“One of the most fascinating archeological finds in Russia has been the discovery of hundreds of “birchbark documents” (messages written on the bark of birch trees with a sharp stylus) that were created from the 11th to the 15th century.
The birchbark documents of Novgorod are a major source for information about life in Medieval Novgorod because they are not the writings of church theologians or political leaders, but rather, personal messages, IOUs, love letters, shopping lists, and so on. One of the most fascinating items, in my mind, is a collection of children’s drawings that have been unearthed.
Children’s drawings in the Middle Ages?! Even if such things were created in period, how could they have survived to the present day? After all, finger paints, magic markers, and crayons were not yet in use, paper was far too valuable of a commodity to waste on children, and refrigerator doors were unavailable for the display of Junior’s artistic genius. Most of the products of childhood inspiration probably were expressed on the ephemeral canvas of dirt or sand.
But birchbark was a different story. The bark was widely available (although there are indications that excessive use of the medium caused a decline in the local birch population) and easily cultivated. Anyone could use it. When one was finished with the message, it was simply thrown into the mud, where the presence of water and clay created an unusually bacteria-free environment which preserved the documents. So, we have the ideal medium: cheap, easy to come by, and (thanks to unique geology) preserved for hundreds of years.
The drawings from Novgorod that we have found appear to all come from a Russian boy named Onfim, who lived at the end of the twelfth century or beginning of the thirteenth century in the city of Novgorod. By the estimate of the archaeologists who unearthed his works, he was around seven years old at the time that he made these drawings.
Onfim was being taught to write, but he was obviously restless with his lessons and when he could get away with it, he intermixed his assignments with doodlings. In this first example, he started to write out the first eleven letters of the alphabet in the upper right corner, but got bored and drew a picture of himself as a grown-up warrior impaling an enemy with his spear. To remove any doubt about the identity of the warrior, he even labeled the person on the horse as “Onfim.”
Fantasies of becoming a mighty warrior were not the only things that Onfim thought up though. In another example, he took the piece of bark that he was practicing on (left), turned it over (right), and drew a picture of himself disguised as a wild beast (which he identified by writing “I am a wild beast” [Ia zver’] over it). The beast, with its long tongue (or fiery breath), is apparently still a friendly beast as it is carrying a sign that reads “Greetings from Onfim to Danilo” [Poklon ot Onfima ko Danile]. Danilo (i.e., Daniel) was probably a friend, perhaps even a schoolmate sitting next to Onfim.
Onfim liked to draw people and while his artistic aptitude may have been lacking, he was prolific.”
This is very charming evidence that the way seven-year-old boys doodle in class hasn’t changed in eight hundred years.
Спасибо, Onfim. Я надеюсь, что у вас была большая жизнь!
What has changed is the reaction those drawings might produce now.
In many modern schools Onfim showing himself as a warrior spearing an enemy wouldn’t be a sign of patriotism (defending the homeland), wanting to be a bogatyr warrior (ambition) or just mythic daydreams like his monster (imagination). It might instead get such a “possibly troubled” child sent to the principal’s office and his parents called in for a serious talk…
"Commonplace books that survive from the Tudor period contain a huge variety of texts, including letters, poems, medical remedies, prose, jokes, ciphers, riddles, quotations and drawings. Sonnets, ballads and epigrams jostle with diary entries, recipes, lists of ships or Cambridge colleges and transcriptions of speeches. Collecting useful snippets of information so that they could be easily retrieved when needed, or re-read to spark new ideas and connections, was one of the functions of a commonplace book. But the practice of maintaining a commonplace book and exchanging texts with others also served as a form of self-definition: which poems or aphorisms you chose to copy into your book or to pass on to your correspondents said a lot about you, and the book as a whole was a reflection of your character and personality."
Tom Standage: How commonplace books were like Tumblr and Pinterest, drawing from the research for his forthcoming book.
See also: the distractions of social media, 1673 style.
(via blech)(via blech)
Scholarly Saturday: The Cult of the Saints
For the last two Scholarly Saturdays, I’ve featured articles on history (chivalry in the Middle Ages) and linguistics (comparing translations of the Old English poem Beowulf). Today, I’m going to focus on my other field of study, theology. I’m working on a master’s degree in the history of Christianity, and I’m going to spotlight one of the biggest reasons the early church was able to spread: the “cult of the saints,” or the relics, shrines, and rumored miracles associated with those believers who had been martyred by the Roman Empire. This is often denigrated as a rural “superstitious” practice, somehow “polluting” a “purer” form of the faith, but the reality is very different. Questions of power, ecclesiastical authority, state persecution, theological doctrine, social ties, urbanites vs. rural peasants (since Christianity was at first a city religion, the world pagan comes from the Latin paganus, meaning essentially “country bumpkin”) and more were brought into play around the Christian martyrs, and changed the social landscape and the body politic of the Catholic Church in many lasting ways.
To find out more, put on your walking shoes, grab your pilgrim stick and maybe some holy water, and join me below the jump where there be dragons:
"The Jewish Psalter became the first hymn-book of the Church, and still remains the backbone of its ordered daily worship: the reading and expounding of the Old Testament, stressing the historical character of the Christian revelation, as from the beginning a vital part of the ministry of the Word. Thus Christian worship, though from one point of view it was indeed a “new song”, from another accepts and completes the devotion of the synagogue, and shows forth in its fullness the spiritual mystery towards which the sacrifices of the Temple looked. Here as elsewhere the revelation of God, breaking in upon history, accepts and clothes itself in historical forms"
While the Folger holds many fine examples of extra-illustrated Prayer Books, I’ve been researching a copy that makes particularly interesting use of the practice of interleaving liturgical texts with images. Like many others compiled in the seventeenth century, this Prayer Book is bound within a collected volume that includes several religious texts, including a Bible, a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalms, an Apocrypha, John Speed’s genealogical tables, and John Downame’s concordance. Unlike other composite volumes, however, this book—really, an aggregate of multiple printed books bound together—is heavily interleaved with loose prints, diagrams, maps, illustrations extracted from other texts, contemporaneous portraits of religious and political figures, even an elaborate (and as-yet unidentified) manuscript monogram. In fact, most of the leaves of the Bible in this copy have been removed and replaced with images culled from different sources, including William Slatyer’s illustrations of Genesis (a set of 40 plates published in the 1660s) and an unidentified German book, possibly some form of illustrated Bible that includes scriptural passages in both German and Latin. In short, the owner(s) of this volume went far beyond the standard practice of interleaving one’s Prayer Book with a few ready-made prints of Guy Fawkes!
From The New York Times for April 24, 1901. (HT Weird Universe)
Trade card of Benjamin Tiffin “Bug Destroyer to His Majesty” and “Paper-Hanger” (HT Georgian Gentleman)
January 2013 has marked the 150th Anniversary of the first of the London Underground lines – the Metropolitan opened in January 1863 between Paddington and Farringdon. The event was marked by the running – in passenger service – of steam-hauled trains through the tunnels over the original route, through Baker Street station.
Photo credit to Peter Zabek
Books to Purchase: Adrian Teal’s Gin Lane Gazette.
Discovered at the chirurgeon’s apprentice. Other reviews and mentions at British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, History Today, & Georgian London.
Drunken Lovers by Thomas Rowlandson (1798) (HT Georgian Bawdy House)
