Last November I enjoyed several weeks devouring books at the National Art Library and the British Library, but then I stopped going out, and I stopped posting. Why the quiet? I was crunching data. (And Christmas happened, with three straight weeks of visiting grandparents, during which time everyone in my family got sick with annoying upper respiratory afflictions; we’re all better now.)
I’ve been thinking recently about what qualifies me to do embark on this research project, and I think it might be simply my skill at doing research and managing data. I’m certainly not trained or exceptionally talented as a costume designer, seamstress/tailor, photographer, cultural historian or art historian. I’m not even particularly skilled at web design, for sharing my findings online. The only time my biology background has been of even the remotest use is when I noticed someone incorrectly capitalizing the scientific names of animals used as fur in the sixteenth centuries. As anyone familiar with my penchant for volunteering can testify, I can organize, I can collect data, and I can process that data to get things done. So I suppose it is only natural that I’ve attacked this church monument photographing project not by driving through the countryside with a camera, but with spreadsheets and maps.
The libraries provided me with the software I used to create my starting database of monuments and brasses. I set up a spreadsheet and started sorting, deleting, organizing, classifying. I created Pinterest boards for all the funerary monument and brass images I could find online, so that I could better determine which churches were most worth visiting. Using this data, I rated the monuments and made an initial classification of the clothing styles represented on each.
Then I tracked down church data. Websites, contact info, open hours or keyholder information (when available), addresses (mostly “Church Street, name of town” although often the name of the town is somewhat questionable, as little hamlets are for postcode purposes classified as belonging to larger nearby towns. I honestly have no idea how mail carriers keep from going nuts.) and — most challenging of all, exact latitude and longitude. I did this step twice, once quickly finding a lat/long for each town, and then this past week I spent two days painstakingly using Google Maps to find the latitude and longitude that would place a little arrow right on top of the church I wanted to visit. Sometimes this was easy, because the church had already been officially added to Google Maps. Sometimes this involved finding the little town and then skimming the satellite view until I located what was most likely the church (I looked for the regular pattern of small shadows that indicated a graveyard) and going to streetview to verify that I was indeed looking at a church, not a large community hall. You would think that steeples and bell towers would be good clues, but they don’t show up well in satellite view, and only a few of the churches I hunted were large enough to have the cross-shaped transept.
I recruited my wonderful and patient husband to figure out how to create a custom Google Map (and to help me debug it every time I made changes and broke it), and this is my result: Map of Monumental Effigies of Women from between 1475 and 1550, rated by color (green is best quality, light blue second best, dark blue third, and very worn/poor quality effigies are excluded). To me this map is beautiful, useful, crammed with data. But when I think of how much time and effort this map took to create, or at least the data to be collected, it seems like a pitiful result. So I wouldn’t write another blog post until I’d gotten a little more done.
After all the work I’d put into making that map, I thought I should finally write up more clearly what I’m trying to research, where and how I’m looking for data, and what I’ve learned so far. This meant many hours spent frowning over my website, trying to write summaries about subjects in which I have no expertise, such as illumination and portraiture and church monuments. It meant lots of searching my head for sources, because I took only fair notes last fall during my library days, and none of them had yet been transcribed. It was, as I hoped it would be, motivation to better document what I’ve learned so far and how I know what I know.
Going through my library notes reminded me of books I want to purchase, so I placed a couple orders at AbeBooks.co.uk. Finally, I found something that costs LESS in the UK than it does in the States — niche books about English art and costume history that were published in the UK! Huzzah! This makes me want to find used bookstores and go browsing for more…or go to the library and better ascertain which tempting titles are truly worthy of purchase. I need to update my LibraryThing catalog…if I buy books too quickly, this might be useful for me to be able to check when I’m out at a store so that I can remember what I’ve found so far.
But this is somewhat of a distraction: the most important thing for me to do, now that I have a working map, is to figure out where I’m going to go look for monuments, and then do it. I’ve already started just a little bit.