I’ve collected and reviewed digitised illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, sculpture, embroideries, embroidery books, tailoring manuals (thank you WdW and the SCA network for fully half of that!) across and up and down Europe and through time. I’ve collected digitised historical records including entire books of music, contemporary essays and larger works about the artists and subjects and lives of people.

And I’m now at the point I have an eye for the works of several artists and doubt some attributions but also have a nice record of artists who copied each other.

All because the stories about Anna of Cleves just didn’t ring true. I’m not the only person by far. I’m trying to work out why I felt that. What instinct made me first feel uneasy. Because it was pretty much a gut reaction based on my own many years of making and wearing historic and contemporary costume.

But you can’t go by instinct. You need to be able to explain it so that’s what I’ve been organising.

It’s a massive project. I’m trying to work with imprecise dates when I really need dates down to the half year, so in order to potentially find that I need to have many examples of any one genre by any one artist.

In order be able to edit down I need as many really solid examples as possible. To know the evolution of them.

I’ve been able to now narrow my focus in time and for each genre. The work now is to yes catalogue them all properly and to not crash my pc with file names that are too long!