allison_is

I got a copy of Weigel's trachtenbuch through ILL and am going to begin scanning them soon, in preparation of another translation project. DUN DUN DUN! And now I am going to edit this post because after I hit post I realized I sounded like a jackass:

The verse is not as exciting or challenging or as clever as Lautenbach's, but still of interest to me.

I really think that when it comes to historical research, costume books are often overlooked or scoffed at for their inaccuracies but that should not necessarily be the case. Sometimes the woodcut artists had seen the clothing they are depicting. They aren't really that different than portraits can be. Everyone takes artistic liberties, yet somehow a portrait can be taken as the authority for clothing. Yes, they can be wrong. But so can portraits. I guess that's where I'm going with that. It's all in how you interpret the material. Grain of salt, etc. I usually try to reproduce a garment I have seen multiple times, be it in paintings or woodcuts. 

Depending on the book that is looked at, they can be a super cultural tool when it comes to understanding what was valued in women and their appearance and virtue. It's also useful when it comes to understanding how other cultures perceived each other, and they also can show that people were genuinely interested in what life was like in other places, especially when it comes to what happened after the discovery of the new world. I think this is super apparent in some of the incunabula - Guy Marchant (publisher in Paris 1483-1504) released three editions of Columbus' account of the new world, all in 1493. Just one printing house. That's how popular they were. They were published in Latin, but the vernacular rolled around as early as 1493. The Nuremberg Chronicles feature woodcuts of different cities (though to save money sometimes they are the same woodcut, but still. . . )

And as I'm learning, because of the financial risk involved, publishers usually just wouldn't print any old thing. That happened with Lienhart Holle in Ulm and that fool went out of business within two years. He published like two books!  He couldn't read his market at all obviously. I'd like to think that if they were published, it was because there was a market for them. That might not be as true in early markets though - people were attached to manuscripts apparently. It's like how I feel about e-books.