Tag Archives: ink

Art, Digital History, Early Modern, Education, Experimentation, Ingredients, Libraries, Archives & Museums, Manuscripts, Material History, Posts, Teaching Resources

Red Thread: A Co-curated Digital Site with Students

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By Vera Keller, University of Oregon

Image credit: Gart der Gesundheit, Hortus sanitatis (1485), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon. Burgess 109, p. ccxlviii.

The Red Thread site grew out of an interdisciplinary, Honors College seminar, Global History of Color. I made colour the focus of a course for four reasons:

  • it intersects with my own research into early modern experimentation with color;
  • it is a vehicle for teaching a course that is global, interdisciplinary, and material;
  • it is not too intimidating for students;
  • and I thought it would be a way to connect disparate corners of campuses and to build a public intellectual community.

Everyone knows that artisanal production is big in Oregon, but there is little connection between wider public interests in historical craft practices and academic research on those topics. When it comes to the study of material culture, we not only have under-used collections of objects at UO, but also many unique and wonderful resources around campus–an Urban Farm, Craft Center, and Beach Conservation Lab. We also have a highly skilled, curious and passionate local public of artists, crafters, homesteaders and farmers. What we don’t have is a way to connect and strengthen these various constituencies, especially in a way that places the University and historical research at the center of this connection.

Particularly as a faculty member at a public university, I feel that engaging the university with a wider public is part of its mission. Historically, recipe collections have served as forms of social media tracing community building and sharing across different domains of knowledge. At a moment when face-to-face interaction, civil discourse, and communities are weakening on a national scale, we can draw on the strength of this historical genre to engage ourselves, our students, and the public in a collective endeavour to build intellectual community.

Color proved to be an accessible way for both students and the public to engage with primary sources, material practices, and historical artifacts. In the course, we focused on a range of reds: ochre, coral, cinnabar, vermilion, kermes, madder, cochineal, Tyrian purple, brazilwood, logwood, colloidal gold, ruby glass, and red-painted porcelain. Together, we studied the history of these pigments through the lenses of the history of science, the history of medicine, economic history, cultural history and material culture. Each student focused on a single material object from campus collections, which became the subject of their exhibition labels for a co-curated exhibition and a final research paper.

We visited three campus collections: Special Collections and University Archives, the Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH)  and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA), with strengths respectively in European, Native American and Asian materials. Through a campus grant for teaching initiatives (the Williams Foundation), I invited a guest speaker to campus for a public event. Marie-France Lemay, the paper conservator at Yale Library, brought with her the Yale Traveling Scriptorium — a traveling showcase of the materials found in premodern books and manuscripts. With Lemay, we explored the Scriptorium alongside rare books and manuscripts from our campus collection. Lemay also demonstrated a cochineal recipe, which highlighted for students the wide range of materials and processes involved in producing premodern books.

Image credit: Sa’di, Gulistan and Bustan, 1600-1699?, Edward Burgess manuscript collection 043, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon. MS 43.

The course produced several intertwined outcomes that were oriented simultaneously to the classroom and to the public. The Museum of Natural and Cultural History hosted a small exhibition of the student-researched objects drawn from their collections. A selection of all the students’ work is also featured on a site I was able to build through a grant from our campus Digital Scholarship Center. All the books and manuscripts were completely digitized as part of the grant. My aims in building the site were to advertise our under-utilized campus collections; to highlight my students’ research; and to produce a resource that could be used in other courses and by the public.

With remaining funds from the Williams grant, I built our own version of the Traveling Scriptorium, with help from UO’s conservators Marilyn Mohr and Ashlee Weitlauf. The Scriptorium is a case full of nearly 100 materials. We experimented a lot with packaging and labelling its various parts. Through my use of the Scriptorium in various classroom settings, we tested the ease and rapidity through which it could be unpacked and repacked. When we were satisfied with it, we donated the Traveling Scriptorium to our campus library, where it is now cataloged and can be checked out by faculty for a week at a time. 

The Travelling Scriptorium.

At the same time that I was working on developing the digital Red Thread site and the physical teaching resource, the Traveling Scriptorium, I also worked on an on-going third initiative, “Farm to Book” , a collaboration between myself, the Beach Conservation Lab and the Urban Farm.  We experimented with historical ink recipes drawn from my archival researches with conservators of the Beach Lab. We also planted ingredients for inks and dyes at our Urban Farm.

We’ve held several highly successful public events at the Craft Center and at the new “Dream Lab” in our library where members of the public could craft with our inks produced according to historical recipes, practice calligraphy, hear student presentations on their historical research, explore the Traveling Scriptorium and the Red Thread site, see selections from our rare book materials, and learn about the history of our campus collections. We even served cochineal cake!

