Gifts and ghosts

I'm running a bit behind on the Christmas stuff here, but thought I would just mention that I have written about medieval-style rosaries as Christmas presents here. (The short version: yes, anyone who uses an ordinary modern rosary can say the same prayers on this one.)

If you want to make a medieval-style paternoster as a gift, and you have a friendly local bead store, everything you need should be there. There's a shopping list here and simple instructions here. It takes less than an hour to put one together (less than half an hour, really, unless you have difficulties making a tassel). You may want to take the trouble to braid the cord you string the beads on from thinner thread, as it's likely to be more durable.

I wanted to share a few photos of several more modern-style strung rosaries I've made, all variations on a theme. The community I work for has a number of symbols they're fond of, including the color blue, an anchor (for hope), a heart, and a rose, and all of these were made for members or friends of the community.

This one is sodalite, with mother-of-pearl markers:



This one is mother-of-pearl, with lapis lazuli markers and a striped glass heart:



Mother-of-pearl again, but the marker beads are flat blue glass roses:



I particularly like this one, which is blue "goldstone" (a type of glass) with cloisonné markers:



And a detail:



I also passed a sad little milestone this week: for the first time, one of the rosaries I've made has been laid to rest. I made this one a couple of years ago for a friend's elderly mother. By special request it was rose quartz (her favorite color) with mother-of-pearl markers, the Virgin Mary with roses, and a cross with shamrocks. My friend's mother died this past week, and it was buried with her. I hope it brought some comfort to her and to her family.

Here is the one I made for her:



Perhaps hundreds of years from now, when the world has changed completely and these electrons are all dust, some archaeologist will see these beads and be touched by the thought that they brought someone a sense of peace.

Through medieval eyes

pretty pictures, part 4

I made this set of green beads as another gift recently, and it presented some interesting opportunities. As is common in today's society, not all of my friends are Christian, and in fact the woman I made this for is Pagan. But since she's a re-enactor, I wanted the beads to look acceptably medieval-Christian. The colors she requested were green, white and black, and as I often do, I used a nicely non-sectarian silk tassel for the pendant at the end.



The green heart is a personal symbol (again from Venetian Bead Shop), and as I was contemplating what else I might add, I thought of the little flat silver charm you see attached.

It's been sitting in my box of charms for several years, since I bought it along with the similar one I used on a little six-decade set of coral beads. Both of these little square charms are fine silver from India, stamped with (presumably) figures from Indian legends. I immediately claimed the first one for one of my own projects.

This six-decade rosary was one of my fairly early ideas. I had found a nice string of small pink beads that were reasonably priced, real coral and not dyed (which is uncommon). The marker beads were part of an eBay purchase: they were sold as rock crystal, but the price was very reasonable, so I wasn't too disappointed when I got them and discovered they were glass, as shown by the round air bubbles in one or two of them. (Rock crystal may have flaws, but not visible, perfectly round bubbles.)



Besides being an example of beads with six decades, I made this project as an example of the sorts of miscellaneous charms and accessories that might have been hung on a medieval rosary. The cross is Ethiopian, which is admittedly rather an improbable stretch for what a medieval European might have had available. I rummaged through my charm box and found a hand with "palm reading" lines on it, which I thought made a plausible "good luck charm," as does the crescent moon. The little silver pendant with a stone in the center is a carnelian, which actually was a good-luck charm in the Middle Ages. The round medal is a very worn Sacred Heart medal -- somewhat post-medieval in form, but as I said in an earlier post in this series, the devotion itself was known in the Middle Ages.

I liked the little square charm from India, because if I try to look at it through the eyes of a medieval European, my immediate identification is that it's Saint George... or perhaps Saint Martin of Tours, except that he seems to be wearing some sort of helmet and no cloak. He's clearly on horseback, and there is a diagonal line starting in the upper left corner that could be a spear or a lance, although if you look closely you see that he's not actually holding it.



People who have studied the religious thought of the Middle Ages more deeply than I have may certainly correct me here, but my own guess is that a medieval person, seeing such a thing, would try to fit it into a conceptual framework that he or she knew, and that means it would be identified as a saint, or perhaps a knight -- some sort of familiar image.

The pendant I still had sitting in my box was more problematic. With my modern eyes, I can see that it's possibly intended to be one of the round-breasted women characters from Indian legend, but it's much harder for me to fit that image into a plausible medieval-Christian context.



