S. Worthen | Weblog

I ran across an image today for which I had an immediate mental explanation: of course a fifteenth-century personification of Chastity might hold a spear if she's in conflict with Luxury, who is riding in to attack her. Then I read the contemporary-to-the-illuminations description of Chastity. "Next comes the second lady, Chastity, whose hands wear iron gauntlets against dishonourable contacts. She has in her right hand a long rod for making beds, signifying that she would be the dormitory-maid and keeper of the dormitory of Holy Religion, and should not permit any person to enter who does not wish to preserve chastity."* There's more about her, but it's not pertinent to my question.

( The image in question... )

"A long rod for making beds"? ("ung baton long a faire lit") Pray tell me, how does one make a bed with a long rod? What is it used for? Beating bed lice out of the bedding? Making straight edges? Smoothing undersheets beneath an over blanket? Waking up late sleepers? What is it for?

* The image and translation come from Peter Rolfe Monks. The Brussels Horloge de Sapience: Iconography and Text of Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS. IV 111. K.V. Sinclair, translation of captions. (Leiden, New York, København, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1990).

Edit: It might be easier to think of uses for a bed rod if you can see the right kind of bed. Happily, the very same manuscript has pictures of beds (among so many other things), so I can show you what is presumably the kind of bed with which a bed rod might be used.

Here are two images: the first shows a neatly made bed behind the main character, the second shows two people sick and dying. While we're at it, I'm hypothesizing the circles tossed all over the floor and beds are herb wreaths to counteract the smell of sickness, but I don't actually know. Thoughts?

( Two fifteenth-century beds... )

I quite like online wish lists: they're convenient ways of keeping track of the details of book I want to order, ready for consideration to give way to whim and ordering. Indeed, I've found it inconvenient to not have wish list functionality on some sites, particularly the Right Stuf, from which I order most of my anime.

But the problem with them, I find, is proliferation. It wouldn't be a problem if I had one anime wish list on one website and a book one on a different website. The problem is that I'm now up to four online wish lists for books only, and three of those wish lists are with Amazon. The problem is, you see, I can order books in Canada, the US, and the UK, and at different times it's convenient to do one or the other.

Some books are only available in one of those countries and not the others. That's where the beginnings of proliferation began. To begin with, I just used Indigo, the major Canadian bookstore chain, to keep track of my bookish desires, but then I started finding books to track which weren't available in Canada. Then, having established lists in multiple countries, I began to add with impunity, ignoring what country might be the most convenient to order a given book in, and just adding whereever I happened to already be. Indigo still has the bulk of my list, but the others aren't far behind.

You don't need to move around a lot for this to be a problem. Within any one of these countries are several competing online book dealers, most of which probably have this function these days. The result is the same, a fractured group of lists.

In many ways, this proliferation defeats the purpose of having a unified wish list, one place to go from which all books can be retrieved. But it wouldn't be that simple, even if so many books weren't available only in one country, because there are so many obscure and deeply out-of-print books that I also covet. I'm just glad that it's a pain to order books to Italy right now, or I might have a fifth list.