellcome Library, London); A man sits in a chair apparently with his abdomen opened surgically. Kneeling before him is the surgeon with a bowl collecting the abdominal contents, watching are three figures, one with spectacles. Could show an early surgical procedure or portray treatment of a severe abdominal injury, from Das Buch der Cirurgia des Hieronymus Brunschwig by Hieronymus Brunschwig (Wellcome Library, London).

Sixteenth-century woodcuts often depict young men wearing striped doublets or striped hose. When historian of science Tillmann Taape embarked on a journey into the meaning of stripes, he discovered that artists used them to mark out people who were neither rich and educated nor poor and illiterate – but something in between.

̽��ֱ��whole topic of stripes, and the messages they convey, set me off on a tangent that took me into the realms of art, fashion and social satire

Tillmann Taape

Wellcome Library, London

Distillation in the 15th century, from Liber de Arte Distillandi de Compositis by Hieronymus Brunschwig

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Where to find a dragon in Cambridge

jeh98 — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 08:00:00 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

Earth, water, air and fire. If you were to pick an element that you most associate with dragons, you would probably choose the last – fire. And though the jaws of all the dragons to be found lurking in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) are devoid of flames, they do speak to the immense power of the dragon to ignite cultural imagination in all corners of the globe.

From the Anglo-Saxons of Old England, to the lamas of Tibet and the jungles of Borneo, dragons have been carved, stitched and emblazoned on countless artefacts of human creativity and endeavour.

But on closer inspection, a more appropriate element to associate with these mythical reptiles may indeed be water.

Sporting arguably the finest beard in the MAA, this dragon formed the fearsome figurehead of a canoe. On display in the Maudslay gallery, it was found in the Baram River District of Borneo by alumnus of Christ’s College and influential anthropologist, Dr Alfred Cort Haddon, during his fieldwork expedition to Malaysia and the Torres Strait Islands in 1898.

In the folklore of Borneo, the dragon is a goddess of the underworld. She protects the living, guards over the dead, and is associated with earth, water, thunder and lightning. One particular folktale tells of a dragon that guards a precious jewel on the top of Mount Kinabalu, the highest point of the island.

This fellow, and his mighty fine facial hair, has been temporarily removed for conservation but will be back to take his place in the museum soon.

A few paces across the gallery take you all the way from the coasts of Borneo to the former Kingdom of Derge, high in the Himalayan peaks of Tibet, and takes our watery connection in a slightly different direction. This extremely rare piece of Derge ware is an iron water bottle covered in silver and gold ornamentation and bound with brass. ̽��ֱ��hexagonal spout rises from the mouth of a sea monster at the base, and anyone looking closely at the handle will notice that it is in the form of a dragon.

̽��ֱ��dragon, or zhug, is a deity in Tibetan mythology. Influenced by the dragons of Chinese and Indian culture, Tibetan dragons are believed to have control over the rainfall and represent water. ̽��ֱ��dragon keeping a close eye on this water container was presented to Frederick Williamson, a Cambridge graduate and Political Officer of the British Raj, by the Prime Minister of Tibet in 1933 and deposited in the museum by his wife, Margaret, in 1976.

Stepping further back in time, we find dragons that were traded across the seas by Anglo-Saxons between the 5th and 11th centuries.

̽��ֱ��museum's collection of Anglo-Saxon brooches, some with dragon-like creatures engraved on the front, were among the first in Britain to have testing carried out on their garnets – decorative pieces of red gemstone. ̽��ֱ��results of this testing have provided evidence that the Anglo-Saxons were trading with India.

Serpentine or dragon-like shapes were common in Anglo-Saxon art as they were easy to work into the interlaced designs that were popular during the period. Beyond just being carved on jewellery and armour, the association between dragons and treasure was particularly strong in Anglo-Saxon writing – even entering proverbial sayings such as the maxim “draca sceal on hlæwe, frod, frætwum wlanc” (a dragon must be in a mound, old and proud in his ornaments).

Students in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNAC) come face-to-face with dragons in a number of courses, according to Dr Richard Dance. Probably the most famous of these is the dragon that defeats the eponymous hero of Beowulf in the epic poem’s dramatic finale.

Ða se gæst ongan gledum spiwan,

beorht hofu bærnan; bryne-leoma stod

eldum on andan; no ðær aht cwices

lað lyft-floga læfan wolde.

Wæs þæs wyrmes wig wide gesyne,

nearo-fages nið nean and feorran,

hu se guð-sceaða Geata leode

hatode and hynde: hord eft gesceat,

dryht-sele dyrnne ær dæges hwile.

(Beowulf – XXXIII. Project Gutenberg.)

̽��ֱ��stranger began then to vomit forth fire,

To burn the great manor; the blaze then glimmered

For anguish to earlmen, not anything living

Was the hateful air-goer willing to leave there.

