Paradise Found

This methodological chapter identifies the working vocabulary and chief genres of both textual and visual evidence that contemporaries used to discover and articulate authorial character. The chapter first shows how with the rise of reading for the author key selfhood words —such as ethos persona and character—begin to extend beyond their semantic home in ethics and rhetoric and into literary culture to signify at once the essence of an author’s identity and the performance of a put-on role. The chapter then shows a similar hermeneutic counterpoint at work in the realm of visual character evidence particularly two media that commonly appear in early modern books: the pseudo-fictional author portrait and the writer horoscope. In setting the terms for the case studies that followthese examples together also challenge modern jurisdictional boundaries between the discourses of fact and fiction the verbal and visual arts and most broadly the fields of reception and invention.

Reviewed by: Medieval Clothing and Textiles ed. by Monica L. Wright, Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker Julie Hotchin Wright, Monica L., Robin Netherton, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, eds, Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Volume 15, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2019; hardback; pp. xiii, 195; 36 b/w illustrations, 3 colour plates; R.R.P. US$70.00, £40.00; ISBN 9781783274123. For fifteen years Medieval Clothing and Textiles has provided a forum for interdisciplinary research into ‘the fabric of the medieval world’ (p. xi). The seven articles in this issue exhibit the excellent scholarship for which the series is known. The contributors are concerned with various aspects of the manufacture, materiality, use, and cultural meanings of cloth and clothing. They examine evidence from the early to the late Middle Ages, extending from Scandinavia to southern Europe. This volume marks a transition for the series, with Monica Wright assuming the role as lead editor of this issue while founding editors Robin Netherton and Gale Owen-Crocker step back from steering this influential series. Gale Owen-Crocker, who has been a driving force in textile studies for nearly five decades, opens the volume with a succinct and characteristically perceptive survey of the state of the field. Presenting an overview of textile studies [End Page 256] for researchers new to the field, she considers methodological and interpretive challenges in the analysis of material textile artefacts, textual evidence, and discusses recent theoretically informed approaches such as object biographies. The footnotes are replete with references to databases, repositories, sources, and other research guides, all of which are introduced with informed commentary to orient readers to the key resources for medieval textile studies. Researchers new to the field will find much of value here, and the article is ideally suited to teaching. Two articles engage with questions about the materiality of textiles and how it influences the cultural meanings of cloth and clothing. Working from the critical insight that material resonances matter for metaphor, Maren Clegg Hyer examines the interplay between interlace designs in Anglo-Saxon textiles and literature as expressed in the metaphor of ‘wordweaving’. Her analysis of Latin and vernacular poetry demonstrates how authors drew on the familiar, recognizable patterns of textile and manuscript interlace design to create ‘experientially resonant’ poetic metaphors particular to their historical place and context. In the other article to examine textile artefacts, Tina Anderlini undertakes a comprehensive analysis of medallion silks. Drawing on surviving fragments, textual, visual, and material evidence, she demonstrates the importance of these luxury fabrics for display in religious settings. She also shows how these textiles influenced other aspects of material culture, examining wall painting, sculpture, and mosaics to demonstrate how the roundel design of these silks served as a ‘source of inspiration for other arts and a strong sign of sanctity, honour, power, and wealth’ (p. 136). An unusual depiction of weaving cloth is the focus of Joanne W. Anderson’s study of a painted Annunciation scene in a church in South Tyrol. Focusing on the depictions of the Virgin weaving and an unfinished heraldic textile on her loom, Anderson deftly contextualizes the imagery to show how it expresses the devotional and social identities of the patrons. She concludes that material processes of cloth production also serve as a metaphor for creation, ‘of both things and life in the making’ (p. 159). A theme taken up by several contributors is how clothing signifies identity, denotes personal change, and mediates social relations. Through an intertextual analysis of the depiction of attire and changes of dress in The Niebelungenlied and the Völsunga Saga, Elizabeth M. Swedo argues that clothing was a ‘versatile and powerful signifier’ (p. 54). She distinguishes aesthetic preferences for types of clothing in the two traditions, arguing that ‘fictive clothing’, especially that which served as the vehicle for narrative action, needed to resonate with the cultural expectations and social experience of the audience. The material and cultural importance of cloth and clothing in elite households is the subject of Hugh Thomas’s finely grained study of the use of textiles at the court of John I of England. Drawing on household accounts such as close rolls, this study models approaches to...

