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In the final programme , Professor Bartlett lays bare the brutal framework of the medieval class system.Inequality was a part of the natural order: the life of serfs was little better than those of animals, while the knight's code of chivalry was based more on caste solidarity than morality.
This undated photo released by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, shows a piece of lapis lazuli. During the European Middle Ages, Afghanistan was the only known source of the rare blue stone which at the time was ground up and used as a pigment. Modern-day scientists who examined the 1,000 year-old remains of a middle-aged woman in Germany discovered the semi-precious stone in the tartar on her teeth. From that, they concluded the woman was an artist involved in creating illuminated manuscripts, a task usually associated with monks. The find is considered the most direct evidence yet of a woman taking part in the making of high-quality illuminated manuscripts, the lavishly illustrated religious and secular texts of the Middle Ages. And it corroborates other findings that suggest female artisans were not as rare as previously thought. (Christina Warinner/Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History via AP)
This undated photo released by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, shows a piece of lapis lazuli. During the European Middle Ages, Afghanistan was the only known source of the rare blue stone which at the time was ground up and used as a pigment. Modern-day scientists who examined the 1,000 year-old remains of a middle-aged woman in Germany discovered the semi-precious stone in the tartar on her teeth. From that, they concluded the woman was an artist involved in creating illuminated manuscripts, a task usually associated with monks. The find is considered the most direct evidence yet of a woman taking part in the making of high-quality illuminated manuscripts, the lavishly illustrated religious and secular texts of the Middle Ages. And it corroborates other findings that suggest female artisans were not as rare as previously thought. (Christina Warinner/Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — About 1,000 years ago, a woman in Germany died and was buried in an unmarked grave in a church cemetery. No record of her life survived, and no historian had reason to wonder who she was. But when modern scientists examined her dug-up remains, they discovered something peculiar — brilliant blue flecks in the tartar on her teeth.
And that has cast new light on the role of women and art in medieval Europe.
The blue particles, it turns out, were lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone that was highly prized at the time for its vivid color and was ground up and used as a pigment.
From that, scientists concluded the woman was an artist involved in creating illuminated manuscripts — a task usually associated with monks.
The discovery is considered the most direct evidence yet of a particular woman taking part in the making of high-quality illuminated manuscripts, the lavishly illustrated religious and secular texts of the Middle Ages. And it corroborates other findings that suggest female artisans were not as rare as previously thought.
“It’s kind of a bombshell for my field — it’s so rare to find material evidence of women’s artistic and literary work in the Middle Ages,” said Alison Beach, a professor of medieval history at Ohio State University. “Because things are much better documented for men, it’s encouraged people to imagine a male world. This helps us correct that bias. This tooth opens a window on what activities women also were engaged in.”
Though her name remains unknown, the woman buried in the German churchyard was probably a highly skilled artist and scribe.
Ultramarine, as the powdered form of lapis lazuli is known, was the finest and most expensive pigment in medieval Europe, more valuable even than gold. The stone came from a single source: the mines of Afghanistan. Because of the cost of carrying it to Europe, ultramarine was reserved for the most important and well-funded artistic projects.
“If she was using lapis lazuli, she was probably very, very good,” said Beach, co-author of a report published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. “She must have been artistically skilled and experienced.”
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The researchers pored over old painting manuals to form a hypothesis as to how the woman got blue flecks in her teeth: She periodically licked the tip of her brush to bring it to a fine point for detailed work.
“If you picture someone in the Middle Ages making a fine illuminated manuscript, you probably picture a monk — a man,” Beach said. That’s in part because monasteries kept better records than female religious organizations did, and because men were more likely to sign their works, she said.
In recent years, scholars have identified indirect documentary evidence that women participated in making the expensive, handcrafted books that religious communities used before the invention of the printing press. For instance, a 12th-century German letter commissioned a liturgical book to be produced by “sister ‘N.’”
The scientists arrived at the latest discovery by accident. A building renovation in 1989 uncovered the woman’s tomb, along with those of other women who were apparently part of a female religious community attached to the church. Radiocarbon dating of the skeleton revealed the 45- to 60-year-old woman died between 997 and 1162.
In 2011, a team of scientists decided to use the fairly new technique of analyzing hardened deposits on the teeth — tartar — to gather information on long-ago diets. Microscopic traces of ancient wheat starch, for example, can be found in tartar.
