The Goethezeitportal: German culture in the age of Goethe

Here’s another useful link: the Goethezeitportal, a excellent umbrella site linking to all kinds of online resources for the study of German art, literature and music in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The “Weblinks” page is extensive, and they also provide a large number of articles for download as PDF files directly on the site (go to the “Bibliothek”). There’s no focus on technology per se, although I did find an interesting article about automata in the library.

Playing the piano may be hazardous to your health?

Someday I’d like to do a project on women and piano-playing around the turn of the 19th century. Women were perhaps the primary consumers of pianos for the home in this period, especially as the 19th century progressed. And I’ve noticed in my reading of late 18th-century musical journals that it was not at all uncommon for a woman to be described as a virtuoso on the piano, but at the same time, it was also routine for critics to denigrate female piano players as a group. So I’m creating a category on this blog to collect observations on this topic as I go along with my other research, and this is the first post in that category.

Last week I was reading some early-19th-century piano playing methods and came across a few comments suggesting that the piano was the most (or indeed the only) fitting instrument for women to play, because it is the least likely to cause physical injury.

Wooden Artifacts Group website

The Wooden Artifacts Group of the American Institute for Conservation provides some useful resources here. You can browse their archive of postprints; also, the Digital Bookshelf is an excellent set of links to online books on cabinetmaking and related topics, mostly 18th- and 19-century. There are also links to wood image databases and other miscellaneous and interesting places.

16th-century book of the arts

In the collection of German manuscripts at the Münchner Digitalisierungszentrum (a project of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) I found Wolfgang Seydel’s Kunstbuch oder von manigerlai Handwerchskünsten (loosely translated, Book of Arts, or Of Various Handcrafts) (1550-1560). I can’t read much of the handwriting, only a few words here and there (“glue,” “silver”), but for those who can read it I’m sure it would be a fascinating early source, so I thought it would be useful to post it here.

I also wanted to add that is possible to subscribe to the MDZ’s RSS feed to be notified as new documents are digitalized and published online. This is a great service that makes it much easier to take advantage of this enormous collection.

Arts and Secrets from 1771

The Library of the Institute of Economic and Social History at the University of Cologne has a web site that links to an enormous number of digital resources, in particular for German history. I find the site a little difficult to navigate, and it looks like the main page may not have been updated in a while. However, I had a great time browsing through this subpage of digital texts, and it seems that new texts are actively being added there. I was excited to find Künste und Geheimnisse großer Künstler, zum Gebrauch der Mahler, Bildhauer, Schwerdfeger, Uhrmacher, Buchbinder, Schreibemeister, u. dergl., published in Prague and Leipzig in 1771. The book is in two parts, and the scanned pages can be viewed as PDF files, in 10-page chunks. I haven’t had a chance to look through it very carefully, but what seems interesting is that it’s a very practical, how-to book. It seems like it could be a good reference for old painting techniques, especially.