Hello! After some thought we've decided that, as life will not stop getting in the way any time soon, we're going to have to end the podcast. Thank you all so much for your support.

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@breadandthread
Hello! After some thought we've decided that, as life will not stop getting in the way any time soon, we're going to have to end the podcast. Thank you all so much for your support.
idk man i don't have any strict goals in life. i might make an artifact
Fun little thing about medieval medicine.
So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.
It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.
The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.
I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?
I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”
I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P
I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers.
Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.
This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”
Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)
All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.
it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking
Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.
*INHUMAN SCREECHING*
M Y T I M E H A S C O M E
You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.
STORY TIME
Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.
Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.
But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.
BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.
Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:
Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.
For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus.
With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:
Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.
Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.
Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.
A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts.
Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.
What an interesting find.
Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:
This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.
It worked well.
It worked extremely well.
So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.
Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.
Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this.
To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic.
Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.
All that to say: Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Further reading:
The 2015 Ancientbiotics report: A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity
NPR: ‘Ancientbiotics’ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments
Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Bald’s Leechbook
Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.
Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Bald’s eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this:
Clothing in antiquity functioned as an immediately legible social code, a woven system of signs in which the appearance of a garment, the na
There was such a thing as "counterfeit" Tyrian purple. Incredible.
I'm imagining how salty elites who could afford the dead snail juice must have been about this.
Real Tyrian purple was known to be color-fast. I am guessing the imitation purple would be detected once it faded over time.
If anyone is wondering why there are/were so many unique breeds of domestic animals in the outlying Scottish & Irish Isles, it is because the Iron Age (and possibly Neolithic) residents of the area would keep their livestock on the islands to graze them and protect them from predators and thieves. It was also a historical custom to leave livestock animals on remote islands so marooned sailors would have something to eat, hence why there were already sheep in the Faroe Islands when Norse settlers arrived there but no sign of previous permanent human residence. Many of these isolated sheep breeds are the descendants of the Iron Age sheep placed there and have had thousands of years to adapt to their environments, with possible genetic influence from later Norse settlers.
Of course, British settlers wanted to replace the ancient local land race breeds with livestock breeds that produced more meat, fur and milk.
Look at these things, they’re fucking amazing (Soay sheep):
Like, no, I’m sure their wool output isnt like that of the Merino, nor are they as meaty as a Suffolk but they are so fucking badass. For thousands of years, they’ve been living on an island humans couldn’t survive on.
This is why I’m so passionate about the preservation of heritage and land race breeds.
I'm sorry, their wool was plucked????
Yes! They naturally shed it, a trait bred out of more modern breeds. You can kind of see it in the photos, you’d just have to pluck the shedded bits of coat instead of entirely shearing.
Viking dresses by Savelyeva Ekaterina
Another visual demonstration that historical clothing wasn’t dingy and monochrome.
All of these colours can be obtained from vegetable dyes, producing different shades depending on what mordant (colour fixative - alum, different metal filings, different vinegars) was used. See here and here for examples.
BRING THIS FASHION BACK.
Not clothes, but this was a palette developed by the National Museum of Denmark based on paint residue from archaeological finds for the purpose of painting a reconstructed hall.
Apparently, they can tell from the chemical composition that the colours wouldn’t be mixed with black or white to mute them, but be used in their brightest form. Bright yellow and red was achieved with expensive dyes (orpiment and cinnabar) and was thus fashionable. (Source in Danish)
@athingofvikings
What is a man? An ecstatic little pile of pigments.
^reblogging for that comment
Forever reminder that the ancient world was colorful everywhere, and every attempt to brownwash it in modern fiction is sheer laziness.
Im not traditionally a conspiracy theorist but there is no way in hell’s black earth that Dubai chocolate bullshit was not some kind of psyop
That crap was goddamn everywhere, viral shill influencer equivalent of herpes simplex virus 1, and now there’s $20 bars at my grocery store???
My child it is Pistachios in Chocolate
ETA: @executeness in the notes provided this link, which pretty much confirms it:
The viral pistachio-filled candy bar is everywhere—but there’s nothing sweet about the United Arab Emirates and its human rights record.
I don’t like being correct
Do yall want me to live post through my writing process for this paper on mystic women and disability
reposting this comment on the main post because it’s incredible and you’re so right @aprillikesthings
Would I ever want to like, hang out with her? Have dinner with her? Absolutely not.
