16th century ornamentation

From lightsabers and jedi it's back to the 16th century. Today I had the joy of reading an original manuscript from the year 1520. The texts have been transcribed and are available in a book frm 1997, but I was really interested in the original for some other reasons. As an historical recreator I was curious about the ornamentation of the script, since this is a book that was made in Sweden in 1520 it would give a lot of information on style and elements. In the printed book there is also a note that there is a recipe in the original, but since that is more of a scribble they hadn't included that.

You are not allowed to take photos of the original, but I tried to copy the designs by hand. The book was a very expensive items, it's made from vellum with illuminated golden initials. Still not all illuminations are finished, and a lot of the elements surrounding the golden intitials are quite uneven and look almost hastily done.

The most common element was this, that I called the snowdrop.It's not always mirrored, they are sometimes just upright and they also some times have four stems, with two in each direction and all of them of different height. After the stems it's usually three horizontal lines and it ends with a Z lying down. Sometimes it's just two horizontal lines before the Z.

Sometimes the snowdrop has a more solid part at the top and on the larger ones the tip of the solid part is sometimes filled with ink. It occurs facing in both directions.

On one page there was this little simple scrolling element. I added the top and bottom straight lines to help me draw th scroll, it wasn't there in the manuscript.

I feel really inspired by these ornaments, and I will definitely see if I can incorporate them in my 1520s court gown project somehow.

As for the recipe, well unfortunately my reading of 16th century handwriting isn't the best, and unlike most of the text this looked liked something that was just scribbled down on an available piece of paper. It is a list of things that were eaten during the Walpurgis celebrations. Unless the recipe actually calls for "porgs", which I find unlikely, I just couldn't make out anything except that you should finish it off with saffron. To the dish with the recipe they also had one long pig and one little pig.

Under the recipe there is a list of other foodstuffs, which also gives an insight in the household. The list contains

Cod, herring and stock fish, pork, beer (two kinds), butter (two kinds) bread (two kinds) and spirit vinegar.

The separation of the foodstuff gives a view of the first part, where you have saffron and pigs (probably meaning fresh meat and not salted pork) where for the feast and the noble family, while the other list is made up of simpler food that presumable was consumed as everyday food, and some of it probably by the servants as well. The separation of two different kinds of bread, butters and beers is likely a separation of the quality of the items, where the noble family's food was of the higher quality while servants had to make do with food of a lesser quality.