Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick – the Sargon Vase: an enduring story, a fragile vessel

Whenever I go to a museum or exhibition I play a game. What, if I could take one thing home with me that day, would I have? 

What I’ve realised over the years is that it is rarely the most obviously beautiful or valuable item (with some notable exceptions - hello, the Crown Jewels!) that I would choose. Instead I tend to be drawn to the ‘everyday life’ items – the things which produce that moment of sudden, blinding recognition: the people who made this, used this, really lived. Despite the differences of centuries and cultures, they were, in many ways, just like me.

That’s how I felt last week, attending the British Museum’s current blockbuster exhibition I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria. Following the political history of the Assyrian Empire – which at its largest covered the area from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the mountains of western Iran - it covers a huge geographical area and, by providing the background to Ashurbanipal’s rule, several centuries of history. 

Much of the exhibition focuses on the large narrative panels setting out important episodes from the king’s reign. These are beautiful, intricate carvings which do much to illuminate the sophistication of Assyrian courtly life. They show a deep appreciation for nature and beauty, as well as telling exciting stories – primarily Ashurbanipal demonstrating his prowess against the forces of chaos through lion-hunting or by defeating human foes. I was especially taken by poor King Teumman of Elam, who in a battle scene first loses his kingly hat, then manages to get it back, only for the victorious Assyrians to take his head instead. (The curators of the exhibition mixed modern technology and the original objects in a sympathetic and intelligent way to bring out this story.) 

Battle of Til-Tuba. detail. 660-650BC.

©The Trustees of the British Museum

The king’s library, preserved on clay tablets, is also impressive, if largely incomprehensible at first glance to a modern lay audience. There is the occasional more relatable item, such as the tablet which includes both text and a 3-D model of a lung, to act as a teaching aid to three-thousand-year-ago medical students, or the tiny tablet containing royal orders, contained with an equally tiny clay envelope. You can find out more about the Library here: https://blog.britishmuseum.org/a-library-fit-for-a-king/

But it is the smaller, humbler objects which really caught my eye. The nearly three-thousand year old gaming board, with which courtiers may have whiled away their time. Were they simply bored of hanging around at court - waiting for the next lion hunt to start, say - or were they avid gamblers, whose fortunes were won and lost on the progress of the game? They may have played their game seated at tables with feet depicting beautifully realistic deer hooves or lion paws which still survive, long after the main article of furniture has vanished. What of the people who made and used the clam shells, intricately carved and turned into decorative cosmetic containers, the pride of a fashion-conscious beauty’s dressing table?

Decorated shell, probably 630/580 BC

©The Trustees of the British Museum

The final element of the exhibition was, however, the most moving: a section setting out how much of the archaeology of the region, both that in museums and in situ on sites has been destroyed in recent years by Isis/ Daesh. It’s a frightening reminder of how much that we see is but a tiny fraction of the stories that are there to be told, when so much destruction can take place in only a few short years. 

So, what would I take home with me, to take pride of place in my Cabinet of Curiosities? Obviously the answer is - "actually I wouldn’t" - but if I could have one thing, the exquisite Sargon Vase – a tiny glass vessel, made with care and skill in the eighth-century BC and still intact despite nearly three thousand years of warfare, abandonment and yet more destruction, seems a fitting symbol to me.

The Sargon Vase, 721-705BC

©The Trustees of the British Museum

Powder and Paint: Make-Up and the Medieval Woman by Catherine Hokin

"A woman without paint is like food without salt."

You might think that quote is taken from a particularly literary edition of Femail magazine's never-ending 'name and shame celebrities caught without make-up' feature but it was actually coined by the Roman philosopher Plautus around 254 BC. I offer it as an illustration of both our ongoing fascination with cosmetics (now a $170 billion a year global business) and the attitudes and social connotations that affect its wearing.

 Roman face cream with visible finger-marks

Although they did not match the colourful heights of the Egyptians whose practices they copied, the Roman women Plautus associated with wore a lot of make-up. Their heavily-blackened eyebrows would not look out of place in a twenty-first century city centre, although they would have been framing faces whitened with a chalk and vinegar paste rather than apparently darkened with builders' tea. Cheeks and lips were highlighted in pink or red, thick eyeliner was essential and it was common for wealthy women to employ a cosmetic artist (a cosmatae) a la the Kardashians. 

