Coffee in Spain - "Un café con leche templada, por favor"

One of my favorite things about Spain so far, (other than the vellum-bound gorgeous old books) has been the coffee. I felt it deserved its own post. I had my first cup at Ferro's Cafe with Dr. Paul Vita, SLU's academic dean. He ordered "un café con leche templada, por favor" and I said "lo mismo" because I had no idea how to order coffee in Spain at all. He explained that ordering it "templada" means you want it with mixed hot and cool milk, and that it is thus "templada" or "temperate" - ready to drink.

It. Was. Perfection.

I'd never had such a good coffee drink in my life. I never thought I'd say it, but it put Dunkin to SHAME. I love coffee in America, but it might be hard to go back. Spaniards laugh at the idea of American coffee. One man I talked with called it "dirty water," and my host mom said it "lacks strength." When compared to the Spanish understanding of what coffee should be, it's a fair assessment. Spaniards say the only other country that makes good coffee like in Spain is Italy. Italy and Spain have a lot more in common culturally than I realized.

So what is a 'Cafe con Leche,' in American coffee terms? My coffee expert friend Kyle tells me that it's what an American Latte should be, but never is. It's simply expresso with steamed milk, but done really well. In the mug, there's about a centimeter of thick, dark, expresso, and then the rest of the cup is milk. (I think maybe it's whole milk?) The difference is that the expresso here is really good, the milk is really good, thick, and perfectly steamed, and the sugar comes in giant, perfect, 8 gram packets. That's right, none of these crappy little 2-4 gram packets like in America that you need a zillion of, in Spain you get one hefty 8 gram bag, always. When you order it "templada," they bring over two pitchers of milk, a hot steamed one, and a cool one, and they pour in a bit of each. If you don't specify, they'll usually just use hot milk. But if they ask you anything about your order, it'll be how you take your milk - templada, caliente, etc.

Me at the coffee counter, taking a research break at the BNE

My favorite part of the day today was after lunch, when I ordered my cafe con leche over at the coffee bar downstairs in the Biblioteca Nacional's Cafeteria. The top of the bar is covered with stacks of little plates with a teaspoon and an 8 gram sugar packet on each. They just await the mug. Beneath the glass bar is a display of snacks you could order with coffee - cookies, donuts, croissants, sandwiches, and, most popularly, Spanish tortilla.

Cafe con leche with a piece of Spanish Tortilla, at a cafe near my home stay.

Many people just order, wait for their specific mug to be set down on one of these stacked plates, then take the plate back to their table, but it's perfectly common just to stand and drink it at the bar too. I prefer to stay at the bar because it is my favorite form of people watching.

People watching at the library, like a total creep

I love to watch the busy baristas making magic on the expresso machine, dashing back and forth filling orders. And I also really love watching the other customers order their specific drinks. Lots of people order "cafe solo" which is just a tiny cup of expresso. All Spanish coffee drinks seem to have this single expresso as their common base, but it's amazing how many different ways they take it. The girl next to me ordered "cafe cortado," which was a single expresso in a tiny mug with just a teensy pour of milk. The old ladies next to me ordered "cafe con hielo" which was super amusing to watch. They were each given a steaming cup of expresso, sugar, and super tall glasses filled with ice cubes. They mixed the expresso and the sugar, stirred it very well, and then poured it into the cup of ice. They drank them quickly! I mean, they poured boiling expresso over ice, and when they were done their empty glasses were still at least half full of ice. The Spanish really don't like watery coffee it seems. I've only ever ordered "cafe con leche" because it's hard to imagine there's anything more delicious to be had, but there's clearly a myriad of ways they prepare expresso, and I'll be sure to try something else before I leave.

I love you, Spanish beverages <3

For more info, I just found this little explanation of the Spanish coffee drinks. Which would you choose?
http://gospain.about.com/od/fooddrink/qt/coffee_in_spain.htm

Pictures/Details from a 16th century text, or, as some might say, "Book Porn"

Went back to the BNE today to spend some quality time with a 16^th century text on the history of the Dominican Order in Aragon. So cool! When I first requested the text, it said it was in the general  Recoletos collection – I usually associate this with modern publications, considering there is a whole separate area, the Sala de Cervantes, for rare books and manuscripts. So I was very surprised when they brought me one of the actual original copies of the book, printed in 1599! It was a really exciting surprise and I tried not to act like a fangirl when they handed it over to me trusting that I'd take it back to my desk and treat it properly. No biggie.

Awwwwwww Yeah! Cradling/carrying it back to my desk. This is gonna be good.

