̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - 15th 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

'Bawdy bard' manuscript reveals medieval roots of British comedy

ta385 — Wed, 31 May 2023 05:00:00 +0000

An unprecedented record of medieval live comedy performance has been identified in a 15th-century manuscript. Raucous texts – mocking kings, priests and peasants; encouraging audiences to get drunk; and shocking them with slapstick – shed new light on Britain’s famous sense of humour and the role played by minstrels in medieval society.

What is so unusual about a sloth’s neck?

amb206 — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 09:58:52 +0000

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

Xenarthra is an order of primarily South American mammals that includes sloths, ant-eaters and armadillos. Several are sufficiently endangered to be on the IUCN ‘red list’. In previous millenia, the group was far bigger. It covered many other creatures, now extinct, such as giant ground sloths estimated to have exceeded the size of a male African elephant.

As ‘exotic’ animals, xenarthrans have long fascinated westerners and became a must-have item in ‘cabinets of curiosities’ – collections gathered from a world that was opening up to exploration from the 15th century onwards. In the mid-17th century, the naturalist-physician, Georg Marcgrave, stationed in Dutch Brazil, described the armadillos that he encountered:

" ̽��ֱ��Tatu or Tatu-peba in Brazilian, Armadillo in Spanish, Encuberto in Portuguese, we Belgians call Armoured-piglet. It is a most powerful animal that lives in the ground, though also in water and soggy places. It is found in various sizes."

As a consequence of the blossoming of scientific enquiry in the 19th century, many leading zoology museums have examples of xenarthrans in their collections. Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology, for example, has a fine collection of specimens collected on expeditions to South America, from the diminutive Pink Fairy Armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus) to the towering giant ground sloth (Megatherium americanum) which became extinct some 10,000 years ago.

̽��ֱ��ground sloth is one of a number of relatively recently extinct large sloths, one of which Charles Darwin himself helped discover on the voyage of the Beagle. On September 18, 1832, Darwin noted in his dairy that he had dined on “Ostrich dumpling & Armadillos”. ̽��ֱ��‘ostrich’ he ate was, in fact, rhea; the abundant armadillos were a staple diet of the local gauchos.

Not long afterwards, Darwin saw for the first time fossils of shells and other animals, embedded in soft sea cliffs, including a specimen of giant ground sloth which was to be named Mylodon darwinii in his honour.

Xenarthans have been a source of fascination to Dr Robert Asher, an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Zoology, ever since he first began studying mammalian diversity as a graduate student some 20 years ago. He’s particularly interested in the evolutionary stories told by the structure of their skeletons – and the ways in which their bones act as clues to their relative position within the tree of life.

Natural history museums in Berlin, Paris and London have in their collections examples of three-toed sloths, including embryos and foetuses. These specimens enabled Dr Robert Asher and his colleague Dr Lionel Hautier (formerly a Cambridge postdoctoral fellow and now at the ̽��ֱ�� of Montpellier) to publish research on an aspect of the anatomy of sloths which sets them apart from almost every other mammal on earth.

̽��ֱ��difference lies in the arrangement of vertebrae in sloths’ spinal columns – which can be seen as clues to xenarthrans’ divergent evolutionary pathways over the past few million years.

You might think that animals with long necks would have more neck vertebrae than those with short necks. This is certainly true of some birds and reptiles. But almost every placental mammal on earth (some 5,000 species in total) has seven ‘ribless’ vertebrae in the neck – even creatures with long necks such as giraffes. ̽��ֱ��three-toed sloth deviates from this rule: many of these tree-living creatures have eight, nine or even ten cervical vertebrae.

This remarkable diversity was noticed in the 18th century and scientists continue to tease apart the mechanisms by which mammals deviate from the “rule of seven”. In 2009, Asher and colleagues set out to learn more about this intriguing quirk. Neck vertebrae are known as cervicals and the rib-bearing vertebrae below them are known as thoracics. Thoracic vertebrae have facets which allow articulation with the ribs.

Asher and colleagues looked at patterns of bone formation in mammals as they developed. They found that, in all mammals, the centrum (or middle part) of the first thoracic (number eight, counting down from the skull) turns from cartilage to bone earlier than the centra of the posterior-most cervicals. In sloths, too, the eighth vertebrae begins to develop early – but, in their case, this ribless vertebra is located in the neck and generally considered to be ‘cervical’.

“ ̽��ֱ��‘extra’ vertebrae in sloths’ necks have the same developmental characteristics as thoracic vertebrae. They are, in effect, ribcage vertebrae, masquerading as neck vertebrae. In sloths, the position of the shoulders, pelvis and ribcage are linked with one another, and compared to their common ancestor shared with other mammals, have shifted down the vertebral column to make the neck longer,” explains Asher.

“Even in sloths, the mammalian ‘rule of seven’ applies to the vertebral centra. ̽��ֱ��ossification of the centra in a long-necked sloth resembles ossification in other mammals. However, sloths can deviate from the “rule” by shifting the embryonic tissues that give rise to the limb girdles and rib cage relative to the vertebrae, adding what are essentially one or more ribcage vertebrae into the caudal end of their neck. ̽��ֱ��next question to address is why and how sloths managed this shift.”

Xenarthrans also pack some intriguing surprises when it comes to teeth. Anteaters have no teeth. Sloths have just one set of teeth to see them through life – as do all but one genus of armadillo. Armadillos in the genus Dasypus (including seven- and nine-banded species) are unlike other armadillos in having two sets of teeth during their lifespan: deciduous (or ‘milk’) teeth and permanent teeth.

Most mammals, including humans, shed their baby teeth while they are growing. Recent research by Asher and colleagues from the ̽��ֱ�� of La Plata, Argentina, into the dentition of Dasypus revealed that its permanent teeth erupt long after the animal reaches its full size. “ ̽��ֱ��equivalent scenario in a human would be losing your milk teeth, and gaining all your permanent ones, once you were fully grown and well into your 20s,” says Asher.

In this regard, Dasypus is similar to most species of endemic African mammals (Afrotheria) – a group of animals that includes elephants, manatees, tenrecs, golden moles and sengis. “Eruption of adult teeth after the attainment of full body size and sexual maturity is not unheard of in other mammals,” says Asher. “Some people reading this won’t yet have erupted their ‘wisdom’ teeth or third molars. But few groups do this as pervasively as Afrotherians and Dasypus.“

With gratitude to PhD candidate Natalie Lawrence (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) for her input on early western encounters with ‘exotic’ animals.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: Y is for an animal that is an integral part of high-altitude livelihoods throughout the Himalayas, Tibet and Central Asia.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Illustration of an armadillo from Historiae Naturalis Brasilae Tatu by Georg Marcgrave; Skeleton of a giant land sloth (Museum of Zoology); Three-toed sloth - Bradypodidae - Luiaard (Martha de Jong-Lantink); Lateral view of 3D reconstruction of computerized tomography (CT) scans of skeleton in the three-toed sloth Bradypus (Hautier et al).

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge’s connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, X is for Xenarthran. A must-have item for 15th-century collectors of 'curiosities' and a source of fascination for evolutionary biologist Dr Robert Asher.

It is a most powerful animal that lives in the ground, though also in water and soggy places

Georg Marcgrave

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

Yes

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.

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