Giorgio Cornaro and the Cloth of Gold

Struktur und Funktion der genetischen Information in den Plastiden: III. Genetik, Chlorophylle und Photosyntheseverhalten der Plastommutante „Mrs. Pollock‟ und der Genmutante „Cloth of Gold‟ von Pelargonium zonale

It is probable that the Egyptians first drew wire in order to make fine gold thread which they could then weave with other fibres to make ‘cloth of gold’. There is evidence from the paintings in the tombs of Tuthmosis III, c. 1460 BC, and Tutankhamun, c. 1350 BC and from other sites that gold nuggets were hammered to form plate or sheet. From the sheets, long narrow strips or slivers of gold were cut and these were subsequently drawn by pulling them through a hole in a pebble. It is believed that the dies were made by abrading a hole in a hard pebble using a pointed stick, sand and tallow. Thus the geometrical shape of the deformation zone resembled a venturi. To draw the gold slivers through the pebble, the end was pointed by hammering, lubricated with tallow, gripped by the fingers or tongs and pulled. So, having produced wire of uniform diameter and surface finish from fine rectangular sectioned strip, it was but a short step to take to draw finer wire from wire already drawn, thus realising all the advantages that such additional deformation provides.

The Walking Dead in Chaucer's <i>Knight's Tale</i>

Achillea filipendulina `Cloth of Gold', Astilbe arendsii, Campanula carpatica `Blue Clips', Echinacea purpurea `Bravado', Gaillardia grandiflora `Goblin', Lavandula angustifolia `Munstead Dwarf', Oenothera missouriensis, Rudbeckia fulgida `Goldstrum' plugs were stored at 5C for 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 weeks under a 5 μmol· s-1· m-2 PPF. Sample plants were removed and planted in 10 cm pots and placed in a 19C, constant temperature greenhouse under short-day or long-day photoperiods. Long-days were provided with night-break lighting from 10:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. by incandescent lamps. In Achillea, Campanula and Gaillardia, only terminal buds grew in the long-day photoperiod while both terminal and lateral buds grew under short-days. Development of Astilbe, Echinacea, Oenothera, Rudbeckia was minimal under short-days compared to that under long-days. Lavandula in the early treatments remained vegetative, short, and compact under short days, whereas plants elongated and flowered while grown under long days. Longer durations of storage shortened the time from potting to flowering for Lavandula.

It’s an early April morning, and Death Valley has never looked better. El Nino’s battering storms brought mayhem to coastal California, but as they charged inland, a succession of mountain ranges squeezed the wrath out of them, and they had nothing but nourishing showers for the sunken valley on California’s eastern border. Desert sunflower seeds, dormant for decades, have sprouted and blossomed by the million, carpeting the valley floor with a cloth of gold.

Cloth of Gold and Gold Thread: Luxury Imports to England in the Fourteenth Century

Cloth of Gold and Gold Thread: Luxury Imports to England in the Fourteenth Century

In recounting the enthronement of Chinggis Qan (reigned 1206–1227), the historian Hayton (Het’um), a prince of Lesser Armenia long in Mongolian service, says that in those early days they made do with “black felt” because they had no “fairer cloth [drap].” Very soon, however, the Mongols enthusiastically embraced a much fairer cloth of state. Indeed, this textile became closely identified with the Mongols and its fame spread across Eurasia from the Far East to the Far West, where it was known as “Tartar cloth” in the languages of Europe.2 From direct examination of garments designated as panni tartarici in early church inventories, we know that this was a drawloom textile mainly made of gold and silk thread.3 In the Middle East, the same cloth was usually called nasij, a shortened form of the Arabic nasij al-dhahab al-harir, literally “cloth of gold and silk.”4 In the Chinese sources of this period nasij is encountered in the transcription na-shi-shi, which on two occasions the Yuan shi defines as “gold brocade [jinjin].”5

