Thurso II (Donald Thomson): Week 19 – 10 June

Medieval manuscripts.  Those two words conjure images of cold, drafty monasteries, fantastical illuminations, monks slipping chilled hands up sleeves to warm them, tonsures bent over writing desks.  Countless words written by anonymous hands.  So anonymous that it is impossible to determine the gender of a scribe from their handwriting.  But nunneries and convents needed and used manuscripts, and likely produced them for other establishments as well.  A rare few manuscripts contain the names of scribes, unobtrusively written in the margins or coded in small letters above the text, but there is also physical evidence in skeletons. 

Red Campion

A female skeleton dated to c1000-1200 AD was excavated in Germany during building renovations, and in 2011 researchers analysed her teeth hoping to find evidence of diet.  What they found in the mineralised dental plaque was quite a surprise.  There were tiny blue particles, which upon further investigation were found to be grains of lapis lazuli.  This rare and expensive mineral, originating in Afghanistan, was ground to a powder to make the pigment ultramarine, and was particularly favoured for painting the robes of the Virgin Mary.  During the Renaissance, the cost and quality of ultramarine was often specified in artists’ contracts. The current theory is that this anonymous woman was an illustrator of manuscripts, and the mineral was deposited on her teeth when she licked her brush to draw it into a point. 

Back Garden Orchid

In a way, knitting is much the same, in that you can’t tell the gender of the knitter from the finished article.  Men were skilled knitters in the past, but did they knit ganseys?  Nowadays, it is always assumed that women knit the ganseys.  But many were machine knit, something that isn’t mentioned often.

The gansey just completed is of course completely hand knit.  It’s been a gansey on training wheels; I haven’t knit a gansey on my own for about 30 years. During that time, of course, Gordon perfected his own gansey knitting.  I started work on another gansey a few years ago, when Gordon was there to lend a helping hand and answer questions. He’d given me one of his projects to continue, when I couldn’t find anything to knit during Zoom calls; he’d done the ribbing.  It’s still in progress; the second sleeve is nearly finished. 

Raindrops on Peony

The ‘training wheels’ for this gansey was one of the same pattern which I found in his boxes of finished jumpers.  Another aid – and it was like finding the Holy Grail – were the measurements, stitch counts, and pattern that he’d chosen.  Both the existing gansey and the notes provided helping hands in absentia, but I still managed to overlook details, like when to start the gusset and how many diamonds are on the sleeves.  But these are just details, and this luscious pink gansey needn’t be an exact copy of the exemplar. All in all, I’m quite pleased with it, despite seeing all the little flaws that only the maker would notice.

Two Together