Not only was make-up heavily used (pun intended), in both ancient Rome and ancient Greece, sporting a visibly painted face appears to have been acceptable across the social ranks. For medieval British women, however, whose lives were increasingly governed by the complex and judgemental rules of the Church, the picture was far more complex. 

 Visible cheek and lip paint

Whatever the current debate gracing the pages of the Huffington Post about the politics of wearing/not wearing cosmetics, it is a truth surely universally acknowleged that wearers use them to look healthier/more rested/more 'attractive'. I have yet to meet anyone who puts their slap on to look worse. It is no surprise, therefore, that the male clerics of the medieval church would instantly equate paint and powder with harlotry: if a woman is temptation enough, goodness knows what madness an enhanced woman could unleash. Based on this logic, cosmetics were banned for quite some time outside brothels. Ordinary women, however, continued to use make-up as is clear from the statuary, paintings and writings of the time. 'Ladies red powder' (made from dried and ground safflowers or angelica leaves or brazilwood chips soaked in rosewater) is mentioned in a number of sources including a twelfth-century poem which complains that statues are going undecorated because the women have used up all the paint. 

Now I know my fiction revolves around rediscovering hidden women's voices but even I cannot pretend the women of medieval England were strutting round plastered in full war-paint in open revolt against the Church and just no one thought to mention it, so what was going on? The answer: very clever rule-bending. Marriage, and avoiding the sin of adultery, was key to maintaining an ordered society: if allowing a wife to make herself attractive to her husband (particularly if she had been afflicted by a disfiguring illness) maintained this, even the clerics could see they had created a problem by condemning cosmetics quite so harshly. So they began to make exceptions to the rules, and women began to bend them: the 'natural look' was born.

 The Natural Look

Unlike the earlier intentionally visible cosmetic fashions, medieval faces can look surprisingly colourless - there were none of the bright pigments that characterised ancient Egyptian make-up and eye-shadow does not appear to have been worn. This look was all about hiding (both the flaws and the fact you were doing it) and enhancing, in this case not just your looks but your status. A pale face signified you did not work outside, a clear one showed you had not been marked by disease. Rather like a modern serum, skin preparation could start with a strawberry juice wash to remove redness or a wet amethyst crystal rubbed against spots, before the all-important paling (a lightening as opposed to the more extreme whitening seen in later periods) could begin. Twelfth century recipes include ground lily roots to whiten the skin but the favourite method used wheaten flour: this would be soaked in water for 15 days, then strained and crystallized to give a white powder that was mixed to a foundation-like paste using rosewater and patted on with a cloth. By the end of the medieval period, the whitening powder had become lead-based and highly toxic to the wearer - in the case of the renaissance Aqua Toffana it had become arsenic-based and far more dangerous to the husbands invited to kiss it but that's another story.

 The medieval make-up artist

Mouths and cheeks would be tackled next with wine or adaptations of the ubiquitous red powder added to lip balms made from beeswax or suet. Apparently a common beauty trick was also to rub a cut lemon across your lips to make them redder. Weirdly this works (I tried it) and the tingle was quite fun but it may not be the most practical thing to keep in your make-up bag! 

It must have been a time-consuming beauty routine. All the preparations seem to have a long drying time and all the tweezing required to maintain the high hairline and thin brows must have taken hours and goes some way to explain why some women resorted to quicklime powders to remove hair. Please do not try this one at home: the whitening effect is created by revealing bone. 

Perhaps there was a subversive element to some of the painting and powdering, I hope there was and at least one of my medieval characters will be wielding her face-brush with as much defiance as her sword. What I love, however, is the one thing that really hasn't changed over the centuries: achieving the 'natural look' still takes forever. As the playwrite Tracy Letts put it so neatly in August: Osage County: "The only woman who was pretty enough to go without make-up was Elizabeth Taylor, and she wore a ton."

