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All but one of the shields with [Margaret Holland, Duchess of Clarence's] husbands' heraldic arms are positioned next to images of death and resurrection: the arms of Beaufort impaling Holland are juxtaposed with an image of the Last Judgement at the beginning of the seven penitential Psalms; Clarence's arms are placed next to a funeral scene at the start of the Office of the Dead; and at the Commendation of Souls the arms of Beaufort are placed next to a miniature showing angels carrying three souls upwards to the Trinity. The only apparent exception to this pattern is the arms of Clarence impaling Holland at the Prime of the Office of the Virgin, juxtaposed with an image of the Arrest of Christ. Perhaps Margaret saw this image of armed violence, featuring a crowd of guards in armour reminiscent of fifteenth-century fashions, as an oblique reference to Clarence's bloody death on the battlefield. It is certainly one of the miniatures that attracted the most attention: the face of Christ, grasped simultaneously by Judas and an armoured knight, is smeared from rubbing or kissing. Interestingly, the other area on this folio similarly blurred is the escutcheon of Clarence and Margaret's arms directly below the scene: the only heraldic shield in the Clarence Hours to bear the traces of such tactile ministrations. Just as the miniature of the Presentation to the Temple sets up a correspondence between the Virgin's dedication to God and Margaret's own religious commitment, so the duchess may have seen the violence of Clarence's demise as an echo of Christ's suffering.

Jessica Barker, Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture (The Boydell Press, 2020)

#margaret holland duchess of clarence

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What do you think of Anne Neville What I mean is, all the articles I read about her are about the men around her, her father, her two husbands... Anne's two biographies are mixed with the author's biases and feel more like novels. (When it comes to her novels, in all the works I know, Anne's role is to shape her "perfect" second husband... Her marriage with Edward was a disaster...)

The thing is there's very little that survives about the "real" Anne Neville. As far as contemporary chronicle accounts, the best comment about Anne is by Kavita Mudan Finn in The Last Plantagenet Consorts:

... about Anne herself there is little information. She remains an empty space at the center of these accounts, a definite and ultimately unexplored source of political and economic capital.

As an empty space, she can be anything anyone wants her to be. But like almost everything about the Wars of the Roses, she's become stereotyped into a collection of literary tropes and constructions that supposedly is her "real self" but try to trace them back and scrutinise them and the evidence will fall part apart or feeds a circular narrative.

In Tudor times, Anne's story was shaped by the narrative around Richard III. She is yet another of the monster's victims, the murdered wife casually disposed of by the cruel husband seeking a new bride - or else she and her son don't appear, their absence heightening Richard's alienation from humanity. The Ricardian movement has reshaped her into Richard's tragic and loyal wife who has loved him all her life. In this stories, Anne has been ailing since childhood and struggles through adversary and trauma - dragged hither and thither into danger by her uncaring, power-hungry father, married off to a vicious husband who abused her and maybe raped her (the debate on the marriage's consummation sure is... a thing that exists), endured the cruelties of Evil Queen Margaret, imprisoned by her own sister and brother-in-law - before Richard rescues her and she receives a brief few moments of married bliss before the recurring miscarriages and her frail health collapses ruin this bliss before she finally and tragically dies in a heartbroken Richard's arms.

Some novelists, such as Philippa Gregory and Annie Garthwaite, make a "feminist intervention" where, despite being still the tragically ailing heroine, Anne is also more ruthless or clever than Richard in the pursuit of power. Both authors depict Anne and Cecily Neville joining forces to push noble-hearted Richard into disinheriting his nephews in order to save him. The TV series based on Gregory's novels, The White Queen, depicts Anne as willing to have the Princes killed, though of course Margaret Beaufort gets there first and Anne later has a breakdown, having heard Elizabeth Woodville has cursed the murderers of her sons and rumours that Richard is having an affair with Elizabeth of York (which he pretty well is). Garthwaite, on the other hand, depicts Anne as the only woman Cecily Neville likes (and the only other woman the narrative doesn't derive as evil, stupid, selfish or hysteric - how is feminist again?) and joins forces with Cecily to advise the kindly Richard to bring the Princes back from wherever he's sent them to prove that they're not dead. Richard, however, nobly refuses - displaying what seem to be post-Diana concerns about the right of royalty to privacy - as he insists to bring them back would expose them to the public eye, a cruelty he cannot countenance but one Anne and Cecily evidently can.

