Getting Down to Serious Research

I haven’t been ignoring my blog, I just keep composing in my mind while away from the computer, and no one has yet invented a method for me to transfer the results onto the screen.

I’ve been lurking in libraries and trolling online catalogs. Last week I spent two days at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum. That museum is big, and confusing, and pieced together like a multi-story crazy quilt. I got lost and had to ask for directions four times just to find the library, and then got lost trying to find the cloakroom to check my bag, and then got turned all around trying to find the restroom. At least when you get lost at the V&A, there are interesting things to see. Distracting exhibits on silver, stained glass, jewelry, Buddhist sculpture, ballgowns, 20th century art…so I even enjoyed getting lost. And once I figure out a route once, I’m good with directions and usually get it right when I retrace it.

The staff at the V&A were quite helpful and the computer system is easy to work with. I went to the prints and drawings library (totally different part of the museum; more getting lost) and the librarian seemed genuinely remorseful that he couldn’t produce some tidbit of art that would inform my research. I thanked him and told him that it was OK, finding nothing still was a data point for me, since it meant I had an adequate grasp of what images might be available.

This past weekend I grappled with bibliography issues. I have pages and pages of call numbers and titles of books at the UNC Libraries; many of the books on them I at least looked at, others I never got my hands on. Some I have thoroughly plumbed, digitally scanning every image that might help and scanning or summarizing the text; others could not be checked out and required more time than I could devote on that library trip; still others were in storage and I never requested them, or in circulation and I never went back after they had been returned. My trips to UNC were irregular, and my research areas varied. When I was pregnant, I looked at books about birth customs. When I was preparing my Italian men’s clothing research, my sources were Italian or German. When I worked on English women’s costume, I looked at art from England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. And I had plenty of tangents into other topics — learning about Margaret of Beaufort so that I could write poetry in her voice, or looking for 16th century Turkish art so that I could make the boys clothes to attend a Middle Eastern themed event. (I love UNC libraries.)

I sorted these library lists and made a single long list on my V&A library account of books that they have that I want to see because I think they’d be useful for my English women’s costume in 1500 research. Some I know I have seen before, but it has been so long, I should look at them again. I made a smaller list of books that the V&A didn’t have, but the British Library did.

I also started a Librarything account, on which I am only attempting to list the nonfiction costume and history related books that I own. (I’ll have to list lots more once our furniture arrives from the U.S. — it still isn’t here.) I already love the feature where they recommend other books based on what you own; I certainly could spend a lot of money on books, despite my deep and abiding love of libraries and their “free books.”

This week I spent two days at the British Library. I’ve been just a little nervous about applying for a reader card there — I mean, I’ve never before had to go through an interview to prove that I’m worthy to read books in a library! But it was easy, the staff was helpful, and I got what I most came for: the searchable database of the Pevsner’s Architectural guides. Which I could have ordered, but then I would have had to pay for it AND wait for it. The software is a bit of a pain to use — I messed up the first time and I had to ask them to hold the disk for me a few more days, but the second time I got everything I wanted. Now the data awaits me, sitting on my computer in a nice spreadsheet, just begging me to go trolling through it looking for interesting churches to visit and memorial artwork to scrutinize.

I also got one image I’ve been wanting for at least a year and a half. It is a full color version of this illuminated page from the Writhe Garter Book. The British Library has one of the facsimile versions that was published in the 1990s. I wondered why I had to go to the Rare Books room to see it…until they brought it to me. It had to have been more than two feet high. Huge. Beautiful. Vibrant color. With really intelligent discussions about how to date the artwork. It was almost too big to fit onto their super-duper digital imaging scanner thingy, but it did! For 36 pence, that image was mine (with a British Library watermark across it, but I can handle that).

I’ve been reading the bibliographies of the books I’ve requested almost more carefully than the articles inside. Today after enjoying The Illuminated Page: ten centuries of illuminated manuscripts in the British Library by Janet Backhouse (really lovely book, great color reproductions, nice overview of a large span of time with just enough text to inform with bogging you down), I looked through her recommended reading list and realized that I had read every book on her list that related to my time period, except for one that I hadn’t seen yet but already had on my list at the V&A.

I looked at The Depiction of Clothing in French Medieval Manuscripts by Patricia M. Gathercole but found little there that a SCAdian with a penchant for costume research couldn’t tell me. But the book did have a bibliography, so I started jotting down titles…only to glance over to my left and see one of the listed books sitting on the top of the stack I’d just picked up from the reservation desk.

Which means that, I have really got to organize my references. Now. I believe there will be hours of playing with Endnote in my near future, since that is the software we already have sitting on our computer.

Ah, the happiness of making progress, getting things done, figuring things out. My head is so full of names of kings and queens, painters and printers, images of art, dates and places. I looked through a book with the complete paintings of Holbein today, satisfied myself that I had seen every image in there, and kept going. I wonder how many images I’m storing in my head related to this research? Holbein isn’t someone whose work I’ve delved deeply, because he worked in England long enough after my target date that the costumes really had changed and what he depicts looks radically different from what I see on c.1500 funerary art.

I also realized this week how important it is for me to be present in England, learning the real and current geography of London, for me to comprehend what I read. I was skimming/reading an article about printers, scribes, writers, bookbinders and their ilk in England between 1475 and and 1500. I wanted to see whether there were any names that I should be searching on, any artists whose corpus I had not perused. But the discussion was more about the mechanics of who set up shop where and why. To slog my way through the academic paper, I had to create a mental map, relating the guildhalls of London to the Inns of Court (just outside the City walls, and thus their jurisdiction), and thinking about the travel time between Westminster (where William Caxton set up his press) and the City.

Which I know, because I’ve walked it. Wow.