medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
From: Terri Morgan <[log in to unmask]>
> I forwarded the link on to a bunch of SCA woodworkers, one of whom posited
the idea that the casket might be made of wood reclaimed from a previous box,
thanks, Terri, for doing that --the more minds set to an impossible and
fruitless task the better.
in that context, even "crazy" ideas are of use.
like, my crazy idea that there was no possibility that the wood was
"reclaimed"
which i will now shamelessly disavow and modify in view of the suggestion you
forward below.
>such as might happen if a saint's coffin was [were] exhumed and the wood
sized down to create a smaller box to hold merely the bones.
yes, especially since the saint's coffin would, itself, qualify as a "contact
relic," worthy of both preservation and of being put to such a supremely
fitting ("dignatus est") 2nd use.
>It would be difficult, I would imagine, for the devoted craftsman to have to
balance 'making it fit correctly' against 'profaning a sacred [the original
box] object' by shaving off too much of the wood.
seems to me that you've made the case for cutting the bottom to fit the box
being made.
if the wood is, indeed, oak and the original coffin was [were] in the ground
for an extended length of time it would, of course, have been rotting all the
while --from the exterior surface inward.
re-using old wood --especially oak-- used to be one of my favorite things to
do back in the cabinet making daze of my dissolute Youth.
though i never worked with a piece that had been in the ground for any
extended length of time.
as i believe i mentioned before, oak has "tannin" in it (as does tea) and the
interaction of the tannin with the air causes it to turn to a warm brown (even
white oak, which usually starts out a kind of light cream color).
i found that i could take a board of old barn wood (more common in southern
Indianer 40 years ago than today) and, using my "scrub plane" (a plane about
the same length as a smoothing plane, but with a slightly convex bit/blade so
that it would cut deeper at a swipe), i could remove the rough outer surface
of the wood, down below the sawmill "kerfs" (the arc-shaped marks made by the
sawmill saw which originally "ripped" the board from the log) to reveal the
fresh wood below.
if i did it just right --and the wood had weathered for long enough-- i could
remove the "shadows" of the sawmill kerfs but not go down so far as to hit
"virgin wood".
i would then be left with a smooth surface (but not a flat one, since the bit
of the scrub plane was not straight, but convex), and i would still have the
lovely, very dark cream/light brown color left by the interaction of the
oxygen with the tannin-rich wood. a beautiful, natural color which only
needed an application of some boiling hot linseed oil to finish up nicely.
some similar process might have been at work to transform the inch-thick wood
of the coffin into the half-inch thick wood we see making up the box.
an inch thick oak board in the ground for many years would rot rather slowly
--assuming that it was, say, beneath the paved stone (or even pounded earth)
floor of a church rather than out in the churchyard cemetery-- and there might
well be a half inch of good, reasonably sound, salvageable wood left in the
center of it after even a century or more, i should think.
still doesn't explain the gaps visible along both sides of the bottom board,
however.
but, some mysteries are just impenetrable and known only to YouKnowWho.
c
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