Hey @elodieunderglass, other nerds on this webbed site, et al, can I have a signal boost for a very silly request?

you know the motif of snails in medieval art (snart)

I'm looking for a particular master's thesis on this topic, which was:

- probably written within the last 6 years

- definitely within the last 10 years

- the author is probably a woman and

- probably did the masters in the USA

Given snail art (snart) as a topic, there's a nonzero chance the author is a fellow tumblrina

🐌

Best of luck!

... Paging @kaberett @findingfeather @star-anise ?

@gallusrostromegalus, this sounds like it’s at least tangential to your wheelhouse

@cellarspider ?

Has anyone pinged @jstor yet?

Hi! We love a niche topic, and this is proving to be a bit of a challenge...

Our best result is a journal article from 1995, "Miró's Mystical Mollusks" by Corinne Mandel, viewable for those with JSTOR access. A preview of the text:

Probably not the precise thing you're looking for, but interesting stuff nonetheless!

Dr. Emily Shartrand wrote a Bachelor's thesis on snail/knight combat in medieval manuscripts in 2012, and just recently published an article on the topic.

The Ainu people are an indigenous ethnic group residing in the northern parts of the Japanese archipelago, including what is today known as Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu. Their ancestors date back to the Paleolithic (35,000 – 13,500 BCE) and Jomon periods (13,500 – 400 BCE).

This accordion style album is a copy of Ishūretsuzō (夷酋列像), also known as A Series of Paintings of Ainu Chieftains. It is a series of twelve painted portraits of Ainu elders who helped suppress the Menashi–Kunashiri rebellion in 1789 by siding with the Wajin (ethnic Japanese people, also called Yamato people). The original portraits were completed in 1790 by the Japanese artist Kakizaki Hakyō (1764–1826) and was received by the imperial court in Kyoto in 1791. The album includes a portrait of an elderly woman named Chikiriashikai, the mother of the chieftain Ikotoi, also pictured in the album.

Tan Yi-Ern Samuel, Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, is looking at this album for his paper in Professor Yukio Lippit’s seminar on East Asian Portraiture, taught with curator of Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg. Today, we opened the album to look at it in its standing accordion style. The clothing worn and other accoutrements including animal fur depicted in the portraits show the connections between the Ainu, the Wajin, China, and Russia during that time.

The Ainu people are one of the few ethnic minorities native to the Japanese islands. They have been subjected to forced assimilation and colonization by the Japanese since at least the 18th century or earlier. Their ancestors, referred to as Emishi, were pushed to the northern islands by Wajin since the 9th century. The portraits of Ainu elders in this album reveal how they might have been fashioned in the imagination of the Wajin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Sir Lady Java is a transgender rights activist, dancer, singer, comedian, and actress. When her performances were shut down by the LAPD in 1967 she organized picketing at clubs and fought in court with the support of @ACLU.

MS Thr 1777

Houghton Library, Harvard University

RIP Lady Java: https://www.them.us/story/sir-lady-java-black-trans-drag-entertainer-dancer-dead-death

Frass: debris or excrement produced by insects.

This manuscript is part of the José Agusto Escoto collection of Cuban history and literature. The 1574 manuscript in a later binding had extensive beetle damage ​from its previous life in the Caribbean when it arrived at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. There were such copious frass deposits that large sections of the 119 pages were stuck together, so much so that the text could not be read. Karen Walter, senior paper conservation technician, had a lot of work ahead of her.

The manuscript needed to be stabilized for digitization by disbinding, separating the fragile pages, re-attaching the fragments with media, and rehousing in Mylar sleeves.

It was the “separating” part of this task that worried Karen until, during disbinding, she realized that the frass was very brittle. She did a test using a Teflon tool to apply pressure through the paper on top of a small area of frass and was surprised when it crumbled away allowing her to slide a microspatula further between the two pages until it hit the next deposit. In the worst cases, this step was repeated dozens of times.

As a result, the pages were successfully separated with minimal loss of media revealing text which had been inaccessible for many years. And as a bonus, it turned out that crushing desiccated bug poop for days was a lot of fun!

For Ask A Conservator Day, bringing back one of the more heroic efforts from Harvard Library's amazing and highly skilled conservation team.

The procession of the months: the verses by Beatrice Crane; the designs by Walter Crane, [1889].

Typ 8302.89.10

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Unfinished business: this manuscript was intended to have illuminated initials, but for some reason they were never completed, which gives us an unusual opportunity to see an earlier stage in the process, preparatory sketches which would have eventually been covered over.

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313-1375. De mulieribus claris : manuscript, [ca. 1425]

MS Richardson 41

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Functional Fore-Edges

A former owner has marked off the locations of individual titles within these bound volumes of pamphlets from the 19th century. Some markings look more functional and accurate than others, but regardless of how often these indexes were used, they suggest an owner who cared about the component parts of these volumes.

The procession of the months: the verses by Beatrice Crane; the designs by Walter Crane, [1889].

Typ 8302.89.10

Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Ajeeb the Wonderful, a chess-playing automaton made in 1865. Famous opponents incl. Houdini and Roosevelt though, of course, Ajeeb had a little help from the human hidden inside him making the moves. More from the Harvard Theatre Collection here: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/cabinet-card-photographs-from-the-harvard-theatre-collection