Edelman Bedelman / Rich Man Poor Man -- A Short Review

Together with the latest issue of Medieval Warfare I bought this stunning image book by photographer Stef Verstraaten. In 2008/2009 Verstraaten took pictures of participants/reenactors of the yearly Limbourg Brothers festival in Nijmegen. The book shows on roughly 200 pages full colour photos of reenactors dressed in 15th century gear. The text is bilingual Dutch and English, however, there is only about 20 something pages of text, the focus of the book is clearly on the beautiful images.

The first thing to notice about the book is its enormous size. The format is rather large, for example compared with your average Osprey title.

The second noticeable feature is the superb quality of the photos inside the book. You can clearly see those pictures have been taken by a professional. As I am not into reenactment myself and have not much knowledge about 15th century clothing I cannot say whether the colours of the clothes, their patterns and their fabric are "historically correct". They look authentic to me and I will certainly take inspiration from the book for my late medieval brushwork :-)

Compared to other reenactor books like Embletons Medieval Soldier, it is easy to see that both digital photography and digital printing made a huge progress during the last 20 years.

However, this book is neither a history book nor is the focus on the military aspects of 15th century life, it is rather an art book. I would guess only about 20% of the images are soldier/weapons related, the rest shows civilians exclusively.

The book is available on http://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/shop/medieval-book.html

Some more pictures