Bringing together
the old and the new

At the center of our logo page is a woodcut form the 16th century, depicting numerous trades in action.

While not a photographic representation of any particular village, the image does represent the interconnectedness of premodern trades. Today we tend to think of industries as discrete entities, and while of course today they are still interconnected, they exist at great distances from one another and materials are trucked or freighted between them (think of how far-flung the components of your car were before they rolled off the final assembly line in Detroit or Tokyo or Berlin). In the medieval and colonial worlds, materials largely stayed and remained local.

Although the idea of a fully self-sufficient farm is largely a myth [1], most villages were largely independent of any necessary goods from more than a few dozen miles away (we of course recognize that luxury goods traveled many, if not hundreds or thousands of miles). Wood and most common metal were sourced nearby, cloth was woven locally or at least made into clothing locally, and food mostly came from within a few miles, if not one's own back yard. As Ruth Cowan put it for the american colonial period, ""

Sources

Woodcut:

[1] Ruth Schwarz Cohen