̽��ֱ��war of the worm widely was noticed,

̽��ֱ��feud of the foeman afar and anear,

How the enemy injured the earls of the Geatmen,

Harried with hatred: back he hied to the treasure,

To the well-hidden cavern ere the coming of daylight.

(Beowulf – XXXIII. Project Gutenberg.)

“A major theme in heroic and epic literature is obtaining treasure and giving it out to the people – treasure was particularly important in a pre-monetary economy. Dragons, often depicted jealously guarding their hoard, represent the obverse of generosity, like a bad king figure,” says Dance.

“Beowulf is the longest Anglo-Saxon poem that we know of, and it is complex, carefully wrought and evocative. It’s good poetry as well as being a good poem — a finely crafted piece of treasure in its own right. A lot of words and the way it arranges its ideas are recognisably poetic compared to Old English prose”.

Dance explains that the words “draca” (dragon) and “wyrm” (serpent, reptile) are used fairly interchangeably in the poem to refer to the hero’s final foe.

“When the dragon appears towards the end of the poem we see that, very early on in written culture, the fantasy fiction idea of a dragon that we have today is already formed. Looking at dragons in modern fiction you can see that our ideas of what a dragon is depend quite closely on the ways they are presented in medieval literature like Beowulf, especially via the works of authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, himself an Anglo-Saxon scholar,” says Dance.

Dr Judy Quinn of ASNAC, who researches Old Norse poetry, says that Scandinavian and Icelandic poems demonstrate how productive a symbol the dragon remained for poets in the medieval period.

“Poets were drawn to the legend of dragons such as Fáfnir and Níðhöggr found in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda – a 13th century Icelandic anthology of traditional anonymous verse. ̽��ֱ��proverb ‘dragons often rise up on their tails’ is recorded in the 12th century Icelandic poem Málsháttakvæði,” says Quinn. “ ̽��ֱ��dreki or dragon most often encountered in medieval Scandinavian poetry is a ship, named for the dragon shape carved out of the prow of Viking-Age war-ships.”

Whether in it, or on it, or providing a useful container for it, the dragons of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology have a long and storied relationship with water. Which is perhaps unsurprising given how the fire-breathing lizards of our imaginations started life in many cultures and mythologies – as serpents, sea monsters, or river deities.

But to find the most unusual connection between the MAA’s dragons, we need to turn to an even more essential element – tea.

Medieval England, between the 16th and 18th centuries, gives us an exhibit affectionately nicknamed “Dragon in a cup”. One of the highlights of the MAA’s permanent Archaeology of Cambridge display, this piece of stained glass depicts St John the Evangelist. At the end of an outstretched arm, St John holds a poisoned chalice – with a tiny dragon peeping over the rim. It is a fairly common motif for St John to be depicted in this way, bearing an ominous cup of dragon – although the dragon in question looks far too friendly to be poisoning anybody.

For the next stop on our tea cup quest, we’re off to Borneo by canoe again to find another intricately carved prow, known to the museum staff as George.

Part-crocodile, part-dragon, George is afflicted by a condition that most tea-lovers will be able to sympathise with – he sees tea cups wherever he goes.

And finally, once more to Tibet and this tea cup decorated with a long, green dragon. Donated to the museum by the Williamsons, this cup is part of a large collection of Tibetan artefacts, including a teaspoon and a folding tea table both decorated with images of dragons.

All that remains is for someone to discover a dragon using a tea cup and the MAA’s collection will truly be complete.

You can meet all of these dragons, and many more of their friends prowling the treasures at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology – from Javanese Batik cloth, to Japanese netsuke.

During the summer, children can embark on their own animal adventure and try their hand at finding all of the exhibits in the museum’s Animal Safari Trail.

Admission to the museum is free and it is open every day except Mondays.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: E is for an animal that takes pride of place among the medieval manuscripts in the Parker Library, and is the subject of vital conservation research in Thailand's 'Golden Triangle'.

Inset images: Figurehead of a canoe, accession number Z 2403 ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge); Derge iron water bottle, accession number D 1976.115 ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge); Viking ships (Jos van Wunnik); Circular panel of glass, showing a saint with a dragon in a chalice, accession number Z 16318 ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge); Head for front of canoe, accession number Z 2698 ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge); China tea cup ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge).

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, D is for Dragon. Watch out for fire-breathers among the treasures of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in Anglo-Saxon proverbs, and in fantasy literature from medieval Scandinavia to the present day.

When the dragon appears in Beowulf we see that, very early on in written culture, the fantasy fiction idea of a dragon that we have today is already formed

Richard Dance

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Derge iron water bottle. Accession number: D 1976.115.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution