The Frock Chick

My book on the last art form I desperately needed arrived yesterday and as per usual I have a much richer curation because of my focus. But I also am itching to actually work on my Anne of Cleves gown. I mean all of my research is to put her frocks in context so it’s really obvious that would happen.

I’m still feeling pulled between the extremely tidied art and the evidence in extant garments and the manuals.

The manuals and the extant items match so very well though so I have to work from there. The artwork though match across different artists and countries. So I also have to take that on.

I might have to let everything that is percolating in my brain from the month long dedicated efforts to organise my written evidence. That too matches incredibly well across countries.

My next step is to figure out how the heck to sync my files across my devices and storage. And then eventually to allow me to batch edit/add to my websites. I know what I need to do because I’ve done it before. I’m just so tired doing all the “back office” stuff to create content. There are so many options now that didn’t exist for the first mumble-ty years of self hosting. I can’t port my older work over though due to the code just being so incompatible.

I managed to fix the OCR issues of my scanning program and just managed to brute transcribe and translate the most important pages and yes! Some new and really exciting information but also support for what I have found in terms of gaps and assumptions.

It’s so important when you are working in a niche field to be able to include the work of scholars who came before you because it gives weight to your interpretations and means those scholars are credited.

In this case the book is out of print and only available in a few libraries and of course is in German. So it makes it even more important to be able to link to this work, as the author used the same older sources as me, and a few more and cautions the interpretations of some of them. And some of the questions I had were directly linked to those interpretations. They also tended to gloss over the role of women.

So now I have a bit of confirmation as to a couple of reasons I’m just not finding the work I need.

By coincidence someone shared an extant item and an interpretation of it and while it’s too early for direct evidence, it’s also evidence of a craft that I can find visual evidence of. Oh, and I just realised I might also have spotted some evidence of the kind of decoration used. Okay I need to write this down in my notebook to make sure I don’t forget.

So much progress in short bursts, fly by post as I’d like to get one of my pearled appliques stitched down as it’s incredibly difficult getting a needle through the layers. But yes that is still progress.

I just made my way through the book and wow. I need to create a table but I think there is easily 1000 women named. Which is extraordinary. I needed to erase the pencil marks of the previous owner, who probably was the first owner, and now I’m wondering what they were working on and if I might be able to find their work by searching for the sentences they must have quoted from.

I still need to get through my timeline of images, I really disagree with some of the dates given but I might also need to organise by decade as I think some of that is down to some dates being specific to a year, some as before a date some as after a date but when you organise files alphabetically that pushes say 1500s after 1509.

There is so much to do. I wish I could just keep my timeline as it is but I’m trying to include all the important information too, and that means probably having to create a CVS file to be able to mass import the probably 200 posts I need to write up to include each figure.

So time to make a pot of tea, and also rest. I’ve only been up 3 hours but I had a shower which in this heat dings all the fun dysautonomia symptoms that have creeped up on me the last few years.

Fun fact I didn’t know Rheumatoid Arthritis can be a cause, but now that I know I feel a bit better. Well, it’s not great, but at least I can point to that seeing as there is a tendency to think if you have fibro you bring these things on yourself. Nope.

Just reading about this now and I really need to talk to my GP because if you add in all the ways the nervous system (CNS and ANS) is altered by RA it really is the simplest answer to supposedly complicated symptoms. I even tested an AI chatbot with my complex symptoms and it failed. It shouldn’t have because even in 1999 these alterations were known.

Once upon a time I decided to head into the relatively uncharted territory of North Rhine dress of the 16thC. Relatively because there are less than a handful of quality resources but all of them predate digitisation. I thought I might find some better quality images from two of these but would be better able to find the archives in the more text based works.

It’s a bit of a reversal of fortunes. There are vastly more images than I can handle because digitisation of microfilm has wound up very cheap and relatively easy whereas manuscripts in archives have been harder to get hold of.

I’ve just managed to sort of organise a couple of hundred images of either better quality than I have or of entirely new to the digitised sphere portraits. They all support my thesis about whether some are more or less likely to be by Bruyn and his workshop, but each one is so exciting. One group includes gold on the main gown which is just so very rare and a detail that is guaranteed to expose sumptuary laws and thus help identify sitters.

My book about trades is on par for excitement except I have to figure out how to scan the most important pages for me. OCR is great unless you have it in operation on pages with columns, over two pages, or upside down pages. I’m almost at the point of allowing pages to fall out of my books so I can put them all through the automated scanner. Almost. For books that have fallen apart there is the concern that the paper won’t go through in one piece. The paper is a bit fragile due to age.

One of them has already been digitised but not available as a digital file. You can search the contents.

My Achilles injuries have been so awful though. It’s not just pain, pain is my default, it’s the danger of causing damage. And not just once but with every step. This entire post is a reflection of how I set difficult challenges for myself. Would I really be scared if this was just difficult? No. That’s not who I am. I’m not sure who could possibly look at any one research topic or costume and think I’m just lazy and unwilling. No. I have to avoid actual limits not because of the amount of work involved but by the harms I face at those limits.

Suddenly you find ALL THE THINGS! Finally finding people interested in the 16thC even if it’s only the first decade. A portrait that’s disappeared (sold at auction but I can’t find the catalogue) but includes completely new clothing information for children, a book on all the pieces at a Cathedral, a dissertation about the Cleves-England marriage that builds in a totally different direction that other authors that rely on the same resources he used but matches the day by day details in L&P, stained glass window book.