Am I glad she existed? That she was a constant thorn in the side of so many people? That she called out shitty priests?
And that she had it all written down for her from her own perspective? 100% YES
For those of you who don't know: She lived in the late 1300's to mid 1400's. She was English and middle class, and married and had fourteen children--at which point she told her husband God had asked her to be chaste. (Which was actually a struggle for her, side note.)
She was prone to having visions during mass that caused fits of hysterical sobbing, writhing on the floor, and wailing. I cannot exaggerate the degree to which people found her incredibly irritating! But courageously dealing with others' hatred of her was part of her devotion to God, so people complaining always backfired lol.
She was tried for heresy multiple times, as well as preaching (which was illegal for a woman to do)--but was never convicted.
She went on numerous pilgrimages (including the Camino), annoying the shit out of people all across Europe and the Holy Land. She also met Julian of Norwich, who said her visions were genuine but also told her to maybe cool it a little with the hysterics lol.
And we know all this because she wrote (well, dictated; she was illiterate) what is considered the first autobiography in English! It's called The Book of Margery Kempe.
More info at wikipedia, of course.
There's a very good novel about her life and Julian of Norwich's life! It's called For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie. Quite short, like 150 pages.
This is the longest post I've ever seen about Margery Kempe that doesn't mention how bad she wanted to make love to Jesus.
btw it still exists ˆˆ
here's the written out link:
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/1940s-knitting-patterns
There really really ought to be a book about how the staple crops of different civilizations shape and influence those civilizations, and I really want to read it.
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (three are alcohol, three have caffeine) are not quite that, but may still be of interest?
I read Salt back in the day and it's so so good, second the rec. I have heard of 6 Glasses and not read it but I am sure I would probably love it. Gotta see if the library has it. Thank you!
Gonna throw Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert in the ring here! You'll never see the modern world the same way again.
A Short History Of The World According To Sheep by Sally Coulthard blew my mind. So many things are tied to wool and sheep and weaving and so many words and phrases are tied to wool, people have no idea.
Example words which come from textiles/weaving, if not specifically wool (go look them up!): subtle, shoddy, tabby, Brazil, rocket, twit, warped, going batty, on tenterhooks, text...
I'll throw in a rec for Pickled, Potted, and Canned by Sue Shephard - a very interesting look at food preservation and how the availability of different types of food preservation shaped cultures and cuisines.
Sweetness and Power is this but for the topic of sugar
The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past might also be up your alley. It's about "forgotten" foods and staples. They talk about different types of wheat, sauces, veggies, etc and a little about the cultures from whence they come
Question i want to ask an archeologist who specialised in fibre crafts:
Do we find cat hair woven in to historic projects?
Or is that just a thing potential future archaeologists will find in my tablet woven bands
Okay so here´s the issue, sadly: We can´t always tell what animal a fibre came from! We are actually extremly lucky if we actually find fibres, and not just their impressions or mineralized remains on metal clasps or buttons. And then we can essentially tell apart the big three: Wool, plant fibres and silk.
Also, most of the things we find have been used before ending up in the situation we find them in - for textiles, it´s mainly burials - and so anything that may have been stuck in the weave would have been gone by that point.
So, yeah. We are very, very unlikely to ever find something as fragile as loose cat hairs caught in a weaving project. And if there were the sort of insane people who had a cat that shed so much they spun the fur and wove that, it will simply read as "animal fibre" in the archeological record.
Tablet weaving especially, I have learned recently, preserves somewhat badly. Many bands use both wool and linen threads, or silk too, and they need different conditions to be preserved, so we sometimes only have fragments of the band, and it´s really hard to figure out the pattern with many organic dyes being affected by the soil. Finding a band so well preserved that we can still see cat hairs caught in it? That would be a bit of a holy grail.
(If you want future archeologists to find your bands with cat hair in it, I think - think, because I´m not an expert - the best way would be to not use the band at all, tug it away somewhere safe and undisturbed - like a box - and then sink it in a bog. Archeologists go wild for stuff that was clearly special for someone for some reason, and bogs are our friends when it comes to preservation.)
The Booooog
The BOOOOGGG
Seriously though, the bog is our friend.
It is! I have the joy to literally live a few hours away from where they display the Nydam boat, the oldest ship we´ve found that was build using iron nails.
And it was found in a bog that has been interpreted as a site for sacrifice. The bog is your best friend.
I think the only better thing known for preservation is mountain-ice and permafrost....though those landscapes are quickly thawing out.