It's a bit of a stretch, but I wonder whether a medieval person might see this as one of the virgin martyrs who was stripped and tortured -- Saint Agatha, perhaps?

On the other hand, as a "goddess" image, it's now found an appreciative home.

Still more pretty pictures

part 3

This next batch of medieval-style rosaries were made for friends as special gifts. Among the people I hang out with, many are medieval re-enactors, so a medieval rosary is an appreciated gift, whether the recipient actually uses such a thing for religious purposes or not.

Since "decoding" the instructions given by Alanus de Rupe for a special rosary for a penitent knight, I've made several sets of these beads with special markers.

It took me quite a while when I made the first set to find a "multi-colored" bead I liked for the first marker. Most of the multicolored beads I could find in catalogs were either very cheap and badly made, or they were covered with little pink rosebuds. I didn't think that was very suitable for a bead supposed to symbolize our "multitude of sins." Eventually I found a millefiori bead, as you can see in this example.



The light-colored marker bead is mother of pearl here, the red is carnelian, the black is jet, and the gold is a foiled-glass Venetian bead from Venetian Bead Shop. Once I found sources, I bought several of each of these types in the 10-millimeter size, so I can now put together a set of "Beads of Death" without having to run out and shop for the parts.

The small beads for this rosary are green glass, the cross is another one from Rosary Workshop, and the little silvery-looking pendant is a hollow sterling-silver bead, with the ends plugged, and a few grains of earth from the Holy Land inside. One can fairly easily buy little "souvenir" containers of "Terra Sancta" and water from the River Jordan, but I happened to acquire little vials of both a few years ago that were about to be thrown out, and I've made good use of them.

This next set of beads is a "tenner." I have a couple of strings of 14-millimeter jasper beads, which seem to be about the right size for this common men's accessory, so that part was easy.



The hardest part of shopping for "tenners" is finding a good thumb-ring for the top. It's not at all difficult to find nice-looking plain silver rings in "finger" sizes, but finding a sturdy, closed ring about an inch in diameter and without egregiously non-period decoration isn't easy. I hoard them when I find them, and I had this one in my stash, so I used it.

The brass "gold" ring suggested using small brass "gold" beads between the larger jaspers, but what to do for the end? The friend I made this for said he wouldn't mind having a cross, but I didn't see anything affordable in the right size that I liked. Then I thought about the dark jasper cross that I'd picked up at the craft store, without any project in mind. I've never seen anything quite like it in a medieval context, but there are certainly coral and rock-crystal crosses (though not this shape) and the occasional wide-armed cross (though I usually can't tell what material they are -- I suspect wood). I decided this was good enough, and after wrestling with it a bit to get the flimsy silver-colored bail off, added it to the string.

The little gold pelican is definitely not medieval in style, but the pelican on a nest is a well-known medieval symbol of self-sacrifice, since the pelican was thought by classical authors to feed its young by stabbing its own breast so the offspring could feed on its blood.

The recipient has, he tells me, already to put this string to good use. He used it to amuse himself during a very long meeting by keeping count of the rounds of applause every time someone received yet another award.

More pretty pictures

part 2

Here are more of my recent projects.

(By the way, I've had a couple of comments and e-mails about these beads, asking if they are for sale. No, I don't make paternosters for sale, although I'm sure there is a market out there for them. I'd much rather teach people to make their own! There are full instructions in Bedes Byddyng, and the materials are neither hard to find nor expensive. A while back I also posted a "shopping list" and instructions.)

I posted some, but not all of the sets of medieval-style rosary beads that I made to take with me to Leiden in March. Here are a couple that didn't make it into the first batch I posted.

These are actually two of a color combination I've made several of, and will undoubtedly make more. I bought something like 20 strings of these opaque red glass beads for a special occasion, and I still have a number left over. The clear marker beads are rock crystal -- though not especially good quality rock crystal -- and at the particular moment I bought them, were actually less expensive than glass beads the same size.



Based largely on what I see in paintings, I tend to make most of my "ordinary" medieval-style rosaries from 8-millimeter beads with 10-millimeter markers. Those seem to be the approximate dimensions of the smaller medieval rosaries I see (there are some much bigger). These particular ones have 12-millimeter markers because that was the size that was on sale at the time.

