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Originally Posted by Ed
This thought has been with me for some time and I think that I actually posted something along these lines ages ago but I thought that it would be worthwhile to revisit the idea.
I will speak for myself here. My interests have tended to be in the time period 1400-1650 or so. 250 years. During this time, how many swords were produced? Millions, certainly. But 10 million? More? How about articles of armor? And of these, how many survived? 1% I doubt that. Maybe 1/10 of 1%? And which kinds were among the survivals? In other words, could you say that the survivals are representative of those objects whose population they were drawn from?
The reason I bring this up is that often I hear (particularly from my friends in the curatorial profession) that something "does not look right because we've never seen one before" or words to that effect. So a certain foliation decorative element is "never seen before the 15th century". Fine and good, but what is such a judgement based on?
The fact is that we really don't know what the range of decoration or other embellishments or even the form of weapons might actually be for the period in question. The sample that we have is vanishingly small and is almost certainly not representative of the those objects in use at the time. By representative, I mean a sample randomly drawn. They aren't.
I am not a nihilist saying that we can know nothing, rather I am suggesting that we should not be too quick to dismiss an object because it is not contained, in it's precise form, in our references.
Of course, we have documentary evidence, from the arts, particularly manuscripts. I think that manuscripts have their own problems and have resulted in fantasies gaining traction (the massive and silly repro of the gun shown in the Milemete Manuscript comes to mind) but they do form a useful part of our intellectual corpus.
I am interested in knowing your thoughts.
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Ed, I have read your post several times. What do you mean? Your text wobbles between an affliction with numbers and a peculiar concept of what is art......and the meaning of life? I met someone once who was cursed by numerical progression; He would go to the desert and count palm trees and arrive at an equation the square root of which was equal to the number of grains in a level teaspoon full. He was crackers. Psychology certainly plays its part in all walks of life, however, I have seldom seen reference to it on these pages...
I cannot see where this fits on the weapons pages although you could achieve better traction on Ethnographic Miscellania thus I suggest that could be more appropriate.