Dry high altitude deserts are also great for preservation. As are certain types of clay but you have to seal the artifacts in very well for the preservation and then very carefully remove it when excavated.
On the good news front, although most animal hairs have decayed beyond the point of physical identification, DNA analysis is getting better and they have successfully extracted DNA from ancient textile animal fur as of 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S129620742500010X
So if you can bury your textile in somewhere that has reasonable amounts of preservation that isn't going to fully dissolve the hairs, you might have some results for future archaeologists.
So what I'm hearing is i should talk somebody who is going to Antarctica into chucking some well wrapped weaving (plus maybe some glass beads I've made to be complete) out of a plane?
I wonder if you can use ZooMS on hair? I know it can be used non-descructively on parchment and you don't need a huge sample (and less of a risk of cross-contamination that dna)
HEY. HOW DID YOU GET SO BIG.
WHAT KIND OF DOG ARE YOU.
I HAVE QUESTIONS FOR YOU.
[video description: a Dalmatian following a horse that is white with black spots. end description.]
this is, btw, probably extremely fulfilling for this dog.
Dalmatians were supposed to be hunting dogs at the founding of the breed, but what they mostly became bred and used for was carriage dogs.
A carriage dog is a dog whose job it is to run alongside a horse and carriage and prevent anyone from interfering with it. They were excellent carriage security. Nobody could reach up and grab the horses reins, nobody could try to open the carriage door - you could even park with peace of mind
This is also how they became known as firehouse dogs, because fire trucks used to look like this
and i imagine having a carriage dog was very useful to prevent even well-meaning members of the public from doing anything stupid to the equipment or horses while you fought a fire.
So the dog in the video is probably feeling very Job Well Done about his activity
The landmark ruling secures farmers’ right to save, share, and exchange indigenous seeds, by decriminalizing it and safeguarding traditional
Historical context is of course very useful for important things like Politics and Science and everything, but will also open your eyes to things like, uh... the way the clothing/textile/crafting industries try to use the word "natural" as an excuse to sell shoddy and bad quality goods and make you think that's normal.
God knows there are worse things going on in the world, but it really pisses me off when I see companies advertising "Real Shell/Pearl buttons!" like that's supposed to be some upscale selling point, and the buttons in question are the thinnest, roughest, most crudely-made buttons in existence... 🙄😒 "But they're made from Natural Materials! You can't expect Natural Materials to look refined and consistent like synthetic ones!" They are lying to you. THEY ARE LYING TO YOU! And I know this because I've seen "real shell buttons" from 100 or even 50 years ago. And most of them are sturdy and smoothly polished, of a consistent thickness, and sometimes even finely carved. The buttons on nice men's dress shirts? Those are the cheap, plastic IMITATIONS of what people expected actual mother-of-pearl buttons to look like! "Natural" isn't an excuse! Your product is cheap and badly and lazily made! And I'm so sick of this, because I see it EVERYWHERE. "Linen-look" has become shorthand for "coarsely woven fabric with visible slubs" and that drives me CRAZY because do you KNOW what kinds of linen I have seen??? Antique linen so light and fine and smooth you can't even SEE the weave unless you magnify it!!! A fragment of a linen damask tablecloth so smooth and glossy, it looks like SILK? 😭 (On that note, "dupioni silk" is so roughly woven that it would have been considered hardly fit to sell a century ago) "This fabric is woven of Natural Materials, so imperfections will be inevitable!" 🙃 No! 😀 You just made it cheaply and sloppily, and that was your choice! 😊
Hello! We have an episode coming for you at the weekend, but will be taking a podcast hiatus due to Life Getting In The Way.
4,700-year-old ball of yarn found near Lake Bienne. Lüscherz, Switzerland, around 2700 BC
More: https://thetravelbible.com/top-artifacts-from-the-stone-age/
Source: Facebook
Museum of Artifacts
I'm sorry, is this... Is this implying there's no DYE in that rug? All raw wool in its natural colours? She fucking bred the sheep to get the colours she wanted over the course of ten years!? Holy shit.
Edit: this has gotten a huge amount of traction (fibrearts tumblr is a, uh, tight-knit community it seems!) so I am adding this note to state that I checked Lola Cody's website and can confirm: There is no dye in her work. She uses exclusively hand-spun Churro wool sheared from her home-raised sheep flock. It's all natural colours!