“Tartar is really amazing,” said co-author Christina Warinner, an anthropologist who studies ancient microbiomes at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. “It’s like a little time capsule from your life.”
But Anita Radini, an archaeologist at the University of York in Britain, saw something under the microscope she wasn’t expecting: “It looked like nothing I had seen before — bright blue particles, almost like robins’ eggs.”
The researchers ruled out other bluish pigments common in the Middle Ages, which mostly were made with mixtures of copper, cobalt or iron. None of those metals were present. They used what is known as micro-Raman spectroscopy to identify the particles.
“I was completely surprised it was lapis lazuli,” Warinner said. “It’s very rare and very expensive.” She added: “There is no lapis lazuli in the burial environment. The only way it could have gotten into her teeth is because she was deliberately using it in some way.”
Alexis Hagadorn, who is head of conservation at Columbia University Libraries and was not involved in the study, called the find “very exciting.”
“While there are some archival records that identify individual medieval scribes, most of the producers of medieval books remain stubbornly anonymous,” she said. “This study is unprecedented in using archaeological evidence from human remains to suggest a direct connection between an individual and the work of the scribes who created the most sumptuously decorated books.”
Medieval women’s artistic and literary work “has been open to challenges and questions, since we rarely have signed images or identifiable ‘named’ female artists,” said Fiona Griffiths, a historian of the medieval period at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. “Here we have evidence of a female scribe/artist,” not from a secondhand source, “but from residues in her mouth.”
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Follow Christina Larson on Twitter at @larsonchristina.
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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Born | Michael David Wood 23 July 1948 (age 71) |
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Occupation | Historian, broadcaster, documentary filmmaker |
Known for | In Search of the Dark Ages (1979) Great Railway Journeys (1980) In Search of the Trojan War (1985) In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (1998) The Story of India (2007) The Story of England (2010) The Story of China (2016) |
Michael David Wood (born 23 July 1948) is an English historian and broadcaster. He has presented numerous well-known television documentary series from the late 1970s to the present day. Wood has also written a number of books on English history, including In Search of the Dark Ages, The Domesday Quest, The Story of England, and In Search of Shakespeare.[1][2] He was appointed Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester in 2013.[3]
Early life and education[edit]
Wood was born in Moss Side, Manchester. He attended Heald Place Primary School in Rusholme. When he was eight, his family moved to Paulden Avenue, Wythenshawe where he could see historic Baguley Hall from his bedroom window. He went to Benchill Primary School. At The Manchester Grammar School, he developed an interest in theatre, playing Grusha in the first British amateur production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He took A-levels in English, French and History.[4]
Wood studied history and English at Oriel College, Oxford, touring the United States for six weeks in his final year, and graduated with a second class Bachelor of Arts degree. Later, he undertook post-graduate research in Anglo-Saxon history at Oriel. Three years into his research for a DPhil, he left to become a journalist with ITV.[1][4]
Career[edit]
In the 1970s Wood worked for the BBC in Manchester. He was first a reporter and then an assistant producer on current affairs programmes, before returning to his love of history with his 1979–81 series In Search of the Dark Ages for BBC2.[5] He quickly became popular with female viewers for his blond good looks (he was humorously dubbed 'the thinking woman's crumpet' by British newspapers), his deep voice, and his habit of wearing tight jeans and a sheepskin jacket.[6] Wood's work is also well known in the United States, where it receives much airplay on PBS and on various cable television networks. The series Legacy (1992) is one of his more frequently broadcast documentaries on US television.
Since 1990, Michael Wood has been a director of independent television production company Maya Vision International. In 2006 he joined the British School of Archaeology in Iraq campaign, which aimed to train and encourage new Iraqi archaeologists, and he has lectured on the subject.[7] In 2013, Wood joined the University of Manchester as Professor of Public History.
