Category: Research

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.

For two weeks I have inched my way through thousands of data points, trying to make sense of where I will travel to look for costume information. Late this week I hit my stride, and data editing took over my brain. I couldn’t walk past the computer without wanting to work. I put off eating, wanting to get just that little bit more accomplished, to run one more search, and oh maybe I wasn’t THAT hungry…. I displayed a similar disregard for the concept of a “sane bedtime.”

My goal is to recreate women’s costume between the time at which the English gable hood became fashionable (probably the late 1490s, when Elizabeth of York was queen) and the time when nobles began flipping up the lappets, like the women here. I want costume during the reign of Henry VII, not his son Henry VIII. No matter how often people refer to Henry VIII’s reign as “early Tudor,” his dad did some fantastic work stabilizing the English monarchy for 25 years before the young, unprepared king took the throne in 1509. Not many costumers try to research Henry VII’s reign, because there aren’t many portraits painted during this time. Holbein didn’t show up in England until 1526 to paint Henry VIII’s queens and leading nobles. There was almost no illumination happening in England in 1500, only a handful of books being published with woodcuts, and few people commissioning busts as artwork for display in the home. To find images of English people wearing typical English costume in 1500, I have to look at what remains: funerary monuments.

To find which monuments I want to see and where they are, I started with the output of a program that catalogs every feature described in the Pevsner’s Architectural Guides. It would only allow me to save 100 or fewer results in each .csv file, so although I could use the software at the British Library instead of buying it, I had 63 files to combine before I started sorting. Copy, paste, copy, paste, etc.

Once I had a spreadsheet with tabs for the different types of queries I had run (15th century and 16th century lists of brasses, monuments, church windows, church wall paintings, and church woodwork), I had to trim the entries I didn’t need. If the date of death was before 1475 or after 1550, I cut it. I have to look well outside my target years because monuments are not always made soon after death, but many monuments are made within the donor’s lifetime, especially if a spouse died. I also think that accurately recreating the hood circa 1500 will require me to know well what type of hat it evolved from, and what it evolved into. I have no interest in clerical costume, so I deleted priests and bishops (how very Henry VIII of me, I thought). Men whose monuments did not include a wife also got axed. I found that the glass, woodwork, and painted walls did not have subjects of use to me — I want images of the rich nobles who were funding the churches, not allegorical scenes, animals or inscriptions.

Then I started searching for images of the carved stone monuments. I am most interested in seeing these, as effigies are the most realistic art I can find. The monumental brasses of the time are not only two dimensional and smaller than life size, but the art on them is simplistic with inaccurate human proportions and very little perspective to the line drawings. They not only ARE flat, they LOOK flat. Although the brasses are what I knew best from my research time in the UNC Art library (there are far more good books about brasses than about memorial sculptures) they are not the ideal resource for recreating three dimensional clothing and accessories.

Oh Google image search, how I love thee. Many of the monuments on my list do not have effigies, and some of the effigies are so badly weathered or defaced as to be impossible to interpret. I can only judge the quality of a monument, and decide how hard to work to see it, if I know what costume details I might be able to glean from it. I also finally found a use for my Pinterest account — when I do image searches and find effigies or brasses, I save them there.

Once I had images, I began sort the monuments and brasses into four costume types: 1 is solidly 15th century dress (a Burgundian gown or a sideless surcoat, headgear is not similar to gable hood, but one of the other crazy styles). 2 is transitional dress (between Burgundian and Henrican) without a gable hood, but often with a hat that features a wide band on the front similar to the lappets on the gable hood. 3 is transitional dress with a gable hood that hangs down in front. 4 is anything later, more Henry VIII in style, including large sleeves, a gable hood with lappets flipped up, or a French hood.

I am most of the way through my first attempt to find the monuments, with over 100 images found. Those I cannot find, I will look up in the printed copies of the Pevsner Guides (conveniently located in my local library, a 10 minute walk away). I have looked up a few of the hard-to-locate monuments in the books and found sometimes an alternate spelling of the name, a revised date of death, or a more complete description of the monument which helped me locate an image. I also plan to search for images of brasses, but if I don’t find them easily, I don’t plan to scour the internet for photos — brasses just don’t attract as much attention as monuments, so fewer of them are online.

Once I rate the monuments according to how useful they will be for my research, I plan to make a map and start planning church-combing adventures. I’ll have to figure out which churches are locked and which require keys, and whether any have restrictions about photographing or making brass rubbings. It wouldn’t hurt me to learn a little bit more about making good digital photographs in low light, and I need to buy paper and wax for brass rubbing. I’ll need to read up on each church, getting as many clues as possible about where to look for the brasses, which are sometimes on walls behind furniture or on the floor under a rug. I have a lot to learn. I’m thrilled to be making progress.