 In St. Louis, to view a book from the 16^th century would require going to the rare books room,  filling out paperwork, setting up foam book supports to cradle the text, and being watched like a hawk by the librarians. Here, for this copy anyway, not so much.  And I'm not quite sure why. The binding may not be original (Though I'm sure in age it's closer to 16^th century than it is to the 21^st), but the pages certainly are, and they're gorgeous. I'm not really sure why this copy is in circulation while others are in the rare books room or the archive, but my best guess would be that it has to do with the later binding? I have a hard time imagining it's just their crappiest copy that they don't mind passing around, because this text is in SO MUCH better condition than the copy Google worked from when they digitized the book recently – Google's is a water-stained mess and the printing clarity isn't very sharp. I'm glad I didn't rely on just reading the internet's copy, because this was a really wonderful experience – the book itself is in much better condition than the one online, and it's far easier on the eyes to read through for hours at a time. PLUS, it's cool! And there were little interesting tidbits and a bit of marginalia unique to this copy alone that I would never have gotten to appreciate otherwise. I might want to check out the other copies of this same text in the libraries holdings, to see if they have anything unique to offer too.  Plus it'd be a good excuse to get my feet wet in the Sala de Cervantes, which I really need to do.

Okay, so yesterday when I looked at this book, I'd forgotten my iphone for the day, and couldn't take any quick pics to post. But I didn't make that mistake twice, and today I snapped away so I could share the fun with all of you. I hope you find it as interesting as I did!

Let's get started: The book has a rather unassuming cover, but BAM, a pretty impressive title page.  If you look closely, you can tell the cover of the book has been made with vellum, which pretty much will last until the end of time. I assume this is not the original cover and binding for this text, but the fact that it's made with vellum means it's certainly not a modern binding. 

Isn't that a sweet shield? 

The book is  the Historia de la Procincia de Aragon de la Orden de Predicadores... by Francisco Diago

An interior binding detail

Now into the book! Here's the prologue page, dedicated to the reasonable reader 

Check out the pointing guy in the Q! Isn't he amazing? 

This text was full of beautiful details like the historiated initial above. (A historiated initial is a letter that has a picture inside - aka, the best kind of letters.) I took a picture of this Q specifically, but as I was looking through my photographs, I realized I'd inadvertently captured a lot of other beautiful initials as well. The following aren't 'historiated' initials, merely 'decorated initials' or 'illustrated initials' but they're very lovely. So I clicked through the images and copied/cropped any that had initials in them to show you a few more. It might be a fun side project to collect images of initials from books I consulted. Maybe I could get a whole alphabet by the end of my trip! Unlikely, but it might be fun. 

I think the E and the L were each especially lovely. 

Wish I'd paid more attention to the other initials as I was going through!

But initials aside, the book had a lot of other beautiful decorated elements to enjoy. Like this gorgeous banner above this index of martyrs:

 Fancy!

Or the way the end of the prologue tapers into a decorative point, followed by an intricate decoration: 

 

But more so than the lovely early modern printed decorations, I was excited by the text itself. So let's dive into that! Here's page one. Well, technically, it's "Folio one, Recto." This book's pagination is not by page, but by folio, and only the recto (the front side) of each folio is numbered. So the back of this page isn't "page two," it's "Folio 1, Verso" (back side). So by our modern standards, this book has twice as many pages as it's numeration claims. Hah.  

This first page has everything! A beautiful banner, italic and regular fonts, marginal notes, a decorated initial, a stamp pasted in stating its provenance as part of the "Biblioteca Real" collection (see the BR with a crown on top above the illustrated L)... what more could a book nerd want!?! 

While we're on the subject of pagination, I want to point out this other neat and practical feature of early modern books. To aid in the assembly, and ensure that the pages were put together in the right order, at the bottom of each page, they printed the first word that will appear on the following page. Check it out:

This page notes that the following page should start with "Ami" ... 

And so it does! Good job assembling this properly, 16th century printer. 

Now, I've structured this post to get more obscurely nerdy as it goes, so feel free to ditch at any time if you're getting bored. But anyone who's taken medieval paleography will probably get a kick out of some of the holdovers from medieval abbreviations in the Early Modern period. Now, medieval books were handwritten on vellum, (calf skin) which is extremely expensive. Common words were abbreviated or given symbols to save space. However, this practice continues in the first century or so of early modern printed books, even though, since the change was made to paper, there's no concern about saving space. Just custom I suppose. 

The most common abbreviations in this book were a dash above a letter indicating that the following "n" has been omitted. The highlighted words here are "con" and "aun" 

 Here we see the same thing, where the word "orden" is missing it's final "n." But there's another common one here as well, where a "q" with a dash above it is a symbol for the word "que."