Rose and pansy inks at Craft Center Event. UO Libraries, Tayler Bincandi.

My hope is that the Red Thread site can be used in tandem with the Traveling Scriptorium in other classes or in public presentations, either in preparation for a visit to our campus collections, or in the case of large class sizes, in lieu of a group visit. Pairing the hands-on Scriptorium with the digital resource proved to be a great way to minimize some of the limitations of digital surrogates by giving participants a sense of the material constituents of the original books and manuscripts. I used the site and the Scriptorium, for example, during a presentation for a program bringing high school students from underrepresented backgrounds to campus.

The tactile nature of the Traveling Scriptorium offered a great way to draw people in, as members of the public found it fascinating to handle all the little bottles of materials. I purchased one seventeenth-century volume (for less than $100) to include as part of the Scriptorium, so that an actual rare work could travel to events off campus. Being able to hold a four-hundred year-old book always has an immediate effect upon public audiences. The initial wonder and curiosity sparked by these hands-on interactions often then provoked questions and deeper discussions.

Do you think that there is something to gain from connecting classroom instruction on historical practices of making with makers across campus and from your local community? If so, how would you do it?

Tales from the Archives

Tales from the Archives: Pen, Ink, and Pedagogy

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This month, This Recipes Project is six years old. This September also marks our fourth Teaching Series, first launched by co-editor Amanda Herbert in 2014. This post comes from that first series, as Amanda provides some fantastic advice for bringing recipes–and more specifically ink–into the classroom.

By Amanda E. Herbert

Pen and Ink Lab in HIST 488 at Christopher Newport University. Photo by the author.
Pen and Ink Lab in HIST 488 at Christopher Newport University. Photo by the author.

I teach an undergraduate seminar on gender in early modern Britain, and throughout the semester, students learn about the ways that people in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries worked to differentiate women from men.  We talk about early modern ideas on the human body: Galen’s four humors, the two-seed versus the one-seed model of conception, and “reversible” reproductive systems.  We also talk about the ways that early modern people mapped gender onto the workings of the human brain, ascribing mental acuity to men, and emotional intensity to women.  All of these lessons help to show students that gender is a social construct, and that it is historically variable.  But the exercise that truly brings these concepts home is one on education.  After providing an overview of the topics that were taught to early modern children, I divide the classroom:  half learn to write like girls, and half learn to write like boys.

I tell the students that they are going to learn about early modern education and material culture by writing with quill and ink.  The students think that they are being given identical materials for this “hands-on” exercise.  I distribute goose quills and powdered ink packets (both of which are available for sale via the Colonial Williamsburg website), and I pass out model alphabets from the seventeenth century, so that the students can form their letters in the style used by early modern people.  But what they don’t realize is that they have received separate models: one alphabet comes from a guidebook for young boys, and another alphabet comes from a guidebook for young girls.

With their alphabets in hand, the students are then set a task: they are asked to copy a recipe for early modern ink.  This receipt, which I transcribed from a commonplace book held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is entitled “To make Inke Verie Good.”  It was created by Anne (Granville) Dewes in the seventeenth century:

Take a quart of snow or raine water and a quart of Beere vinegre, a pound of galls bruised halfe a pound of coperis [protosulphates of copper, iron, and zinc], and 4 ounces of gum bruised; first mix your water and vinegre together, and putt itt into an earthen Jug, (then put in the galls) stirring itt 2 or 3 times a day letting it stand 8 or 9 daies and then put in your coperas and Gumme as you use it straine itt. &c.

As the students mix their ink, shape their quills, and start copying their recipes in “early modern style” handwriting, we talk about the ingredients contained in the recipe, as well as their cost and accessibility to people of both high and low status.  We talk about the time and labor that must have been involved in the production of ink.  We discuss the ways that ink was used in the home, and the gallons of ink that must have been consumed by early modern print shops.  We consider who made ink (both women and men) and who used ink (both women and men).  Ink was a ubiquitous part of life for early modern Britons, as essential to communication as are our own smartphones and tablets today.

About fifteen minutes before class ends, I ask the students to compare their transcriptions, and they are always surprised at the differences: half the class has written in one style, and half in another.  That’s because in early modern Britain, girls were encouraged to learn “Italic hand,” a style of writing with clearly defined, beautifully sculpted, decorative letters.  But boys were taught “Secretary hand,” a flowing, connected style intended for those who, it was implied, wrote with urgency, volume, and haste.  Realizing the ramifications of this – that although women and men used the same tools and the same recipes to communicate, early modern men’s words were seen as authoritative, while early modern women’s were viewed as window-dressing – brings our lesson on gender and education to a powerful close.

