Thanks, Anne! It seems, though, that the author I'm working with does need a
different image -- he's talking specifically about distaffs and the ways they
may be carried, and in this case the woman herself is actually her own
distaff, with no physical distaff in sight. I feel certain I've seen the image
he remembers of the small-distaff-in-the-large-hat, but perhaps I'm mentally
conflating some of the pictures in Tacuinum Sanitatus, which has lots of women
carrying distaffs and lots of women carrying things on their heads, but (as
far as I can tell) no distaffs on the heads.
The Scandinavian image is curious, though, particularly as she also is holding
a torch in her mouth. That doesn't strike me as a really smart thing to do
while you have a pile of loose flax on your head. The caption in Ostergard
says that an archibishop had this image made; I wonder if it was his idea of
industriousness, but not anything that people actually did. (More than once.)
Way off track now, though.
--Robin
Sigrid Briansdotter wrote:
The woodcut of the woman spinning with the material to be spun up on her head under
a band is found in Olaus Magnus' Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus as the
Illustration for Liber Secvundvs, Cap. XVII. De luminibus, & tedis piceis,
which is page 77 in the original version printed in 1555 in Rome. (In English as
per the translation by Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens published in three volumes
by The Hakluyt Society, London first volume publish in 1996 as Olaus Magnus - A
Description of the Northern Peoples - 1555: Book Two, Chapter Seventeen, On lights,
and torches of tar. Page 112 of Volume 1) The woodcut in my facimilie printed in
1972 by Roosenkilde and Bagger, Copenhagen, of the 1555 printing is approximately 2
inches high by 4 inches wide with ornamentals out the left and right sides.
Hope this helps,
Anne Decker
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