Clutching at pearls

So where are your pearls from?

Lucy Liu does the best pearl clutching in the world, hands down.

I've been thinking about where pearls in western Europe came from in the middle ages. There's work on that, so it's not like I'm breaking new ground; I've just been learning. And it's very cool.

A lot of what came around seems to have come from two sources.* The first is the Indian Ocean writ large, including the Persian Gulf (via West Africa or the Umayyad or Abbasid lands). The second is from freshwater mussels, British or otherwise, though Scotland was apparently known for these. There's a reference from the 12th century in a letter to Eadmer of Canterbury, and someone tipped me off to Isadore of Seville noting that Scottish pearls were particularly valued though I haven't found that reference. (Let me know if you know it.) My friend Adrian told me about this gorgeous thing, a reliquary pendant from the 12th century said to have Scottish freshwater pearls, which is in the British Museum (1946,0407.1):

She is a beaut. Read about her here.

I'm not working on this particular beautiful thing at the moment. I am working on a book about things, not all of them beautiful (but let's be honest; almost all things contain beauty.) One of those things has pearls (or had pearls, because they're just not there anymore. This is what happens.) The book is about early medieval England in fifty of those things, to be precise, which I am co-writing with some truly excellent scholars and people: Mateusz Fafinski, David Petts, and Carolyn Twomey.

This particular thing that I'm writing about has pearls from [somewhere, somewhen], silks from Venice and possibly Byzantium or theAbbasid Empire, and gold braid and embroidery from England (some of you will know what this is about by that description.) It was put together by many objects from many places, over a period of hundreds of years. In my head, I'm trying to visualize a way that can express that sort of place and time in a 5D map. People cleverer than me have probably done this already.

It's an oldie, but goodie.

A good collaboration, in my poor analogy, is a similar thing to this centuries-long composite object. Different places, approaches, people, coming together to create something which is (hopefully) beautiful. Maybe no one knows where those pearls are from, but sometimes a thing is greater than its component parts. Actually, many times it is...it's just fun to figure out where (and when) those pieces came from. And then it becomes a beautiful, chaotic, fun, whole thing.

I'm really enjoying doing this book with these people.

And Mateusz, Carolyn, Dave, I swear I will email you all soon.

*By sources, I mean geographic, environmental sources from the original harvesting. Charles West pointed out that some pearls were probably reused from Roman materials - very true. But what I'm curious about is the harvest point, in any case.