*****
Interested in early modern ink, or early modern education and handwriting?  The Folger Shakespeare Library has some excellent resources:

[1] Anne (Granville) Dewes, Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, ca. 1640-1750, V.a.430 f. 42, Folger Shakespeare Library.  You can access Dewes’ ink recipe via the Folger’s Digital Image Collection: http://luna.folger.edu

[2] Dr. Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts for the Folger, has written a great piece on education and early modern handwriting for the Folger’s Collation blog: http://collation.folger.edu/2013/05/learning-to-write-the-alphabet

Experimentation, Ingredients, Manuscripts, Posts, Students

Making Ink

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Making Ink

By Amy L. Tigner

ink-and-quillI had been thinking for a couple of years that I would like to try to make ink the early modern way. I had run across several recipes for ink over the years in my research of seventeenth-century receipt books and I had read Amanda Herbert’s blog in which she discusses making ink in an undergraduate class.  I was also interested to find blogs in which scholars were teaching reconstruction in their classrooms, such as Patty Baker and Laurence Totelin, who are making ancient recipes for a MOOC video (read about it here), or Amanda Herbert, who had her students try tasting early modern hot chocolate (here). Finally, last fall I had a chance to teach both an undergraduate and a graduate class entitled “Early Modern Women’s Writing and Literary Practice” and decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to make ink.  

As it turns out, my interest in making ink comes at a time when scholars are in the process of reconstructing historical recipes, such as Marjolijn Bol, who has made Leonardo da Vinci’s Walnut Oil and ancient Greek and Egyptian recipes for fake gem stones.  Alyssa Connell and Marissa Nicossi write a blog that is all about cooking from early modern recipes in Cooking with the Archives.  Some larger reconstruction projects are also occurring around the world: ARTECHNE in Utrecht is working to rediscover historical art conservation techniques; and The Making and Knowing Project, which is interested in reconstructing art and craft techniques and recipes from the sixteenth century. The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective is working on a digital humanities project that is transcribing early modern recipe manuscripts that will eventually be available online; they often cook the recipes they are transcribing.

Back to my own project: the process of ink making turned out to be more expensive and more time-consuming that I had imagined, though both of these factors were also likely similar in the period and in the end a great learning experience.   I cheated a bit by looking on some ink-making websites that were quite helpful (especially, this one), as it explained about the chemistry of the ink making and also translated some of the recipe terms, such as “copperas” into “ferrous sulfate.”  The site also had links for purchasing ingredients.  I considered several different early modern recipes, but I finally decided on one of the several recipes in the Mary Grenville family receipt book manuscript (Folger V.a.430), because it was in English (some of the recipes are in Spanish) and it was the simplest in terms of ingredients, steps, and time.

granville-to-make-ink-very-well-p-42

To make=Inke=Verie Good

Take a quart of snow or raine water and a quart of Beerevinegre, a pound of galls bruised, halfe a pound of coperis, and 4 ounces of gum bruised, first mix your water and vinegre together, and put itinto an earthen Jug, then put in the galls, stirring itt 2 or 3 times a day letting it stand 8 or 9 daies and then put in your coperas and Gumme, as you use it straine itt.

Most recipes use some kind of wine or vinegar that keeps the ink from molding, but this particular one uses beer vinegar, which I discovered is quite easy to make by combining the “mother” of cider vinegar and a bottle of beer, then letting it ferment for several days. As for the galls, I had been collecting oak galls on my walks in the spring and had several gallon zip lock bags full, but when I weighed them I had only about 6 ounces—not close enough to the one pound required. It turns out that Texas oak galls are the big, light, and fluffy apple gall rather than the smaller but denser traditional iron oak gall.

shumard-red-oaks-apple-gall

Not trusting the Texas apple galls would work, I ordered a pound from Amazon for $45, and they arrived from Guatemala (link here):

iron-oak-galls

These I “bruised” with a meat hammer and then combined with the beer vinegar and rainwater. Because the mixture needed to “stand” for 8 or 9 days, I decided that I would do this in advance, so that we could simply add the final ingredients in class and try out the ink immediately.  I reserved the big fluffy apple oak galls for students to pound in class. The last two ingredients: gum arabic and the coperias (ferrous sulfate or green vitriol) I also ordered online from Amazon and Natural Pigments, respectively. I knew that gum arabic takes a while to dissolve, so I decided that I would pre-dissolve the crystals, first by grinding them into small pieces in a mortar and pestle and then placing them in hot water and finally I strained out the impurities. That process took about 24 hours.

