How Illuminated Manucripts were Painted

Although you don't often hear about, women worked as painters in AngloSaxon times. In this excerpt from Courting Trouble, the heroine's stepmother is painting the border of an illuminated manuscript. Borders were painted before the calligraphers set to work on the script.

She was sitting near her desk in the hall, painting a border for one of the bishop’s manuscripts. She bent over her work closely; she was short-sighted. The piece was on a large wooden frame that held the painting upright. As I approached I took in her elaborate design. Two narrow gold borders were set around the page, one inside the other. Red, blue, and green leaves straddled the space in between. Sometimes Waldberg’s understanding of form was a little wobbly, but I was always surprised at how sensitive her drawings were. It didn’t seem to fit with the rest of her personality.

Her brushes were arranged in a box on her desk. Her pigments were set to one side, each in its own oyster shell. She mixed the colors with egg yolk on a small piece of wood that she held in one hand.

Embroidery, Medieval Style

In Courting Trouble the stepmother Waldberg supplements the family income by creating embroideries and illuminations for the church. This is how she works with metallic thread:

She was working with two needles. One sewed a gold thread on the surface of the work, very close to the previous gold thread she had laid down. With the second needle she sewed tiny silk stitches across the gold to anchor it to the cloth. She had explained to me once that this technique was used so that the expensive gold thread was not wasted on the wrong side.

The Stepmother

Cynethrith's stepmother, Waldberg, a character in  Courting Trouble

[My stepmother] was sitting behind an embroidery frame, working gold thread onto a fabric strip for the bishop’s vestment. Her two daughters were with her. Hilda was standing near my stepmother reciting, with more feeling than required, a poem about the crumbling remains of a once magnificent city that had been built by giants.