Historian Anne Crawford very recently proclaimed Anne the lone perfect queen of the Wars of the Roses - because not a hint of criticism of her behaviour survives, though I suspect this is because the brevity of her life and the sheer absence of evidence for her life, and it's easy to proclaim her the ideal when you reduce Margaret of Anjou to a shrew and Elizabeth Woodville to an invasive species as Crawford does. Some Ricardians, on the other hand, declare Anne was a "bad" wife and queen due to having only one child, thus failing to secure Richard III's dynasty, and then for dying, thus leaving him open to accusations he murdered her. I know people who love the the idea of a monstrous Anne and Richard as an evil super couple.

Are any of these interpretations of Anne likely to reflect the real, historical Anne? We know so little about Anne's life that anything could is possible. We can talk about whether there's evidence that Anne had a chronic illness or recurring miscarriages, that she was raped or mistreated, that she was the brains behind Richard III - but a lack of evidence proving these things is hardly surprising given how little evidence survives about Anne in general, and an absence of evidence is not proof that these things didn't happen. I don't say that to mean, "and therefore I think these things happened" because I don't . I think these are more literary constructions or pointless point-scoring than an attempt to draw out the real Anne or at least imagine her as a flesh-and-blood woman who could have believably lived in the 15th century and did more than act as a heroine in a tragedy or a heroine in a romance.

I've not read the biographies of Anne. The biography by Michael Hicks has not reputation for being absolutely rancid and the one by Amy Licence... well, I think Licence is a pretty bad historian (I've got to rant about her Red Roses book in my head, but I will give her props for actually saying that maybe Victorian historian who famously got a lot of things wrong wasn't right about Catherine de Valois being forced into an abbey which is more than Tudor-Beaufort historian Nathen Amin is doing.) I did read and somewhat like the chapter on Anne in Late Plantagenet and the Wars of the Roses Consorts by Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs but that very much was shaped by Ricardianism.

I actually see parallels between Anne and Catherine de Valois. Both reigned as queen-consorts for such a short time that we have very little knowledge of what their queenship looked like and they can be imagined as perfect queens or useless queens (Anne Crawford labels Catherine as stupid and lacking in personality, for the record). Both are imagined today as more important not so much for their lives but for their status as romantic heroines. And when push comes to shove, they both get thrown under the Ricardian bus - Anne was a "bad" wife for suffering fertility issues and then dying and Catherine's Tudor children were all secret Beaufort bastards, which means Henry VII was a secret incest bastard who never had the right to the throne.

Both women are fascinating to us - but they remain out of reach due a lack of evidence. They must have lived very complex lives, living through the turmoil of war and civil unrest. And yet all everyone cares about is how they might shape the reputation of their second husbands and, in Catherine's case, the dynasty that ensued.

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Bomb more oil refineries!

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Odesa yesterday.

Attacking civilian infrastructure with cluster munitions is pure terrorism and deliberate killing of peaceful population.

Russia is a terrorist state.

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Anti-social blogger who routinely demonstrates they want to do nothing but the absolute bare minimum and has no particular political ambitions outside of performing vague leftism online: I Want To Live In A Commune.

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Swedish Wedding Crown

early 18th century

Walters Art Museum

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La Mode illustrée, no. 18, 30 avril 1882, Paris. Toilettes de la Mon Fladry, Mme Coussinet, Succr, 43 r. Richer. Collection of the Rijksmuseum, Netherlands

Description de toilettes (Bibliothèque Forney):

Keep reading

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I think people forget that the Nazis never said they were the bad guys. If someone says, hey, I’m evil! You don’t let them take over your country. They presented themselves as scientific, not hateful. By their own account, they were progressives, and the superiority of White Europe over the other races was a proven and immutable fact. They had scientists and archaeologists and historians to prove it. They didn’t tell people they wanted to kill the Jews because they were hateful. They manufactured evidence to frame us for very real tragedies, and they had methodological research to prove that we were genetically predisposed to misconduct. Wouldn’t you believe that?