ink-making

On the ink-making day, students assembled the ingredients following the recipe. The most surprising and exciting part was adding the ferrous sulfate, which turned the formerly beer-brown liquid into the blackest black.

dsc01576

We then strained the liquid and poured them into old spice bottles. The recipe made enough for each student to have a bottle.

dsc01590The ink turned out to be very good in terms of viscosity and color–and I’d argue better than the run of the mill India ink you can buy on the market.  Students really loved the project, especially as they were actively involved, and I am certainly planning to make ink the next time I teach a manuscripts class, though perhaps I will try a different recipe.

Amy L. Tigner teaches in the English Department at the University of Texas, Arlington.

Early Modern, Education, Ingredients, Teaching Resources, Women and Gender

Pen, Ink, and Pedagogy

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By Amanda E. Herbert

Pen and Ink Lab in HIST 488 at Christopher Newport University. Photo by the author.
Pen and Ink Lab in HIST 488 at Christopher Newport University. Photo by the author.

I teach an undergraduate seminar on gender in early modern Britain, and throughout the semester, students learn about the ways that people in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries worked to differentiate women from men.  We talk about early modern ideas on the human body: Galen’s four humors, the two-seed versus the one-seed model of conception, and “reversible” reproductive systems.  We also talk about the ways that early modern people mapped gender onto the workings of the human brain, ascribing mental acuity to men, and emotional intensity to women.  All of these lessons help to show students that gender is a social construct, and that it is historically variable.  But the exercise that truly brings these concepts home is one on education.  After providing an overview of the topics that were taught to early modern children, I divide the classroom:  half learn to write like girls, and half learn to write like boys.

I tell the students that they are going to learn about early modern education and material culture by writing with quill and ink.  The students think that they are being given identical materials for this “hands-on” exercise.  I distribute goose quills and powdered ink packets (both of which are available for sale via the Colonial Williamsburg website), and I pass out model alphabets from the seventeenth century, so that the students can form their letters in the style used by early modern people.  But what they don’t realize is that they have received separate models: one alphabet comes from a guidebook for young boys, and another alphabet comes from a guidebook for young girls.

With their alphabets in hand, the students are then set a task: they are asked to copy a recipe for early modern ink.  This receipt, which I transcribed from a commonplace book held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is entitled “To make Inke Verie Good.”  It was created by Anne (Granville) Dewes in the seventeenth century:

Take a quart of snow or raine water and a quart of Beere vinegre, a pound of galls bruised halfe a pound of coperis [protosulphates of copper, iron, and zinc], and 4 ounces of gum bruised; first mix your water and vinegre together, and putt itt into an earthen Jug, (then put in the galls) stirring itt 2 or 3 times a day letting it stand 8 or 9 daies and then put in your coperas and Gumme as you use it straine itt. &c.

As the students mix their ink, shape their quills, and start copying their recipes in “early modern style” handwriting, we talk about the ingredients contained in the recipe, as well as their cost and accessibility to people of both high and low status.  We talk about the time and labor that must have been involved in the production of ink.  We discuss the ways that ink was used in the home, and the gallons of ink that must have been consumed by early modern print shops.  We consider who made ink (both women and men) and who used ink (both women and men).  Ink was a ubiquitous part of life for early modern Britons, as essential to communication as are our own smartphones and tablets today.

About fifteen minutes before class ends, I ask the students to compare their transcriptions, and they are always surprised at the differences: half the class has written in one style, and half in another.  That’s because in early modern Britain, girls were encouraged to learn “Italic hand,” a style of writing with clearly defined, beautifully sculpted, decorative letters.  But boys were taught “Secretary hand,” a flowing, connected style intended for those who, it was implied, wrote with urgency, volume, and haste.  Realizing the ramifications of this – that although women and men used the same tools and the same recipes to communicate, early modern men’s words were seen as authoritative, while early modern women’s were viewed as window-dressing – brings our lesson on gender and education to a powerful close.

*****
Interested in early modern ink, or early modern education and handwriting?  The Folger Shakespeare Library has some excellent resources:

[1] Anne (Granville) Dewes, Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, ca. 1640-1750, V.a.430 f. 42, Folger Shakespeare Library.  You can access Dewes’ ink recipe via the Folger’s Digital Image Collection: http://luna.folger.edu

[2] Dr. Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts for the Folger, has written a great piece on education and early modern handwriting for the Folger’s Collation blog: http://collation.folger.edu/2013/05/learning-to-write-the-alphabet