tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7748990.post1063349917870625084..comments2023-04-13T03:00:12.033-06:00Comments on rita's g-string: onward and upwardAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00419321135768223295noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7748990.post-13383669015447459472011-03-04T10:39:50.805-07:002011-03-04T10:39:50.805-07:00A few specific comments:
The tools you describe a...A few specific comments:<br /><br />The tools you describe as being used for knitting, such as the spool rack, originated as weaving tools, so would have been quite familiar to the painter from that alone.<br /><br />On the Chur purse: color photos of these purses are rare and hard to find. I can tell from some of the mistakes he made (not only on the Chur purse) that he didn't have access to the photos I have, and he could have if he had gone looking for them (since they existed in the 1970s). He may well not have seen the color photo of the Chur purse before the book was ready for publication: admittedly if he had been able to get a good look at it, he *should* have corrected the description and chart, or his editor should have. Also, the photo may not have been good enough for unambiguous charting. The photos I have of the Sion purses -- and they're museum photos and pretty good ones -- certainly are not. <br /><br />As for Roman gloves, there is other evidence to consider. You're right that linguistic evidence is not conclusive, so the fact that there's no word for something does not prove it didn't exist. But there are also no surviving fragments of Roman gloves, and more important, no indication from other media (such as documents or surviving statues) that gloves existed. We do, for instance, know from surviving statues that socks or some form of thin, flexible leg coverings existed, even though the renditions are not detailed enough to say how they were made. We also have quite a lot of surviving Roman documents that would likely mention such things, as for instance they do mention socks -- most notably the letters and other ephemeral documents from Vindolanda.<br /><br />In general, I don't think Rutt is a lazy scholar, I think he is an *amateur* scholar, with limited time to work on his book around the demands of another full-time job (when he wrote this). Under those circumstances I don't think it's fair to fault him for not chasing down every lead.Chris Laninghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07574568785133002628noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7748990.post-62725552183399777962011-03-03T14:16:45.030-07:002011-03-03T14:16:45.030-07:00i do believe that rutt has some very positive poin...i do believe that rutt has some very positive points. he brings up things, and brings them together into a single volume, that weren't together and noted before. <br /><br />on the other hand, if he were a good scholar he would have given sources. footnotes do note make a book less readable. at all. <br /><br />the fact that rutt makes some good points does NOT make him a good scholar, and his lack of scholarship (ie: fact checking, finding translations of books that he says may have valuable information, etc.) all make him less than a good scholar.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00419321135768223295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7748990.post-82072684410653762242011-03-03T14:04:12.939-07:002011-03-03T14:04:12.939-07:00I believe that Rita's point is exactly that: t...I believe that Rita's point is exactly that: the book is being used far beyond the intention. There is no caveat warning the inexperienced that this is, at best, a tertiary source.<br /><br />Also, a good scholar is always a good scholar. Rutt is a lazy scholar with a too-willing publisher. Hardly an example we should ever consider valid.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14811098767365096967noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7748990.post-17126365045131984572011-03-02T17:14:34.241-07:002011-03-02T17:14:34.241-07:00Rutt's descriptions of the Sion/Chur purses do...Rutt's descriptions of the Sion/Chur purses do indeed get the colors badly wrong, and the charts are also messed up. I believe, however, that here at least he did consult a non-English source -- it's in his bibiography: _Mittelalterliche Textilien in Kirchen und Klöstern der Schweiz_. As far as I've been able to find out, this is the only other published description of these purses. Unfortunately the photos are difficult to use as sources for charting because they are black and white: I feel this probably accounts for most if not all of these particular mistakes.<br /><br />I personally think Rutt is generally a good scholar, because in a number of places he *does* display his evidence and reasoning. You're quite right that he doesn't cite every source or explain why he believes some sources but not others. I'm not discounting your criticisms: this is very annoying for the serious researcher, but I don't think that's the audience this book was intended for.<br /><br />Also, I think the barriers between English-speaking and Eastern European researchers were much greater in the 1980s than they are today. Irena Turnau wrote a book that came out about the same time as Rutt, but it's very clear she was working in almost total isolation from anyone else working on the history of knitting. I personally think Turnau is the worse scholar of the two -- detailed critiques on request ;)Chris Laninghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07574568785133002628noreply@blogger.com