Lmst

About using eyeglasses as symbols and metaphors in early modern Europe: One could use giant eyeglasses in broadsides to zoom into a topic, like here: https://mastodon.social/@dbellingradt/109624672307990094

One could use calligram-glasses to attract readers to your message, like in this example: http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000139678&page=1

Or you could use eyeglasses as a metaphor to strengthen the argument in a printed pamphlet: look closer, see better, examine with more quality, you stupid fellow human.

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#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

A broadside with a giant pair of glasses in the image part of the print, Germany 1621/22.

A caligram in the form of eyeglasses, on a page in: "Liber varias diversasque characterum formas continens", http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/bdh0000139678

Title page from Johannes Reuchlin's pamphlet "Augenspiegel" from 1511.

About forgetting or losing your eyeglasses in early modern Europe: Poor thing, have you lost your glasses again? Have you checked the book you were reading? Most often, when you forgot where you put your eyeglasses to, someone found them between the pages...

The history of reading had a chapter about forgetting eyeglasses in books, and about historians and librarians finding traces of these lost eyeglasses.

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#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Page from "Summa angelica de casibus conscientiae", BSB München, 4 P. lat. 335, with the traces of forgotten eyeglasses on the left, and on the right are the eyeglasses.

About using your eyeglasses: Mostly, eyeglasses were needed for reading and writing purposes. In this sense, eyeglasses were part of a cultural practice of writing and reading (and drawing to be honest), near books, with books, at a desk, in a library, at an artist's worktable etc.

It is not by chance that Saint Jerome, patron Saint of librarians, is often sitting at a writing desk surrounded by books and papers, with eyeglasses hanging at his desk.

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#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Painting "Saint Jerome in His Study" (copy after Domenico Ghirlandaio).

Detail of the said painting: the eyeglasses.

Wearing your eyeglasses: in style, in contemplation, at work, out of context, for the wild look.

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#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Screenshot from The Name of the Rose. The Franciscan friar William of Baskerville is using a pair of eyeglasses in the scene.

Details from a page from the "Book of Hours, Use of Rome", from circa 1500, showing Mark the Evangelist wearing eyeglasses.

Detail from the print "Saint Pachomius" from Jan Sadeler (from the book Solitudo, sive, Vitae patrum eremicolarum, circa 1587). Saint Pachomius stands at a tree, and reads a book with eyeglasses on.

Painting of Anna Dorothea Therbusch, eighteenth century, wearing a special eyeglass.

Let's focus upon storing eyeglasses in a premodern context. As a wealthy reader and owner of books you could always go for the luxury option: use your a custom-made case carved out of the back board of a big book to store your reading tool.

Some also chose to protect the glasses in a wooden case, for traveling maybe?

Well, and apparently, at least someone in the sixteenth-century fancied fish-skin leather for her or his glasses as well.

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#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Eyeglasses' case carved out of the back board of a book from 1526. Bruges, Ten Duinen, Ms. 66/35. Loys van Boghem Hours, 1526.

What you see is a wooden glasses case for two glasses from the sixteenth century. Recently found in the Netherlands (2020).

Fish-skin and wood case for eyeglasses from sixteenth-century Europe.

Apropos, buying and selling eyeglasses in early modern Europe: Shops offered the goods, surely, but also mobile sellers did so. Eyeglasses became a moved good that was sold along to the new reading habits and book usages of the period. More books in all variations meant also: more markets for selling eyeglasses. #BookHistory and the growing usages of eyeglasses from 1400 onward are a connected history.

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#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Printed image from 1665 (from the book "Mundi lapis Lydius, oder, Der Welt Probier-Stein: das ist, Emblematische Sitten-Lehren") showing a shop in an urban setting. At the shop's dessk are eyeglasses on offer.

"The Spectacle Seller (Adriaen van Ostade), S5.19.4,” Harvard Art Museums collections. A mobile seller is selling eyeglasses to a woman standing at a door.

A mobile eyeglasses' seller on a Dutch tile from mid-seventeenth century.

Museum Rotterdam 17406.

About buying eyeglasses: You might have been needing eyeglasses for reading purposes for a long time, but before every using of the artifact one needed to find a seller offering the assisting tool. The young woman in this painting is selling eyeglasses by the dozens as a zooming in into the details of the painting clearly shows. You may find the painting here, for example http://lamusee.fr/jeune-femme-vendant-des-besicles-a-un-vieil-homme/

#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

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Painting "The Spectacles Seller" from Cornelisz van Oostsanen, Jacob (ca. 1470-1533).

Detail of the painting "The Spectacles Seller" showing a boy with eyeglasses

About imagining eyeglasses: Traces and images of early modern eyeglasses are to be found in paintings, in books, in prints, etc., and this reminds the historian of the presence of these artifacts in cultural life. Inserting eyeglasses into your painted, printed of hand drawn imaginations about a moment of your life clearly sends a message: eyeglasses were present. Often near books or in books, like these painted eyeglasses as part of imagined book.

#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

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Cryn van Zuyderhoudt, a Dutch writing master, created a trompe l'oeil book in 1779 in which "forgotten" eyeglasses were part of the painting.

Allard Pierson, Universiteit van Amsterdam, HS. XXXV A 33

About wearing eyeglasses: Something on your nose attracted attention, and sometimes this object made you more fancy than you were. Eyeglasses were made for reading and seeing better but also had a distinctive function of making you, the one wearing eyeglasses, a bit more special. The writer Francisco de Quevedo on this painting knew how to make an impression.

#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

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Painted portrait of Francisco de Quevedo, a seventeenth-century Spanish poet, wearing sunglasses.

#Eyeglasses were part of the material history of reading in early modern Europe, as this painting of 1403 (from Conrad von Soest) shows.

This is a slow moving thread for #histodons, a thread about how to read in the past, where to buy eyeglasses, and how to do with them in general. The hashtag is #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Let's roll. #EarlyModernHistory #MediaHistory #BookHistory #HistKnow

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Detail of the "Glasses Apostle" painting in the altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany. Painted by Conrad von Soest in 1403, the painting is considered to be among the oldest depictions of eyeglasses north of the Alps.

The "Glasses Apostle" painting is part of the altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany. Painted by Conrad von Soest in 1403.

And a bonus for those enjoying a thing I did in another thread using the hashtag #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast - eyeglasses for reading, hidden within the papers! Reading was part of the material worlds of paper usages.

https://mastodon.social/@dbellingradt/110824788164557001

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