On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Cin wrote: > >The number of extant inventories, etc. out there that have never been > >studied is practically criminal. One of the defining moments in my life > >was holding Edward II's wardrobe inventory -- the original volume -- and > > Cool! I had no idea one even existed!
...and then I put it back on the shelf between the inventories of Edward I and Edward III. Each volume was about 3-4 inches thick, IIRC. Public service reminder: Drool is not good for keyboards. ;-) > Wouldnt it be cool to Wiki a never-before annotated inventory? Even > tho most of us are just amateurs & fashion fans, I'm sure we'd have > some interesting things to say on so many topics. While none of us > could complete the task, we'd make a nice start. Unfortunately we'd have to start with transcription and translation. I can read 14th c. handwriting, but this was clerical chickenscratch, by multiple hands, in a mishmash of French, Latin, and English, with arcane abbreviations thrown in. You can't analyze the words till you know what they are. And a good lot of the work involves figuring out the dates, quantities, and monetary amounts, which (if I remember right) were recorded in roman numerals. I think part of the reason this has gone undone is that you can't figure out what the words are if you don't know the costume terminology of the period (in all three languages). Paleographers tend not to be costume scholars; they are more likely to work on documents that are deemed less specialist, or that require specialist knowledge in areas that are important enough to people to justify developing a specialty. The person who showed me the inventories -- an independent scholar -- had spent decades reading wills and inventories and legal documents on behalf of people who needed research done in genealogy and heraldry. (He developed a reasonable familiarity with costume terms because of the nature of that work, but I would guess costume research doesn't pay the bills the way family history or heraldic research does.) --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