Misinformation is now a major problem due to its poten-tial high risks to our core democratic and societal values and orders. Out-of-context misinformation is one of the easiest and effective ways used by adversaries to spread vi-ral false stories. In this threat, a real image is re-purposed to support other narratives by misrepresenting its context and/or elements. The internet is being used as the go-to way to verify information using different sources and modali-ties. Our goal is an inspectable method that automates this time-consuming and reasoning-intensive process by fact-checking the image-caption pairing using Web evidence. To integrate evidence and cues from both modalities, we intro-duce the concept of ‘multi-modal cycle-consistency check’ starting from the image/caption, we gather tex-tual/visual evidence, which will be compared against the other paired caption/image, respectively. Moreover, we propose a novel architecture, Consistency-Checking Network (CCN), that mimics the layered human reasoning across the same and different modalities: the caption vs. textual evidence, the image vs. visual evidence, and the image vs. caption. Our work offers the first step and bench-mark for open-domain, content-based, multi-modal fact-checking, and significantly outperforms previous baselines that did not leverage external evidence <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> For code, checkpoints, and dataset, check: https://s-abdelnabi.github.io/OoC-multi-modal-fc/.

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England

Gendered Expressions of Labor:The Case of Sümerbank Defterdar Textile Factory (Feshane) Zehra Betül Atasoy (bio) KEYWORDS gender, labor, Istanbul, Sümerbank, Feshane Industrial workplace and wage labor have lost their appeal for labor historians. One of the reasons claimed for the stagnation in the field of Republican labor history is the insufficiency of archival sources. Nevertheless, the use of alternative evidence beyond standard archival records has been on the agenda in recent years.1 I hope to contribute to the labor historiography of the Turkish Republic from a different perspective, by employing a great deal of visual evidence alongside more common textual documentation. My main objective is to introduce nuances about labor conditions that are not always traceable through textual evidence. I also emphasize the possibility of writing a more gender-inclusive history of labor in the Republican context by examining the issues of safety, health, hierarchy, and worker's rights in the case of the Sümerbank Defterdar Textile Factory (also known as Feshane), where women had a high rate of employment compared to other industrial establishments. Feshane, established in 1833 in Eyüp, was one of the factories that was taken over by the new state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In 1937, it was handed over to Sümerbank, a state enterprise, which was assigned to administer industrialization and to oversee problems in the labor force. It remains a challenge to decipher in which departments women were employed [End Page 435] in Feshane using official government documents. The Sümerbank inspection reports (Sümerbank Murakabe Raporları) include statistics and comments on the work conditions and the body of laborers, but they are either ambiguous or gender blind. However, using overlooked sources provides insights about where female workers were present and what types of tasks they performed. For example, the photographs in the Taha Toros Archive offer an invaluable opportunity to visualize everyday life on the scale of the individual building. In general, the photographs reveal details of the various stages of production and departments in which women were employed, the physical aspects of the spaces, and the hierarchy of work on the shop floor.2 They do not display women individually but instead show them in larger spaces: both performing their tasks and in relation to one another and their male coworkers. Spatial Organization and Technology According to reports prepared in the early 1940s by the Sümerbank inspectors, the complex was marked by deficiencies in hygiene, spatial organization, and technology. The Defterdar Textile Factory was found to be unhygienic.3 It also "lacked order and discipline."4 Referring to all the industrial facilities within Sümerbank, the reports stated that improving the lighting systems could prevent work-related accidents, especially during the night shifts and in the narrow and compact workshop floors with insufficient daylight.5 An additional concern of the examiners was the lack of proper heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. It should be noted that spatial organization and technology not only affected female workers but also their fellow male laborers. Although the reports did not specifically indicate the conditions of each department in the factory, it can be argued that the photographs are in line with the inspectors' observations. Based on the visual evidence, women were primarily employed in wet processing in the spinning department. After the dirty raw wool was separated according to type and quality, it was washed, [End Page 436] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Wool fleece washing unit (yapağı yıkama dairesi ve süzgeçler). Image courtesy of Taha Toros Archive, Marmara University, 001562384008. dyed, dried, and sent to the clean raw wool storage.6 As seen in a photograph of the wool fleece washing department, women operated the fleece opener and washed the dirty wool (Fig. 1). Here, apart from a few suspended lamps from the ceiling, light was provided only through the openings on the roof. The next stage of wet processing was dyeing. Although from photographs the dyehouse (Fig. 2) seems more spacious than the wool fleece washing department, one can notice the lack of interior organization. In the forefront, one unit of processed material, part...

