Whoops. I have had to sort and categorise all my North Rhine research because I finally found a very small but very important stream of information in the form of both artwork and archives. One of the problems with both is being sure that what I’m seeing is indeed from the time.
One archive record I reread used a modern modern translation- both spelling and meaning- and I was about to put it in my stash of modernised records when I saw there was a scan, that while modernised it was not summarised so I was able to find the word in the scan. And yep. Modern translation and spelling but in a really easy to understand way so it means I now have a handful of matching modern records that I can use.
The second stream is potentially a record of four or five noble women that also confirm this. So another dissertation and journal on the way.
But all this tidying made it to my image files and I have now made 228 folders for individual paintings, and that doesn’t count the printed works and images of noble women. But it really has taken 15 years of repeated searches and not just in images and archives. I had to learn the dialect of the time to make sense. Interestingly one of the earliest articles I was sent (not OCR so I had to limit how much I hand typed from the 30 pages) confirms exactly what I have been reading.
But all of this needs to be presented as so many books are out of print, and I have had to back track a single repeated statement. I needed to do that as it’s become fact when it is really not at all.