 In the marginal notes, (like the one below) where space saving is actually a concern, the abbreviations are more frequent. I especially like the "d" with the cross through the ascender. This is for the common Spanish word "de." Unabbreviated, this marginal note reads "Don Fray Raymundo siendo obispo de Valencia tomo el habito de la orden." (Roughly - "Don Fray Raymundo, being bishop of Valencia, took the habit of the order")

Also, how pretty are these italic ampersands? Totally resembles "et."

I also LOVED encountering the notes left behind by past readers. There's one commentator who took it upon himself, to 

  

(A) Make corrections (here substituting "Arnaldo" where "Alberto has been printed)

 (B) Provide suggestions for further reading

 (C) Get all worked up and point out "homicide!" during the description of a friar's death:

(D) (my favorite) Leave his own strong opinions about Ramon Llull:

This last contribution was my favorite, because something interesting happened. Here's how I sorted out what went down - let me know if  you agree. 

You see, this page has a tear in it. At first I thought maybe some of this scholar of yesteryear's marginal notes  had gone with it - see the "o" on the other side of the tear, suggesting that the first line of writing is incomplete, and part is now missing? I was bummed. Until I noticed that the following lines all negotiate around the tear. The tear must have been there before the scholar made his notes. But then what's up with that first incomplete line? 

Then I saw a piece had been cut out of the next page, but still had some evidence that something was once written there, and then cut away - see what looks to be the bottom bits of letters written in brown ink?

It seems the scholar started writing, didn't realize there was a tear in the page, wrote his line, realized part of it had gotten onto the next page, removed the mistake from the next page by cutting it away, and continued his rant on the next line, this time negotiating around the tear. 

These kinds of little quirks are SO amusing to me. 

The two fated pages

Anyway, these are things only a codicology nerd would love, but, that's me.

I also found someone else's notes tucked away, forgotten for who knows how long between the pages. The handwriting is different, and I have to assume these notes are newer than the ones written so neatly onto the book in brown ink, because these are scrawled with a blue ballpoint pen. 

Anyway, if you're still with me, I hope you've enjoyed my little tour through all the bits of this beautiful old book that so delighted me. I hadn't checked it out to view its initials, abbreviations, binding, or marginal notations though. They were fun bonuses, but I'd really gotten the book to read a 16th century account of the medieval history of the Dominicans in Aragon. And it was a very useful text in this regard. As Dr. Garcia-Serrano pointed out to me, oftentimes, despite their biases and problems, these 16th century early modern historians had access to sources that simply are no longer extant, and can be a great resource to historians of medieval Spain. So I was scanning the book for discussions of issues related to my dissertation. And I was rewarded for my patience, because there were mentions of Ramon Marti scattered throughout! Plus there was a whole section just on his life, so that's a great great source to have. :-) Time well spent in the BNE!

My favorite part of the book was finding out that it was going to be a really useful source for my dissertation.These selections of the text may not have had gorgeous decoration or interesting codicological tidbits, but it was nevertheless a thrill. Check it out - one of the parts that mentions Ramon Marti! 

Needless to say, I was a happy book nerd today. <3

Campus Days at SLU Madrid

I met with Dr. García-Serrano early this morning to get his thoughts on the completed sections of my propectus. He's a scholar of the medieval Dominicans, so I was really eager to hear what he thought. When I arrived at his office he had it all printed out full of little notes and suggestions. Right away I saw on the top of the paper though that he had written, "Amy – This is a great prospectus and it sounds very exciting" so before we even got into discussing it, I breathed a sigh of relief knowing already that he'd liked it. He told me that it is really interesting and exciting, and said that if he were to do grad school over again, he'd want to do this too! That felt like such a great assurance that I am on the right track, knowing that this specialist was so on board. I've appreciated the enthusiasm and excitement that both he and Damian have expressed about my prospectus so far.  It was also very cool that he suggested I outline my chapters exactly as I had planned to in my mind – more positive confirmation that it's going well!

We talked about a lot of interesting problems – questioning whether it's possible that Marti could really have been such an accomplished polyglot, whether it's worth considering that he or his father may have been a converso, this tension of questioning religious ancestry in the historiography of medieval Spain, the differences between the Mediterranean milieu and the Northern European world, how Marti's career represents an encounter of these worlds and how his experiences in multicultural Iberia set him apart from French Dominican contemporaries,  wondering why it is that Marti has been ignored by biographers, whether he's exceptional or a product of his time, the problems and benefits of using early modern sources… He told me this is my time to brainstorm all kinds of theories - I can always abandon them as I go through the research, but keeping my mind open all kinds of answers to these complicated questions is important at this stage.