Reviewed by: Manuscripts, Market, and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany Dan Mills Diane E. Booton, Manuscripts, Market, and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate 2010) 469 pp., ill. In Manuscripts, Market, and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany, Diane Booton attempts to trace the development of book creation from late medieval manuscript production to early printing in the late fourteenth century through a focus on case studies of texts and bookmakers in Brittany. This volume demonstrates an impressive array of research and comes with numerous illustrations and graphics, and it also has a significant amount of statistical and technical data. But at a relatively brief length of just over two hundred pages, the body of this volume may have attempted to do too much in too little space and could have benefited from a more focused thesis and a more cohesive argument. As she mentions in the introduction, Booton focuses the first half of her monograph on the “production and commerce of manuscripts and printed books” (3) through the aspects of parchment creation, patronage for bookmakers, identification of manuscript makers, and identification of manuscripts in the context of Brittany (12). As she notes early in chapter 1, this seems like a considerable amount of ground to cover, and indeed as the chapter progresses Booton briefly surveys these topics all the while including large amounts of historical information that frequently seem to derail the ostensible focus of the chapter and larger project of the book. Chapter 1 has three tables of very specific and technical information and a 3-page list of manuscripts with bibliographic descriptions. As is the case with the rest of the volume, chapter 1 reads more like a reference work and less like an opening chapter of a critical argument. In chapter 2, “The Illuminated Page,” Booton focuses her attention on “an examination of certain codicological, iconographic, and stylistic features” (39), focusing primarily on works by the Orleans Master. This chapter includes 29 black and white images of beautiful manuscript pages but opens with a list of eight manuscripts with bibliographical and historical descriptions. Well into the chapter Booton gets closer to an argument when she writes that “manuscripts demonstrate the business connections in the book trade that crossed political boundaries,” but this argument does not see full development in the few remaining pages of this chapter. While the first two chapters are packed with technical data bordering on the esoteric, chapters 3 and 4 begin to solidify a concrete direction for the volume. In chapter 3: “Printing and the Market,” Booton turns to a discussion of early printing in late fifteenth-century Brittany and successfully demonstrates the [End Page 166] “critical role of book contractors and publishers, who functioned as business intermediaries between a prospective buyer and printer, or printer and bookseller” (99). Nevertheless, this is undermined by the acknowledgement that printing in Brittany during this period was “modest in output” (98), which begs the question of whether a chapter on such output can add anything to a study of print culture. In chapter 4: “Ducal Patronage and Ownership,” Booton argues that “acquisitions, sources, and textual and visual evidence in the books and manuscripts help to expand our picture of social constraints, religious attitudes, and cultural mores in the late medieval duchy of Brittany” (126). This chapter gets closer to making a clear contribution based on the enormous amount of research reflected in this volume. Booton betrays one of the potential issues with this volume in chapter 5: “Breton Book Collectors,” when she writes that “Four manuscript copies of the popular and widely read romance, Le Roman de la rose, written by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun can be identified with their former owners” (202). As the subject matter of this volume is particularly specialized it is strange that Booton would not assume the reader would know the names of the authors of one of the most famous medieval romances. In addition, Booton mentions this text earlier in the volume but does not include the authors’ names until this comment in the final chapter. The question of audience rings clear here, and the volume...