Red coral was -- again, judging by paintings -- a very popular choice for rosary beads in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, for those wealthy few who could afford them. I don't know whether red coral in that period was widely faked, but I would be surprised if it wasn't. These glass beads certainly look to me like the sort of thing someone might choose in the Middle Ages who wanted a cheaper imitation of coral. A knowledgeable eye, seeing these close up, would know they weren't real coral, if only because of the absence of flaws and scratches -- glass is significantly harder than coral. It's also noticeably heavier, but you'd have to pick the beads up to know that. From a few feet away, these would probably have looked quite splendid.

I commented once that red coral beads with rock-crystal gauds seems to be a combination one sees a lot in medieval rosary paintings -- but when challenged, I couldn't come up with a lot of examples. I've collected more examples since, but it's gradually become apparent that it is indeed a common combination, but specifically in the rosaries shown in paintings of the Virgin Mary and saints. That means we don't know whether it was actually a popular combination in real life, or whether it represents some sort of ideal "type" of the rosary, thought suitable for particularly holy contexts.



Since I was trying to assemble some representative types of rosaries, I also made this string, which is the full fifteen decades recommended by Alanus de Rupe, rather than the more common sort abbreviated to five decades.



I've seen several 15th- and 16th-century rosaries with a heart as a pendant rather than a cross, so I looked for something that seemed suitable and came up with this pendant from Rosary Workshop. It's not quite ideal for a rosary, since it has a hollow back rather than being cast in the round, but I liked it.

A heart encircled by a crown of thorns today is usually thought of as representing devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In its present form, this is a post-medieval devotion, having become popular as a result of visions experienced by Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, who died in 1690. But it can readily be demonstrated that a number of medieval saints and lay people also cherished a special devotion to the heart of Jesus, though it wasn't necessarily represented in the same way. Rosary Workshop doesn't know the exact source or date of this particular heart, but it reminds me most strongly of Mexican and Central American "milagros", so that would be my guess.

Pretty pictures

Since the early days of this blog, I've made comments from time to time about the attempts people make to create new, medieval-style rosaries based on what we know about beads in the Middle Ages. Trying to make replicas and re-creations is always interesting, and can sometimes teach us a lot about what the historical artifacts were like and how they were made.

Such attempts are, of course, ultimately imperfect, because we aren't in the Middle Ages and don't have a lot of complete, detailed evidence about exactly what medieval paternosters and rosaries were like. Nor are we medieval people, so we are sure to guess wrong at times about how they would have done things. Nor (as I mentioned in Creative Shopping and More Creative Shopping) do we have exactly the same materials available that they did. So all such attempts will involve compromises. But that's part of the challenge, part of the (dare I say) fun. ;)

I fairly often make such medieval-style rosaries as gifts, and since I just finished a batch of them, I thought I'd share some photos, and talk a bit about the decisions I made in making them and why I made them as I did.

I should point out that these are not "data", and I don't think anyone else should necessarily use them as models. They are not medieval, though I think they are reasonable approximations in some ways, with some additional compromises made for the sake of the particular people I'm giving them to.

This one, for instance, I made for someone as a thank-you. She's a professional artist, and since I've seen her work I know she likes these colors. And someone had given me a strand of the dyed, somewhat irregular freshwater pearls that are so common in the bead catalogs these days. The marker beads, by the way, are leftover jasper from my green jasper paternoster.



But.... dyed pearls in the Middle Ages? No, the technology for creating intense, permanent color on pearls was only developed within the last few decades. Pearls can be dyed with fabric dyes, but the color tends to be pale and to fade fairly quickly. And dyeing pearls doesn't seem to have been in fashion in the Middle Ages, perhaps because pearls were so astronomically expensive in the first place (more valuable than diamonds, at least some of the time).

This next one was made for someone who likes (as I do) the combination of fairly dark and saturated blue, red and green. The marker beads are lampworked ovals with gold foil, which does seem to be a style of bead that was made in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, though I have no evidence one way or the other about their use in rosaries.



I'm not very satisfied with the tassel on this one. Tassel-making is my least favorite part of making medieval-style rosaries, and also the most fiddly, expensive and time-consuming, but the ready-made tassels I can find for sale are even more expensive and tend to be made of rayon, which doesn't stand up well to wear. I also haven't studied medieval tassels in enough detail to know much about whether multicolored tassels were in fashion, or if so when or where, or how they were constructed, whether the colors were randomly mixed throughout the strands or in sections, or for that matter what stitches were used to secure them.

