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A trove of medieval craft pictures

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I just stumbled across this resource
Category:Zwölfbrüderbücher - Wikimedia Commons

It's pretty cool. Seems an entity called the Twelve Brothers Foundation of Nuremberg, founded in the 14thc, began making illustrations of crafts, starting around 1425. They kept it up until the 19thc, leaving us with hundreds. The link above shows all of them. It's all in German, but you can just click around.

For those wanting to dig deeper, each image to the Wikicommons site has a link to the source, which in turn has a transcription of the text on that folio. Example: Die Hausbücher der Nürnberger Zwölfbrüderstiftungen

Have fun!
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I just found a couple other useful aspects to the Twelve Brothers site itself. One is a list of crafts ... in English and German!
Die Hausbücher der Nürnberger Zwölfbrüderstiftungen
One nice aspect of this is that a good many trades have simply disappeared; you won't find them in a modern dictionary (e.g., Nestler).

The other is a list of all last names, which is nice not just for genealogy but also for coming up with names. There's also a grouping of images that in some way touch on illnesses (Krankheiten), a listing by tools (Arbeitsgeräte), and others.

I love the Internet.
 

Tom

Istar
Awesome resource, skip! I've always felt it's very important for us fantasy writers to understand how everyday people lived--what they made and did--in the time periods we base our stories on.
 
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