This article explores encounters between wild maritime animals and humans on Finnish deep-sea sailing ships in the early twentieth century. At that time, sailing ships were disappearing from the world’s oceans, and the deep-sea sailors of the 1930s romanticised themselves as representing the last wild and free adventurers in the world. Maritime animals played a central role in this romanticisation, and the encounters with them therefore came to be highly ritualised. Drawing on sailmaker Winifred Lloyd’s (1897–1940) diaries and other maritime accounts of that time which contain rich textual and visual evidence, this article argues that the albatross embodied the glamour of maritime adventures, the heroic meeting between sailors and the ocean, and the sailing ship as a space of masculine homosociality and freedom. As such, they became symbols of the vanishing maritime life and community, while the bodies of albatrosses, caught and often killed by the sailors, bear witness also to the fact that the human exploitation of nature is an important part of maritime history.

This chapter offers a history of the Akkadian kings and a survey of the cultural memory traditions that sustained their memory in Mesopotamia, including textual, material, and visual evidence. Without posthumous images of the Akkadians, one must look for visual allusions to the Akkadian past in post-Akkadian images. A theoretical and methodological framework for the study of the visual legacy of Akkadian kingship emerges from considerations of Oppenheim’s “stream of tradition,” the mechanics of visual traditions, interpictoriality and intervisuality, and the temporality of images (with reference to Nagel and Wood’s substitutional images and Warburg’s visual formulas). The Sun-God Tablet of Nabu-apla-iddina and representations of Neo-Assyrian kings illustrate the connections between visual traditions, authority, and time in Mesopotamia.

Denounced by neighbors and scrutinized by demonologists, the early modern French witch also confessed, self-identified as a witch and as the author of horrific deeds. What led her to this point? Despair, solitude, perhaps even physical pain, but most decisively, demonology&amp;apos;s two-pronged prosecutorial and truth-seeking confessional apparatus. This book examines the systematic and well-oiled machinery that served to extract, interpret, and disseminate witches&amp;apos; confessions in early modern France. For the demonologist, confession was the only way to find out the truth about the clandestine activities of witches. For the witch, however, trial confessions opened new horizons of selfhood. In this book, Virginia Krause unravels the threads that wove together the demonologist&amp;apos;s will to know and the witch&amp;apos;s subjectivity. By examining textual and visual evidence, Krause shows how confession not only generated demonological theory but also brought forth a specific kind of self, which we now recognize as the modern subject.

Guest Editorial: Environmental Multimedia Retrieval

Artists’ depictions of comets provide the only visual evidence of historical comets, most notably of Halley’s Comet. In this paper we discuss the visual evidence of comet P/Halley at several passages through that of 1301 and compare it with descriptions and modern images. Since it was first recognized that Giotto di Bondone painted a comet in place of the Star of Bethlehem and suggested that this was a portrait of the 1301 apparition of comet Halley (Olson, 1979), a great deal of new information has come to light. We present a synopsis of the textual, visual, and astronomical evidence to support the theory that when Giotto painted his comet in the Scrovegni Chapel he was reflecting his viewing of Comet Halley in 1301.