It's clear from surviving beads and from paintings that the charms and accessories that were hung from medieval rosaries were not necessarily religious. But the dragonfly charm on this string is quite modern, both in concept and in style. (The recipient likes dragonflies.) The charm is made from cast base metal, colored with a modern resin rather than a true enamel. Also, for some reason dragonflies don't seem to be very frequent as an artistic motif in the Middle Ages. I don't know why, but they don't seem to have attracted much symbolism, either positive (like lions or eagles) or negative (like snakes or foxes).

I'm much happier with this next rosary, which also contains swirled and foiled beads. This is for someone who likes red, gold, and all things Italian. I chose amber-colored glass beads because I made it to go with a particular dress that I hadn't seen yet, and while different amber and yellow hues often look all right together, reds are much more difficult to match.



I'm a bit concerned about this string, because the thread seemed to snag once or twice as I was pulling it through the beads. I felt them with my fingers, and slid the beads back and forth a few times, and didn't find any rough spots, but lampworked beads are made by winding hot glass onto a "mandrel" or rod, and since their holes are not drilled, but formed as the bead is formed, there may be rough spots inside where I can't see them.

By wearing, using and giving medieval-style paternosters, I've become very aware that, as I tell the recipients, silk thread is neither immortal nor unbreakable. Beads threaded on silk will have to be re-threaded, at least once every few years, and perhaps more often if they are worn a lot. The average lifespan seems to be about two years, which is less than I would have thought. I do have some theories about string, which I plan to write about at some point.

More pretty pictures another time ;)

A thousand flowers

part 2

I posted a few days ago about one type of lampworked beads used in paternosters, namely the kind with looped and dragged surface decoration. Everything else I know about lampworked beads should easily fit into one more post, with some room left over! ;)

Another fairly easy technique for decorating the surface of lampworked beads is to roll them in "frit" -- which is what glass workers call little ground-up bits of glass. "Frit" can be made from leftover bits of glass in whatever colors are available, ground up and sifted to produce bits of whatever size range the glassmaker wants.



The hot bead is rolled in the frit, and when the resulting bits are melted into the surface of the bead, you get random dots of color, something like the beads below. (These have a thick layer of clear glass added over the spotted core.)



500 Jahre Rosenkranz includes one rosary made from spotted, or as the description says, "marbled" glass beads. Unfortunately the photo is small, black and white and terrible, but here it is, for what it's worth:

Millefiori

The gift rosary I made that prompted me to investigate lampworked beads in the first place is shown below, and it's the reason these two posts are titled "A thousand flowers." That's the literal translation of "Millefiori," the type of beads I used for the Ave beads.



I will happily recommend Venetian Bead Shop, where I bought these: they carry a wide variety of colors, shapes, foiled and sparkly beads, swirls, hand-blown hollow beads, and many other types traditionally made in Murano, the glassmaking district near Venice. Their shipping is fast and their prices very reasonable. Occasionally they are out of stock of a particular color, but seldom for long.

Millefiori beads are created by first making a rod of glass out of many smaller rods, arranged in a flower-like pattern and melted together. The rod is then drawn out into a long, thin cane, and slices from such a cane will all show the same flower pattern. To make a millefiori bead, several such slices will be applied to the surface of a hot bead of some other color, which is then quickly rolled smooth. (You can see that these beads are hand made, because some of them are more smooth than others!)

These beads are quite nice: I've seen so-called "millefiori" beads from other countries that are much less well done and look more like multi-colored mishmash than flowers. These are sometimes labeled as "ethnic," which always makes me snort.

What I don't know here is when and where millefiori beads have been actively made and traded. The technique seems to have been known in Italy in the 15th century, but this says nothing about whether it was popular or rarely used. Wikipedia (for what it's worth) seems to think that millefiori beads have only become really common in the last century or so. Resources, anyone?

This paternoster was made for someone who likes "everything Italian," hence the bright colors. I tried a couple of different shades of plain blue glass for the marker beads before I found one that looked right.



This just about concludes all I know about the use of lampworked beads in rosaries! But I'd certainly like to find out more.