Historical Sources for Historical Fiction - Gillian Polack

Last month I made a rash promise. I promised I’d talk about sources. Now that my mind is on other things, I’ll still talk about sources, but not in the way I originally intended. I’m writing a book on the relationship that fiction writers enjoy with history, and that’s colouring everything I do. It definitely colours this post.

Compared with modern history, there are so few sources for the Middle Ages. ‘Compared with modern history’ are tricky words, however. There are a lot of sources. A vast number and range. They’re not always obvious, however, nor are they easy to interpret. And the reason we look at them shapes how we interpret them. Some of this I talked about last month.

Last month I focussed on cosmetics. 

Our main sources for cosmetics right now are a very small number of key manuscripts. These manuscripts talk about what cosmetics women used, they prescribe how women should behave, and they that give recipes for them. We’re not talking about that many documents, in total, and they cover the whole of Western Europe. This means that, from them, we don’t know what cosmetics a given woman would use. Big statements like “All women wore lead paint” are based on a tiny number of sources. A pale face in a picture doesn't mean the woman in the picture is depicted as wearing lead paint. I found you an example of this:

There are also some rather wonderful archaeological remains. Combs are my personal favourite, but they aren’t the only archaeological survival, by any means. One of the big lessons I learned when I worked on The Middle Ages Unlocked, was that on some subjects Katrin (my archaeologist co-writer) knew many things that I did not. My archaeology was a mere two years at university and was a very long time ago. The knowledge differential between me and someone who works in a particular field and knows their stuff is vast and full of chasms. 

Even the stuff Katrin only half-knows is more than what I know in her field. I hope that the same applies to mine and that she was sufficiently awed by my historical understanding for the world to be balanced, but that’s somewhat irrelevant here. What’s relevant is that archaeology is constantly growing and changing and dipping into a popular work won’t give you nearly as much information as learning how to interpret reports of digs or analyses of types of finds. Those finds won’t tell you how someone wore make-up, but they will give you more information about the devices used to make oneself beautiful, and that information helps us flesh out those rare mentions in manuscripts.

The trick is, then, not just knowing what kind of sources are out there, but gaining access to them and putting them in their wider cultural perspective.

One of my favourite websites for small archaeological finds is finds.org. It’s an online database of the small things found by various people in the UK. Each find has a description, but you’ll not get detailed analysis of how it fits in with other finds. Whether this brooch is typical or this tool is normal for a time and place isn’t something you’ll find out without checking what the experts have to say. Sources speak, but they speak much better when they’re interpreted by those with vast amounts of knowledge and experience.

What I do, when I’m researching for a novel is use a mixture of primary sources and the studies of them by those who know more than me. In the happy (but small) areas where I’ve done my own research and I am the researcher, I can bask in the sunshine of actually knowing what I’m doing, but most of the time I argue with myself and try to expand my understanding of the place and time I’m writing about, so that I can use studies critically and not misinterpret the sources too badly.

How does this relate to historical sources for fiction? Intimately. A source is as only as good as the person who looks at it. If you look at a beautiful manuscript and have no idea of the language it’s in or that it’s in a script that predates your period by five hundred years or that it was written by the exact person you want to star in your amazing tale, then it’s a huge waste. 

Sources are only as good as the person using them and are always biased at our (the user’s) end and at the original (writer’s) end. Interpretations are only as good as the brain and thought and understanding of the person using them. And that person needs to remember (I write notes to myself, for it’s a continual reminder, not a once-off) that people in the past were real and had private lives and were grumpy in the morning or tired at night and had to go and milk the cows when they’d rather be writing and… Sometimes we get annotations or comments in the manuscripts that tell us these things, and those notes are writing gold. Most of the time we have to look very carefully at a list or a letter and work out who the writer was from what they didn’t say as much as from what they do say.

That’s why I decided against giving a list of sources in this post. I thought it might be more useful to talk about the most important factor in someone’s research: how they think and discover and interpret.

So many writers want to cut research corners. They ask me for digests of what I know. “Summarise twenty years of your work in three minutes, please, for that’s all the time I can spare this subject.” This is not a wise approach for a writer. The trick with sources is not accessing them: it’s understanding them.

