blamebrampton | Success, medieval sellotape, and deafness

Hooray, hooray, my last fest fic is submitted! Now I can finally get back to writing other things. And beta-ing. I just found a story on my hard drive that arrived a few days ago and I not only have no idea why it's there, I have no idea who it's from. Fairly impressive even for my brain of sievedom.

The exhibition that I went to Melbourne for was excellent in terms of the items chosen to show, and the arrangement of them into groupings. But there was something to be desired about the interpretations -- this is the museum term for the little blurbs of paper that are stuck beside things, the blurbs on the wall, the blather in the catalogue and so on.

Many years ago baby Brammers dabbled in museum geek, so I am very interested in the way that things are presented in exhibitions. It actually makes sense to call it an interpretation: most people find historical objects to be a different language, one that needs explanation, a guiding hand, an interpreter. It is always fun to listen to people trying to puzzle peculiar objects and artworks out, often they have very clever explanations for 'why it's like that', sometimes they are completely right.

So, one of the things that I found frustrating about this exhibition was that a lot of very interesting elements of the manuscripts were not discussed. There was an awful lot of interpretation on the biblical figures being depicted and the religious uses of the text, but very little on the physical aspects of the illuminations and calligraphy, nor the actual books.

In some cases, this was just a shame, because all those school students were missing out on cool things like the obvious differences in illuminators who worked on the one papal missal; I find this interesting, and think many others would, because it gives you an idea of how the scribal workshops functioned with the juniors being given some colour-by-numbers work to train them up. But it's not essential.

In other cases, though, there were Big Questions raised by the items in the exhibition that were not addressed. The most obvious was a large page with frontbinding from a choir psalter. It was about A3 in size, and the rest of the psalter was not there. It was a recto (left hand) page, and to the right of the page, in what would have been the centre of the book, was a series of narrow strips of vellum, several with neatly calligraphed text on them. It was medieval sellotape.

Medieval sellotape was used for the same purpose modern tape is. The strips were glued into place, in this case to reattach pages that had obviously torn out of their stitching. The cool thing was that the text written on the strips was later than the calligraphy of the psalter, and if I were smarter, I would be able to tell you what century it had been repaired in. The strips were traditionally cut out of either old documents that weren't needed any longer, or works that had uncorrectable flaws from the scribal workshops.

Now, I think this is hugely cool, and was unable to resist finding one of the schoolteachers who were there with ravening students and telling her about it, because I am a nerd of the highest order when it comes to these things. But I couldn't understand why the interpretations didn't mention it at all.

Nor did they talk about the marginalia anywhere, admittedly they only had little hunting scenes rather than the bum-baring and copulating couples that you find in a lot of marginalia, but still. These things are interesting, aren't they? It's not just me?

Maybe I just need a T-shirt that says 'History Nerd, please do not discuss period films with me'.

As to the ears, bad news, they are absolutely stuffed with fluid, though I have managed to avoid perforating either eardrum. The tubes, which I insist on remembering as Etruscan, though I think it's eustachian, are both solidly manky. Unless I have a miracle recovery overnight, this means I am not flying to New Zealand on Monday. I can then either see if I am up to going on Tuesday or Wednesday, or else reschedule for when sno is back from Europe and the US. WE ARE CURSED, SNO!

J thinks this is hilarious, BTW. I am hoping that he will soon find my inability to hear anything and demands that he repeat himself as annoying as I find his on a normal day. Cookie is sitting beside me and Monster is sitting on my foot in a bid to reassure me that they still love me.