Seriously, just so very cool. I need to add some of the images to my timeline ASAP as the painting with new clothing information? Includes multiple depictions of the same pattern of goldwork on the kopfbedeckung in two, maybe three, other paintings. I think that might mean they are a specific pattern to a specific group of workers because I haven’t seen this kind of decoration elsewhere.

How do people around you treat you when normal communication isn’t possible? I’ve been lucky. At my last physio appointment I felt myself wind down, I was half way through a sentence and fibro just slammed down the gates to speaking.

That really is what it feels like. A shuttering of voice, a shuttering or words. My hands are mulch so I didn’t even have the opportunity to write what I needed down. I don’t know if I could.

And I’m still not even able to express what kind of pain I was in. Which probably means it was deep in my muscles though still probably the myofascia.

I wanted to cry, but there was nothing unusual in input vs pain.

I just shut down.

It scares me because this is going to happen more frequently as pain care is eroded ever more.

But I’m me. I’m here. If I shut down precisely because therapeutic treatments trigger a deep pain response that bypasses acute pain messaging? I’ll make some physical and digital cards going forward.

A book (another dissertation actually) arrived today and it’s exactly what I need. It’s all working towards what the heck we should call what Anne of Cleves wears; Kopfbedeckung actually I think is the safest bet in general because there are about five layers of distinct pieces.

I got myself extremely lost in the weeds following the etymology within and outside the North Rhine, past and present, hoping for a revelation in word form, variation, and use to hopefully explain the properties captured in art.

So a quick thought experiment for how hard this is. If I was to say I want to draw a bonnet, what do you imagine I mean? Over time, just in English, there are many forms, many materials, many functions.

So that’s the first issue.

Add to that I’m using 19thC historians who have an idea of what a bonnet is to them, writing about bonnets as they appear in documents of a previous century.

Did they even know that form didn’t just change with fashion, the entire meaning can be lost between generations.

Anyway, at least one dictionary was up front about this, which makes me happier, especially as they included other terms also used at the same time with a degree of overlap. And I suspect part of what’s going on is the exceptionalism you find in Cologne of the 16thC. A degree of self determination.

The records I have for after 1550 in JKB rely on French terms, some by way of Dutch. And as the fashion of the court changed with the influence of Maria Hapsburg, it’s not terribly useful for the earlier fashions. Finally as there are few digitised and transcribed documents I have to rely on modern or more widely known terms if I’m lucky and there is a summary, somewhere.

I’m on day five of the total B cell depletion and I didn’t realise just how bad my pain was. I’m still careful but this is also going to, hopefully, allow my Achilles tendons to repair. Which will allow me to rehabilitate from this prolonged inability to walk safely. In tandem with my solution to my in ability to access files due to OS issues, and the conflict with my CMS and “vital” plugins, and I can finally make some real progress.

It meant I was able to find the particular folk dress headgear I lost. It’s not the solution to the (Not A) Sticklechen issue but it’s another engineering issue solved in the embroidery pattern.

So today I managed to access some articles in Gale that mention Anne of Cleves. I’m flagging a bit now, but this is progress. I can now rest and not spend my time stressing about the time I’m wasting. That time is really health that I’m wasting, then trying to recover that health. But what a breakthrough in a matter of days. I wish we could move to a more frequent cycle, but I also have to have some extra tests this time because my immunoglobulins have been steadily decreasing.

I brought my work with me to hospital, but I forgot just how much it takes out of me, add in I was feeling pretty sad, and I managed a whopping 5 pages of double spaced A5 paper. About sleeves. But it was still useful, I’ve got a good handle on those sleeves. Skirts have been given a great boost, they also support my own advice I’ve shared regarding circle skirts for years- “forget Pi, this isn’t paper.” So that’s cool.

My North Rhine research pops in here too. It’s quite hard to find the records I need but it’s the same issue as always, but I have some timeframes for apprentices. Some of these need a much more careful translation than I did because some writers just use apprentice, some journeyman. Different crafts required different lengths of training and it might not be as expected.

For months now, possibly a year, I’ve been blocked from real research and writing progress due to an issue with the thumbnails of my folders of research failing to be created. I was able to only get around this by force quitting the process involved. But then only getting a few files to load and then nothing. Turns out a lot of us have had this problem but no solution actually seemed to work. Some people had malware, some corrupted media files. Then I found someone who solved their own issue.

They had a system file try to tell the OS there was a file on the desktop that wasn’t there. They were told to not delete the system file, but also that it would be recreated on start up if they did. The file is apparently used by the OS what folder options to use- icons, thumbnails, columns etc.

So I turned on “view hidden files” found the same system file , I opened it in notepad and yep. I saw a file name for something that hadn’t been in that folder ever as far as I know. Probably once in a transfer from one drive to another.

So I quickly did a search for the files on my research drive and my “user” folders, deleted every single instance in dozens, but not all, folders then reset folder options, and restarted and wow.

Not only do thumbnails load instantaneously in folders but in searches.

It’s so exciting.

And a massive relief.

But that a crappy little unneeded file caused so much delay and extra work and set back my health hugely. It’s taken time away from everything good in my life because it really needed fixing but no one is willing to say that this is a known issue.