Personal life[edit]
His partner for ten years, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was the journalist and broadcaster Pattie Coldwell.[8][9] He currently lives in north London with his wife, television producer Rebecca Ysabel Dobbs and two daughters, Minakshi and Jyoti.[10]
Honours[edit]
Wood was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society[1] until 2007.[11][12] In 2009, he was awarded an HonoraryDoctorate of Arts by Sunderland University.[13] This was followed by the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Leicester in 2011, and in 2015 he was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy.[14] Having previously acted as President of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, in 2017 he accepted the position of Honorary Life Vice President, offered in recognition of his work on the documentary series Michael Wood's Story of England.[15]
Television series[edit]
- In Search of the Dark Ages (1979–81)
- Great Railway Journeys ('Zambezi Express', 1980)
- Great Little Railways (episode 3: 'Slow Train to Olympia', 1983)
- In Search of the Trojan War (1985)
- Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England (1986)
- Greece: The Hidden War (1986)
- Art of the Western World (1989)
- Legacy: A Search for the Origins of Civilisation (1992)
- Lifeboat (1993)
- In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (1997)
- Conquistadors (2000)
- In Search of Shakespeare (2003)
- In Search of Myths and Heroes (2005)
- The Story of India (2007)
- Christina: A Medieval Life (2008)
- In Search of Beowulf (2009) (a.k.a. Michael Wood on Beowulf)
- Michael Wood's Story of England (2010)
- The Great British Story: A People's History (2012)
- King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons (2013)
- The Story of China (2016)
Documentaries[edit]
- Darshan: An Indian Journey (1989)
- Traveller's Tales: The Sacred Way (1991)
- Saddam's Killing Fields (1993)
- Secret History: Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail (1999)
- Gilbert White: Nature Man (2006)
- Christina: A Medieval Life (2008)
- Alexander's Greatest Battle (2009)
- Shakespeare's Mother; The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman (2015)
- Ovid: The Poet and the Emperor (2017)
- Du Fu: China's Greatest Poet (2020)
Bibliography[edit]
- In Search of the Dark Ages (BBC Books, 1981)[16]
- In Search of the Trojan War (1985)
- Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England (1988h
- Legacy: A Search for the Origins of Civilization (1992)
- The Smile of Murugan: A South Indian Journey (1995)
- In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (1997)
- In Search of England: Journeys Into the English Past (1999)
- Conquistadors (2000)
- In Search of Shakespeare (2003)
- In Search of Myths and Heroes (2005)
- India: An Epic Journey Across the Subcontinent (2007)
- The Story of England (2010)
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ abcMichael Wood BiographyPublic Broadcasting Service (PBS).
- ^Michael Wood visits the HP Visual and Spatial Technology CentreArchived 20 July 2009 at the Wayback Machine The Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham.
- ^'People’s historian becomes Manchester Professor | The University of Manchester'. manchester.ac.uk. Retrieved 20 September 2014.
- ^ abPassed/Failed: An education in the life of Michael Wood, television historianThe Independent, 30 August 2007.
- ^https://www.amazon.com/Search-Dark-Ages-Michael-Wood/dp/0816047022 In Search of the Dark Ages (Revised Edition, 2001)
- ^Andrew Davies (17 November 2003). 'The cudgels are out'. The Guardian. Retrieved 2 June 2016.
- ^'Archaeology News : Iraq: Michael Wood lecture at British Museum'. The Institute of Field Archaeologists article. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 3 April 2007.
- ^Pattie Coldwell: Courageous crusader, BBC News, 18 October 2002
- ^Anthony Hayward, Pattie Coldwell: Obituary, The Independent, 19 October 2002
- ^My Favourite Things: Michael Wood, Daily Express, 4 July 2008[dead link]
- ^According to Sue Carr, Executive Secretary of the Royal Historical Society Michael Wood ceased to be a Fellow of the RHS in 2007.
- ^'Fellows of the Royal Historical Society'. Royal Historical Society. 2012. Archived from the original on 27 August 2012. Retrieved 20 July 2012.
- ^Celebs awarded honorary degreesShields Gazette, 17 July 2009.
- ^'The British Academy President's Medal'. British Academy. Retrieved 23 July 2017.
- ^Minutes of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society committee meeting (May 3rd, 2017).
- ^https://www.amazon.com/Search-Dark-Ages-Michael-Wood/dp/0816047022 In Search of the Dark Ages (Revised Edition)
External links[edit]
- Michael Wood on IMDb
- Michael Wood at the British Film Institute
- In the Footsteps of Alexander The Great at the Wayback Machine (archived 18 March 2008)
- Writings
- Interview
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Wood_(historian)&oldid=949624391'
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