My research (for the ‘I’m-not-a-fiction-writer’ side of me) is generally text-based. Medievally speaking, for me, this mostly means literature. There are bunches of non-literary Medieval written sources, hidden away in archives, staring us in the face as the charters for towns and the underpinning of various family histories. I tend not to work with these for my academic side, for I am addicted to stories.

What I do as a novelist, is read general works on the subject until I understand where current research is going, how it interprets that place and time and what spin it gives to sources. I collect primary sources and then read them myself wherever I can. All of this recent experience comes from me working on a period so alien to me that I’ve had to start from first principles – I can’t trust my common sense, because my common sense will be trumped by my preconceived assumptions at every point, and preconceived assumptions tend to make a rather predictable work of fiction. Also a shallow one.

So, I’ve read a bunch of works by historians and archaeologists and have a fair general knowledge about the setting for this novel I’m working on. I’ve started reading primary sources and taking notes about particular tidbits that’d be handy for the novel. This is my actual beginning. From here I’m working on turning my new adventure into understanding of a deep enough sort that it can inform my novel.

It’s the difference between looking at a source and looking into a source and understanding it. 

I keep using the word ‘understanding’ because that’s the way to get the sources to talk back, to reveal their information and to let them help you bring the novel to life. It’s the difference between giving a reader flat information about a place and a time and giving a reader a lively story where the time and place is integral to the story.

On History and Medieval Cosmetics - Gillian Polack

I asked my readers for suggestions for this month’s post, and I’m torn between telling you about Esther Abrahams and medieval cosmetics. Of the suggestions, those were the two that have the most interesting stories. 

I chose cosmetics. Not because I can give you chapter and verse on them (which I won’t today), but because in research terms, they’re fascinating. We don’t know much and we can’t know much and yet what we know opens so many doors for us and shows us how women lived. Next month I’ll talk about sources for cosmetics and for other aspects of medieval life: that’s when I’ll point to where to find out more. Today is all about us, and how we see history. Cosmetics are my excuse for talking about my favourite subject.

First, the stereotypes. 

I often feel that I can’t talk about the Middle Ages without breaking down a thousand walls of false assumptions. We all own the Middle Ages. It’s one of the most popular periods in Western history. Owning it doesn’t mean we understand it. Owning it doesn’t mean we know it.

How does this relate to cosmetics? 

We filter our interpretation of evidence about medieval cosmetics through several vectors. One is what we think historians have to say about them. 

Why do I say “What we think”? This question is because I’m full of rhetorical questions today. Obviously I got out of the rhetorical side of bed this morning: the rhetorical side of bed is the side that doesn’t face the wall, it’s the one that forces you to go in that direction. And my brain is a butterfly brain, and it would be helpful if I stayed on topic.

"What we think" refers to the fact that we all carry mental images of the work historians do. There is overlap between these mental images and the actual work historians do, but sometimes that overlap is less than we realise. Kelly Gardiner discusses this in her analysis of the debate from the Historical Novel Society’s Australasian conference recently. She quotes me as saying quite straightforward things because it was a debate and we were all full of soundbites, but the reality is more complicated and can't be summarised in soundbites. The baseline however, is that only a very few people can keep up fully with current debates on what history actually is to us and what cultural functions it serves. These people can often be found between the pages of journals such as History and Theory and Rethinking History, their ideas pressed flat to meet the pages halfway. Most people think history is something simpler and grander. Those who like stability in how they see history (for the theory is constantly changing) are likely to fall into following a particular path of historical thinking. One of those paths is a rather nineteenth century variety. I encounter this latter one a lot, which is why I used it as an example at the debate.

The reason I encounter it a lot is because it’s much easier to relate to historical fiction than the  new histories are. It produces narratives and story without too much angst. It’s straightforward and it has emotional appeal. 

It assumes a static past, where facts can be proven and where we know where we stand. We can argue “Richard III was innocent” or “He was guilty” much more easily using this model, for instance. It’s a popular one because of this. The values system implied by simply demanding that innocence or guilt be proven is part of this way of thinking about history. It’s much easier to interpret history when we can use our own judgement.