NB: Artiklen er på dansk, kun resuméet er på engelsk. Patrick Kragelund: Rostgaard, Fabretti and the Dal Pozzo “Paper Museum”. The article discusses a series of late seventeenth century squeezes of Greek and Roman inscriptions in the Manuscript Department of the Danish Royal Library. The squeezes are relevant for understanding two of the period’s most ambitious antiquarian and scientific Roman projects, those of Rafaello Fabretti (1619-1700) and the brothers Cas­siano (1588-1657) and Carlo Dal Pozzo (1606-89). Both projects were based in Rome of the High Baroque and both focus on the visual, the former as a means of recon­structing the texts of ancient inscriptions, the latter to assemble visual evidence for the renowned Dal Pozzo “Paper Museum” (Musevm Chartacevm) ultimately aimed at illustrating all the categories of objects constituting the visible world. The evidence consisting of 29 sheets was acquired in Rome in 1699 by the Dan­ish scholar Frederik Rostgaard (1671-1745). Summarizing the arguments for reject­ing the old idea of Rostgaard having manufactured the squeezes himself, the article briefly outlines the reasons for accepting their intimate links with the grand project of Fabretti, showing how the Rostgaard material in fact offers hitherto discarded new evidence for the reading of ten ancient inscriptions. However, the article’s main focus is on discussing what the material shows about the project of Fabretti and his in many respects innovative methods in using standardised, mechanical means for assembling textual and visual evidence. The second section discusses some hitherto discarded or misapprehended links between the projects of Fabretti and that of the Dal Pozzo brothers. Two Dal Pozzo drawings (ill. 5-6), now in the British Museum, are shown to be copies of an inscrip­tion (now in Urbino, CIG 6238 = IGUR 1228) and a squeeze (Rostgaard no. 18 = ill. 7) in what was then Fabretti’s collection; a third and closely related Dal Pozzo draw­ing (ill. 8), also in the British Museum, copies a further inscription (CIL 6.3424) that was detected and – on the basis of a squeeze – edited by Fabretti; rather than on the original inscription, the said Dal Pozzo drawing may well be based upon Fabretti’s squeeze. In any case, the recovery of these inscriptions is datable to 1684 and 1687, thus in­cidentally raising questions about the overall validity of the commonly accepted chro­nology for the ordering of this section of the Dal Pozzo collections. Attempts to date the acquisition of large numbers of drawings to before and after 1682seem contra­dicted by this new evidence. Thus the three Dal Pozzo drawings discussed above all seem datable, not to before 1682, but to between 1687-89, the latter being the year in which the death of Carlo Dal Pozzo put an end to the great project.

The stereotypical image of the drunken Amerindian in Mexico dates back to the decades following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec state in 1521, and is present in New-Spanish (colonial Mexican) visual culture that was jointly produced by native artists and Spanish friars of the sixteenth century. Along with Spanish religious and historical chronicles of the period, and official colonial documents, these early pictorial works comprise a larger body of historical works that construct the colonial image of the drunken Amerindian. This essay examines the earliest textual and visual evidence that documents drunkenness among New Spain’s native population, and situates these sources in a colonial context in which culturally distinct methods of recording knowledge — native-produced, pictographic images and Spanish alphabetic inscriptions — were combined for Spanish friars and colonial officials to understand the customs and histories of New Spain’s indigenous groups. In particular, this essay critically analyzes the unions and disjunctions between early colonial native manuscript images of intoxication and the Spanish inscriptions that commented on them. It argues that the stereotypical image of the drunken native in New Spain’s early visual record was due not only to the evangelical goals of Spanish friars and the propensity of colonialism to render its subjects as unruly, but also to the complex relationship between European alphabetic text and native-made images, and partial correlations between elite indigenous and Euro-Christian ideologies.

Investigating interactions between animals and humans has become increasingly prominent in the study of the ancient Greek world. How did the Greeks react to non-indigenous species of birds and adapt these into their local environments? As a contribution to this subject, this paper focusses on a series of related avian case studies: domestic fowl ( Gallus gallus), peacocks ( Pavo cristatus), and pheasants ( Phasianus colchicus). Using key pieces of textual and visual evidence, we not only investigate how these birds—all of which are part of the family Phasianidae—became acclimated to Greece but also draw significant conclusions about their reception in Greek society. We argue that these three species remained grouped together in Greek imagination and that their distinctiveness and foreignness were essential characteristics of their cultural reception despite varying degrees of integration (e.g., successful breeding) and utility.

From a diachronic perspective, and considering both textual and visual evidence, this article traces the relic cult of SS Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom. It focuses on two historical contexts, hitherto not compared with each other, in which both the relics and the architectural frame in which they were placed acquired significant additional meaning and value: tenth-century Constantinople and sixteenth- century Rome. I will show how Emperor Constantine VII, in the Holy Apostles, and Pope Gregory XIII, in St. Peter’s, used the same relics as an instrument in a process of meaning-making, thereby asserting their own authority and prestige.