Let a thousand flowers bloom

I was reminded the other day that I'd promised to look into the topic of "lampworked" glass beads, and the fact that I just made a gift rosary this month out of Italian "millefiori" beads meant that this was the month I finally went and looked at my books.

It's clear from a number of sources that glass was a popular medium for paternoster or rosary beads in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. While beads of gold, silver, amber, coral and semi-precious stones are valuable enough to be mentioned in the wills and inventories of the wealthy, there were hundreds and thousands of humbler folk who aspired to nothing more precious than beads of wood, bone, or glass to count their prayers. Few of those survive, and there is less written about them, so finding anything about them takes some digging.

Making glass beads by hand uses very simple technology and attracts many people who are looking for an interesting craft project, especially in more recent years when the basic equipment and the glass for making such beads have become easy to find and affordable. You can buy yourself a torch, some basic tools, protective goggles and enough glass rods to get you started for a couple of hundred dollars or less. If you're not intimidated by having a small blowtorch burning within inches of your fingers, you can produce some remarkably pretty beads with a bit of practice, including many that you wouldn't be able to find for sale. And if you're interested in historical glass, you can make good replicas of beads worn by the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and similar peoples. They make impressive gifts, too.

Naturally, the question I'm most interested in is what types of lampworked beads were used in historical rosaries. I knew I had seen a few instances of glass beads with such designs, and this week I went back to look again at the photos and see what I could discover.

The exhibition catalog 500 Jahre Rosenkranz: 1475-1975: Kunst und Frömmigkeit im Spätmittelalter und ihr Weiterleben, from a 1975 exhibition in Köln (Cologne, Germany) has two examples of rosaries made from lampworked beads. One is shown in a fairly good, clear picture, although it's in black and white:



These beads are described as "blue glass, decorated with yellow stripes (Murano)." They are tentatively dated to the 17th century (with a question mark!) and are in the Diocesan Museum collection in Köln. All the glass beads in this rosary are of the same type; the marker beads are slightly larger and each of them is set off by small bone beads and rather clumsy bone disks or caps on either side. Also included in this rosary are carved bone "Five Wounds" markers: two small arms ending in hands, two feet, a heart (?) and a skull.

The smaller beads seem to be arranged in six groups of nine (?) beads (though the last group now has only six). Attached to the loop is a short straight string with a marker bead, three small beads and another marker, as on a modern rosary. This is rather an odd number, and my guess is that, like many old rosaries, this has been re-strung at some point, perhaps in an attempt to make it look more "modern." Or it could be simply missing a few beads, which not rare either.

Iclear from looking at these beads that the decoration is not just a simple "stripe." However, once you are reasonably adept at making lampworked beads, it's not too difficult to do.

The first step is to melt a thin rod of a contrasting colored glass and make a series of loops back and forth on the surface of the bead:



A metal pick can then be used to "drag" the centers of these loops downward.



Repeated around the bead, this makes a nice looped or "feathered" pattern.



The middle bead in the illustration above starts with a series of straight red stripes instead of continuous loops, and the other two beads illustrate open loops (top) and closed loops with a yellow filling (bottom).

Using different stripes and dragging some parts up and some parts down can produce some very complex-looking zigzagged and "feathered" beads, but it's really just surface decoration and simple to do.



So we have evidence of beads with at least this simple style of decoration being used for a paternoster. They were likely more expensive than ordinary glass beads because of the additional labor -- certainly today these beads aren't cheap unless you make them yourself or know someone who makes their own.

Lampworked beads are something I don't know as much about as I'd like to. I have books on Egyptian and medieval glass, but there are very few beads in them and they're rather earlier than I'm really interested in. When in the Middle Ages did beads with this looped-and-dragged technique become common in Europe? Who made them and where? How far did they travel in trade? Who could afford them? I'd welcome some book recommendations if anyone knows of good sources.

More about "complex" glass beads another time.

The Cabbage-noster

An excellent thing I've experienced this past year -- through correspondence, websites and the publication of Bedes Byddyng -- is more people becoming aware of paternoster beads and their history.

One result: more people making paternosters for themselves, especially people interested in medieval history and crafts.

I love it when people send me pictures, and this is one of my favorites. This "Cabbage-noster" and photo are by laurelfactorial, who gave me permission to feature it here.