The trouble is that history is more complicated than this.

Surely cosmetics aren’t complicated? (I want a live audience so that I can ask someone to ask me this. Then it will be obvious when I’m asking rhetorical questions.) The trouble is that everything’s complicated. We’re reconstructing the past to make sense of it for ourselves. We’re using available evidence. And evidence can include value judgements and our interpretation of evidence can include value judgements.

The ‘fact’ I’ve seen quoted in various places that all medieval women used lead-based paint to make their cheeks white and beautiful, for instance, seems to come from just one source and that source is the same one that hates women for using urea and fish scales (which we still use in makeup:  urea softens things and fish scales make them glitter). The descriptions of cosmetics in his writing is part of a statement about what women ought to be doing and just how mucky things are. The (male) writer is trying to present negatives, and so of course he uses the less enticing methods of beautification. His view of the world colours how he described female beauty, and so does the underlying position he took in this particular piece of writing. Polemic shades the way we all see cosmetics when we read his work unless we recognise it and say “I know what he’s doing” and make allowances or find other sources, or both.

The same applies to statues and paintings. We’re seeing the artist’s interpretation of what they want to carve or paint. In the Middle Ages this was mostly ideal beauty, so we know more about the ideal than about the everyday. The ideal female beauty in portraits and carvings matches very closely to the way a fairy is described in twelfth century French literature, so this is how I teach it. We have Hollywood and advertising. They had Arthurian romances and knights discovering their dream woman: beautiful and rich and powerful and somewhat magic.

Then, elsewhere (in recipes and formulae for medicines) we get an inkling of some of the makeup people actually used. We have toothpaste recipes and we have eyeliner and… we don’t know who used these recipes, or how often or under what circumstances.

Elsewhere, we hear that prostitutes use too much rouge and too much powder and paint their eyes. The implication is that bad women are identifiable and that cosmetics are an important tool for such identification. I’ve wondered for a while whether the warning is to identify prostitutes because they’re providers of services, or because they should be avoided, or because they’re quite possibly a really solid source of local gossip. I think it depends on the viewer. I also think that there are more options than these three. Which one we choose as our own depends on how we read the source, or how we read the information taken from the source and places elsewhere (in a modern text). There are many medieval readings of medieval texts, and there are at least as many modern readings. 

Consensus can be forced. If we agree that only prostitutes wear makeup from that evidence then some late medieval paintings of noble women are of prostitutes. One source isn’t enough to understand a society.

The reality of understanding any object or practice in any period isn’t through one source. It’s not the fairy’s beauty or the “Thou shalt not decorate” of the conservative. It’s all of these and a whole heap more. Historians discuss continually. Interpretations are a moveable feast. It isn’t one interpretation. It’s a series of linked interpretations over time, some feeding into each other and supporting a strong common view and some standing bravely alone.

Fifty years ago we knew almost nothing about medieval cosmetics. Now we are gradually reaching the stage (though we’re not there yet) where we know enough to trace changes over time and place and maybe begin to form some kind of consensus. This is what those changes in the way we view history have given us. We can include archaeological work into our voyage of discovery, and understand how important medieval values are to interpreting evidence, and how important the values of earlier historians are to the way evidence has been interpreted and we can draw our own conclusions from bringing it all together.

This is where I bring things together myself and admit that I chose cosmetics because it’s a good excuse to talk about how wonderful historical study is and how complicated and how important it is to question our own stance at every point. We can’t interpret history unless we have a narrative for it and we can’t have a narrative for it until we understand the narratives we give ourselves. Unless we question the very ground we stand on, our narratives are always linked to consensus narratives. 

I have personal codes for reminding myself of these things. Mine for this is “Not all medieval women who wore makeup were damned.” This is because so many of our assumptions concerning the Middle Ages forget that religious condemnation of makeup wasn’t universal. The code reminds me that I don’t have answers yet, just many questions and a bit of data. That’s why I love history: one never stops learning.