Stof uit de kist

March 7, 2011 at 12:48 am | Posted in Netting | 1 Comment

The medieval hairnet resource page at http://www.silkewerk.com/hairnet/hairnet3.html lists several excellent sources of information about medieval hairnets. I contacted my friendly neighborhood reference librarian to see if she could track down some of the articles and books for me. While we did not have a 100% success rate in tracking down all of the books, the results are beginning to trickle in.

The first section to arrive at the library was an excerpt from Stof uit de kist, a book about the findings at St. Truiden. I had hoped to get the entire book, but had to settle for a photocopy of the relevant section when none of the libraries in WorldCat would lend it to us. An excerpt is better than nothing! We had to convince the library that yes, I knew the book was not in English. My original hope had been to use a scanner to OCR the contents, then just copy and paste into Google Translate. Unfortunately, the copy I received is horrendous. It’s a good thing that most of the pictures are online (see my previous post) because they are useless in the copy. I could barely make out the letters of the words, which meant that not only did have to painstakingly enter the entire selection by hand into Google, there are certain areas where I just have no idea what it says, as it is completely illegible.

Luckily I was able to get most of the information out of the excerpt. It’s not perfect because I don’t speak Dutch, but I continue to be fairly impressed with Google Translate. There was lots of information about various dyes used on the hairnets, as well as detailed information about how many meshes per cm (as many as 64 per cm2!!), and other useful information. All of the hairnets were decorated, mostly with lacis.