The maker says this was an early effort, but it's still very cute. Really, the beads that look like cabbages are supposed to be roses. They are flat pieces carved on the front with semi-natural-looking rose petals, from various colored semi-precious stones. I first saw these in bead catalogs a couple of years ago, and now there are pages of them in every imaginable size and material. (A couple of examples here)


Hers look especially cabbage-like because they happen to be green. I think her small ones are probably serpentine (sold as "new jade" but softer and cheaper than real jade) and the large one might be green jasper. Her Ave beads are alternating rock crystal and black onyx, and it's strung on a green silk ribbon.

Aside from being amusing, this is an exercise in creative interpretation from the rather limited historical information on paternoster beads. As I have often pointed out, there are very few surviving paternoster beads from the Middle Ages, and documentary evidence isn't exactly thick on the ground either.

The ideal in historical re-creation is to find out what "they" did in the Middle Ages and simply do the same. But when we don't know all the details (and we often don't), we have to start from what we've got and make deductions, extrapolations, and some inspired guesses. And the fact that we can't re-create things perfectly is no reason not to try.

The first question to be answered is often whether the technology and knowledge were available in a particular time and place to make it possible to create the thing we are looking at. In the case of the "Cabbage-noster," on the whole it seems likely.

We know there were beads of rock crystal, though they were much more expensive than nowadays. Black stones similar to onyx were also used for paternoster beads by the wealthy. The carved "cabbages" were also quite possible with medieval technology. While the modern "roses" are probably machine cut, the technology certainly existed to carve such things by hand, as demonstrated by other cut stones, for instance a paternoster from Salzburg of bright turquoise-colored jasper whose beads are carved with spiraling facets.

A second question to ask when re-creating historical artifacts is whether the modern re-creation is plausible -- whether it would be unremarkable if it dropped through a time machine into the century and location of the originals. This is much harder to answer, because it depends on a number of things, including artistic style and which materials are used for which parts of the artifact.

In this case we see the effect of the modern marketplace on our attempt to do reconstructions. As a general rule, the materials used for the Paters or marker beads of a rosary are higher in value or social status than those used for the Aves or ordinary beads. Today, rock crystal and onyx cost about the same as jasper, but in the Middle Ages, rock crystal was a very high-status stone, more valuable even than amber or red coral. So when we see it in period rosaries it is usually only as marker beads.

Another question is whether period rosaries used two alternating types of beads in the Aves. I think the jury is still out on this one. I certainly can't say this was "never" done, but I can only find two examples, and both of them are very doubtful. One is a hand-colored woodcut, where the beads in the kneeling people's hands have been hand-colored alternating green and white. This may very well just represent the whim of the hand wielding the paint brush.

The other is this set of beads, from a painting of about 1500 from the area around Ulm:



There certainly appear to be differences in the Ave beads here, but I'm not sure what, if anything, they represent. There seem to be at least three different colors of beads (other than the markers, which are all gold and swirly) and they don't seem to be in a regular pattern. Actually, we know this is probably not a realistically painted set of actual beads, since the plain beads are in groups of 10, 7, 10 and 6, which doesn't match any pattern of prayers I'm familiar with. So I'd be reluctant to accept this as evidence.

(I don't seem to have the full context for this painting, by the way, so if anyone can help me identify what it is and who painted it, I'd be grateful.)

As for artistic style, my main question would be whether medieval carved roses look like these: and by and large, they don't seem to. I found this example from Exeter Cathedral, probably carved in the late 13th or 14th century:



As you see, the roses are carved to show the entire face of the flower. This is different than the more modern style of the carved roses used in the "cabbage-noster" where the flower is seen from an angle, with several petals obscuring the flower center.

I don't mean to be critical of the "cabbage-noster" here; I think it's an interesting experiment and a good effort. But I wanted to use this as an example to explore some of the ways in which we approach making educated guesses about medieval prayer beads in the process of making our own.

My friends who study heraldry have evolved a rule of thumb, informally called the "rule of two weirdnesses." According to this, designing a new piece of heraldry that shows one departure from known period practice (one "weirdness") is a reasonable level of extrapolation and will probably produce something that could pass the "dropped through a time machine" test. However, when you get to two "weirdnesses," there's much more ground for doubt whether the result is really going to look acceptably medieval.

We are not medieval people and we don't know everything, so every reconstruction we make will be full of approximations and compromises. The important thing is to know what compromises we're making and to make the best ones we can.