Hollywood has spent the last 80 years portraying the Nazis as an obvious and intimidating evil. That’s a good thing in some ways, because we want general audiences to recognize that they were evil. But we also want them to be able to recognize how and why they came to power. Not by self-describing themselves as an evil empire, but by convincing people that they were the good guys and the saviors. They hosted the Olympics. Several European countries capitulated and volunteered themselves to the Empire. There were American and British Fascist Parties. They had broad public support. Hollywood never shows that part, so general audiences never learn to recognize the actual signs of antisemitism.

People today think they can’t possibly be antisemitic, because they’re leftist! They abhor bigotry! They could never comprehend Nazi ideology coming from the mouth of a bisexual college student wearing a graphic tee and jeans. How could they? The only depiction of antisemites they’ve ever seen have been gaunt, pale, middle-aged men in black leather trench coats with skulls on their caps.

If the Nazis time-travelled from the 1930s and wanted to take power now, they’d change their original tactics, but not by much. They would target countries suffering from an identity crisis and an economic collapse. They would portray themselves as the pinnacle of what that society considers progressive. Back then, it was race science. These days it’s performative wokeness. Once they’d garnered enough respect and reputation, they’d begin manufacturing propaganda and lies to manipulate people’s anger and fears at a single target— Jews.

If the Nazis made an actual return, they wouldn’t look like neo-Nazis. They wouldn’t be nearly as obvious about their hatred. Their evil wouldn’t give them yellow eyes, and no suspenseful music would play when they walked in the room. They’d be friendly. They’d look like you. They would learn what things your community fears and what things you already hate. They would lie and fabricate evidence to connect the rich elites and the imperialists you revile to a single source of unequivocal Jewish evil. It wouldn’t be hard— they already have two-thousand years of institutional antisemitism they can rely on to paint their picture.

If you’re curious why antisemitism today is coming from grassroots organizations, young, liberal college campuses, suburban neighborhoods with pride flags and All Are Welcome Here signs? That’s why. It’s because, as a global society, we’ve forgotten that the world didn’t used to see the Nazis as bad guys. And what is forgotten about history is doomed to be repeated.

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Some ppl are like "I'm a kinky sex-positive pervert freak!!!" and then make fun of virgins and asexuals..... sure, reclaim freakiness but keep working on that because teasing ppl for their sex lives (or lack thereof) is, unfortunately, very normie mainstream vanilla behaviour. the right to sexual determination includes NOT having sex. 101 shit. Like this isnt subversive dude, it's using the edge of an ideology for bullying

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Controversial ways i'm raising my children

• I will parent them in uniquely toxic ways so they each develop a different personality disorder as adults

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looked up my symptoms on webmd and it turns out i have an ancient ancestral curse that has been passed down my bloodline for generations

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Jacket Panels

1600-1625

Italy or England

Victoria & Albert Museum (Accession number: 346:1 to 3-1898)

#17th century #17th century fashion

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"Progressives" these days

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People on the #grind will say things like "monetize your hobbies! if you're good at it, you shouldn't just do it for fun you should get something out of it!" and then disrespect sex workers

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Can we please for the love of god stop telling teenagers they’re too young to have aches and pains. Can we please stop being dismissive about these things. Fakeclaiming is disgusting period, but it is exponentially harmful to youth. Just because you didn’t start hurting until your 20s or 30s or 40s doesn’t mean every teenager complaining of chronic pain must be lying. I learned the hard way that if kids are invalidated enough about this, they will just learn to accept constant pain as a fact of life. And then they will need surgery they can’t afford in ten years bc it turns out constant pain is NOT a fact of life. At any age.

p.s. same goes for mental health