The Dravidian languages, spoken mainly in southern India and south Asia, were identified as a separate language family between 1816 and 1856. Four of the 26 Dravidian languages, namely Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, have long literary traditions, the earliest dating back to the 1st century ce. Currently these four languages have among them over 200 million speakers in south Asia. The languages exhibit prototypical OV (object–verb) properties but relatively free word order, and are rich in nominal and verbal inflection; only Malayalam lacks verb agreement. A typical characteristic of Dravidian, which is also an areal characteristic of south Asian languages, is that experiencers and inalienable possessors are case-marked dative. Another is the serialization of verbs by the use of participles, and the use of light verbs to indicate aspectual meaning such as completion, self- or nonself-benefaction, and reflexivization. Subjects, and arguments in general (e.g., direct and indirect objects), may be nonovert. So is the copula, except in Malayalam. A number of properties of Dravidian are of interest from a universalist perspective, beginning with the observation that not all syntactic categories N, V, A, and P are primitive. Dravidian postpositions are nominal or verbal in origin. A mere 30 Proto-Dravidian roots have been identified as adjectival; the adjectival function is performed by inflected verbs (participles) and nouns. The nominal encoding of experiences (e.g., as fear rather than afraid/afeared) and the absence of the verb have arguably correlate with the appearance of dative case on experiencers. “Possessed” or genitive-marked N may fulfill the adjectival function, as noticed for languages like Ulwa (a less exotic parallel is the English of-possessive construction: circles of light, cloth of gold). More uniquely perhaps, Kannada instantiates dative-marked N as predicative adjectives. A recent argument that Malayalam verbs originate as dative-marked N suggests both that N is the only primitive syntactic category, and the seminal role of the dative case. Other important aspects of Dravidian morphosyntax to receive attention are anaphors and pronouns (not discussed here; see separate article, anaphora in Dravidian), in particular the long-distance anaphor taan and the verbal reflexive morpheme; question (wh-) words and the question/disjunction morphemes, which combine in a semantically transparent way to form quantifier words like someone; the use of reduplication for distributive quantification; and the occurrence of ‘monstrous agreement’ (first-person agreement in clauses embedded under a speech predicate, triggered by matrix third-person antecedents). Traditionally, agreement has been considered the finiteness marker in Dravidian. Modals, and a finite form of negation, also serve to mark finiteness. The nonfinite verbal complement to the finite negative may give the negative clause a tense interpretation. Dravidian thus attests matrix nonfinite verbs in finite clauses, challenging the equation of finiteness with tense. The Dravidian languages are considered wh-in situ languages. However, wh-words in Malayalam appear in a pre-verbal position in the unmarked word order. The apparently rightward movement of some wh-arguments could be explained by assuming a universal VO order, and wh-movement to a preverbal focus phrase. An alternative analysis is that the verb undergoes V-to-C movement.

Cloth of gold and its history

Inasmuch as I was now the second personage in the Kingdom, as far as political power and authority were concerned, much was made of me. My raiment was of silks and velvets and cloth of gold, and by consequence was very showy, also uncomfortable....

Cloth of Gold

The dust-jacket: cloth of gold in the auction room1

Cloth of gold, cloth of silver

Reviewed by: The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience by Sharon Farmer Hilary Maddocks Farmer, Sharon, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience (Middle Ages), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; cloth; pp. 368; 28 illustrations; R.R.P. US $69.95, £60.00; ISBN 9780812248487. In this impressive book, Sharon Farmer demonstrates that a luxury silk industry existed in Paris for around a century, from the 1290s to at least 1397. Medieval Paris was the consumer capital of Europe, renowned for production of quality items including illuminated manuscripts, gold work, tapestries, chests and armour, linen and woollen cloth. This study establishes that the city was also a centre for luxury silk textiles. Although the Paris silk industry never seriously competed with the epicentre of production in northern Italy, Farmer shows that Paris silk was highly prized and distinctive enough to be listed in household accounts and inventories of several European courts. It also provided many Parisians, particularly women, with various levels of employment. Previous research into the Parisian silk industry has been inhibited by the paucity and opacity of documentary evidence as well as lack of material evidence. However, Farmer has extracted much revealing information from the main primary sources including the Paris guild statutes of c. 1266–1365 and the seven extant Paris tax assessments from 1292 to 1313. Her study has been greatly assisted by a database of the tax documents compiled by the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT), which has provided the basis for the tables in the book's extensive appendices. Even though seventy-five per cent of the population [End Page 168] was not wealthy enough to be taxed, and hence does not appear in the assessments, Farmer's prosopographical analysis allows her to make insightful observations about patterns of migration, relative sizes of professional groups, and relative incomes across professions and gender. One of Farmer's themes is migration, and she paints medieval Paris as a city of immigrants attracted to the court, the university, and the specialized luxury industries. Taking a swipe at the modern sentimentalized view that the soul of France lies in a native peasantry descended from Gauls, Romans, and Franks, she finds that immigrants arrived from all over Europe, including the Mediterranean basin. Participants in the silk industry included representatives ('Lombards') from large Italian merchant companies as well as workers from Cyprus, the Levant, and former parts of the Byzantine Empire, some of whom may have been sponsored to the city for their technological and artistic expertise. The best raw silk came from the Caspian Sea region (modern Iran) and the main suppliers were the Italian international merchant companies. No extant sources describe the techniques and organization of the silk crafts in Paris, but Farmer does a remarkable job of extrapolating from available sources. It seems that Parisian weavers created a range of silk items, including narrow wear, diaphanous veils, cendals, taffeta, cloth of gold with metallic thread, and velvet. She suggests that unlike in Lucca and Florence, where mercers owned the fibre through every stage of production, in Paris the mercers sold the thrown silk to dyers and weavers, and then purchased back the completed items, thus minimizing any financial risk. The Parisian silk industry's intersection with gender is another of the book's main themes. Overall, the industry was dominated by women, who comprised as much as eighty per cent of the workers. Perhaps not surprisingly, Farmer finds that the less skilled, lower paid occupations of winding and throwing, requiring inexpensive equipment, were performed mainly by women. Higher status work, such as dyeing and velvet weaving, which required metal vats and expensive, complicated looms as well as demonstrable skill, was the preserve of men. However, compared to other occupations, the Parisian silk industry afforded women extremely high status. Also, encouraged by generous inheritance laws, where widows received half the estate, Parisian silk women sometimes rose to the highest levels: Farmer gives the example of mercer Martine la Thierry, who in 1375–78 sold more than 2,000 francs worth of textiles to the Duke of Anjou. Farmer also examines the...