 It was a lot of fun to talk with another professor besides Dr. Smith who really GETS what I'm working on and the exciting issues and problems that I'm facing! Very validating, and made me excited to attend the conference that will hopefully fill in some context for me. I hope to meet with him again soon, (maybe Tuesday?) to get more of his thoughts on what direction to go next with research. Good to make use of his office hours while it's still so easy to just drop by.

After meeting I sat in on his class to get a sense of how it's run, how he lectures, etc. I was also curious to see how the challenges of this international campus are handled. It was neat that he could call on the very European experiences of the students when discussing the history of Europe, and other than needing to explain some American phrases, like "a Catch-22" and such, it was run like a normal class. So that was fun and interesting. Made me realize how much I've missed being in the classroom working with undergrads. I'm really looking forward to guest lecturing in that class on the dark ages in a few weeks. I also hope I can secure an adjunct position, because I know I'd be really good at that and would really enjoy teaching my own class.

So it was a busy and way fun morning, and after class I went to the library to start incorporating some of the changes Dr. García-Serrano had recommended for my prospectus. I think it's looking even better.

Yesterday on campus was nice too! I ran into Alyssa and we grabbed a cup of tea between her classes. She told me the issue of "In Madrid" was out with her article on the Rastro and one of my pictures! I grabbed a copy and read it outside in the sun. It was really entertaining! I hope to get back to the Rastro, now that I know what it is and what to expect, to do a bit of fun shopping one of these Sundays.  I also got to pick up my package with my little blue book on Marti. YAY! In the afternoon yesterday I worked on my guest lecture a bit on campus, which was quite fun. Here's a few pictures from yesterday:

YAY my book arrived!

Reading an English newspaper about Madrid outside in the sun

Alyssa's article on the Rastro and my picture

Early evening sunset from campus

Enjoying the view

SPRING IS COMING! 

The afternoon today was uneventful. Had a great lunch at Ferro's complete with a ridiculously delicious dessert, stopped at home to drop stuff off, pick stuff up, and relax a bit, and then went to spend the evening at the Biblioteca Nacional, where I copied a few sources. Not all that exciting, but not a bad night! Here's a few more lovely photos of the BNE from today to enjoy:

Hola Queen Isabella!

Relics of research days long past

Finished up the night with dinner here with my host family, which was also delicious, and a super hot shower. Now I'm just waiting to chat with Casey before bed. Buenas Noches! 

Who doesn't love a beautiful old book?

So yesterday was a lot of tracking down books, requesting them, waiting for them, and copying the articles or pages I needed. Today was a lot of the same. It was a bit boring. But I can't get my hands on these books in the states, so I've gotta collect them while I can.

Lots of fichas rosas

Research clutter - nabbed a few more dissertation sources!

But then at the end of the day yesterday, I requested a book that really excited me. It was one I'd seen bits of it online before. It's not impossible to find in the States, but I wasn't able to get ahold of via ILL in the past since it is old and fragile, and mostly online. But not old and fragile enough to not be in the BNE's general collection of books you can just request and have at your desk in 15 minutes. SO I DID, because why not? 

I very much enjoyed leafing through Celestino Schiaparelli's 1871 Vocabulista in arabico. It's a printed edition of a thirteenth century Arabic-Latin dictionary which has been attributed to Marti. The manuscript is in Florence and has been published twice. The later was in 1989 I got to see both editions in one day :-)

Very much enjoying this beautiful 140+ year old book! 

I'm certain the binding is relatively new, but that aside, the original portions of the book were all in WAY better shape than the entire 20-something-years-old book I also had on my desk (the other edition of the Vocabulista). 1871, but it looks like it was printed yesterday on bright clean paper. It is definitely a tribute to the value of acid-free paper and quality printing. Plus it smelled amazing.  

Here are some of the beautiful details:

Lovely frontispiece with images from the MS

Intricate printing for section headings. 

I just love the texture of pages that were actually pressed when printed. Here's the raised texture of the text from the previous page. Feels neat.

Complete with a perfectly medieval explicit on the last page. This entertained me greatly. 

Seeing this beautiful book at the end of the day was the perfect way to get me excited about my research. I've been doing a lot of hunting and copying relatively rare secondary sources, which will be SO helpful for my dissertation, but I also need to make time to see some beautiful manuscripts or lovely early modern books! Because those will really excite me, much in the way this pretty old(ish) book did.