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#As for sixteenth century women
pintoras · 1 month
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Lavinia Fontana (Italian, 1552 - 1614): Portrait of a Pregnant Woman, Possibly a Self-Portrait (via Sotheby's)
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nochargebookbunch · 2 years
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The Marriage Portrait
Strong willed teenage girls have been in literature since Shakespeare’s thirteen year old Juliet. Maggie O’Farrell uses Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” and the Macchiavellian intrigue of the sixteenth century to create a fascinating tale of the young Duchess of Ferrara. Lucrezia may be an outcast in her family, not quite fitting in with her dark haired subserviant sisters and her entitled…
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its-not-a-pen · 9 months
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[餘智傳] The 2nd Century Warlord (Part 2)
based on the story by @romanceyourdemons
Read part 1
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ninth day as a second century warlord i try to tactfully ask my fake liege lord if he sent the assassin to kill my loser liege lord and it turns out the idea of using assassins never occurred to him, but now that i’ve suggested it he’s really into it. in order to save my loser liege lord i volunteer to be the one to kill him
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tenth day as a second century warlord on my way back to my loser liege lord’s city i realize i won’t be able to collect my men from my fake liege lord until i bring back my loser liege lord’s head. this would have been a great thing to think of before i got myself in this situation. i go back to my loser liege lord and ask him to rescue my men, and he tells me that if he could sack my fake liege lord’s camp he already would have. that doesn’t change the fact that my men are still trapped. they’re prisoners, even. i go back to my room to sulk
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eleventh day as a second century warlord i find a little caged pigeon in the rafters of my loser liege lord’s room and deduce it belonged to the assassin. without asking permission or telling my loser liege lord goodbye i let the pigeon loose and follow it north. don’t ask what i was doing in my loser liege lord’s room. it’s not important
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twelfth day as a second century warlord i disguise myself as a wizard and enter the camp of the coalition leader the pigeon led me to. in the middle of my little sleight of hand performance i make eye contact with the coalition leader’s second-in-command. IT’S THE WIZARD THAT STOLE MY LOSER LIEGE LORD’S WIFE. after the banquet i corner the fake wizard and ask him what the fuck is going on and he just says “wouldn’t you like to know” and leaves. i don’t know what to say to that so i just let him go
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thirteenth day as a second century warlord i’m honestly so sick of not knowing what’s going on, so i adjust my wizard costume to passably disguise myself as a woman and break into the women’s area of the camp, where sure enough my loser liege lord’s wife is. i ask her what she’s doing here and she tells me the fake wizard overheard her singing a poem she overheard on the street, not knowing it contains the coalition leader’s formation’s weaknesses. the fake wizard kidnapped her and assigned an assassin to kill her husband before they figured out the poem’s significance. she shares the first couplet with me but i’m discovered and thrown out before she can share any more. she doesn’t need to. through a bizarre coincidence of homophones, it’s the poop version of my misinformation nursery rhyme
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fourteenth day as a second century warlord i go back to my loser liege lord and tell him everything, urging him to join with my fake liege lord to attack the coalition leader according to the weaknesses in the nursery rhyme. he tells me frankly that he doesn’t trust me anymore. i ask him to execute me if that’s really true, because i can’t bear to live if i can’t protect him and i can’t protect my men. he agrees to attack the coalition leader
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fifteenth day as a second century warlord. due to the information in the nursery rhyme, and thanks to my loser liege lord reminding me of the weather conditions multiple times while planning our battle strategy, our alliance carries the day. my loser liege lord gets his wife back. my men tell me that our fake liege lord actually treated them really well and they’d like to stay with him if i don’t mind. i do mind, now that neither the men i love nor the man i love have any use for me, but i don’t tell them that
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sixteenth day as a second century warlord i’m preparing to leave to i don’t know where, maybe to try to become a wizard for real, when my loser liege lord stops me and asks me where i’m going. he says he had hoped i would continue to work as his advisor. i was unaware i was his advisor in the first place. i agree, and he tells me he’s truly honored to have me in his service at last. he has known i am a rare and talented man with a strategic intelligence far above his ever since the day he witnessed me tying branches to my horses’ tails in six inches of mud, and could not for the life of him figure out why
The end.
Thanks for reading! Notes under the cut
CORRECTION#1: the warlord's courtesy name was incorrectly written as Yú zhī 餘知 [plentiful knowledge]. my dumbass did not realise zhī 知 [to know] is a GOD DAMN VERB. It should be zhì 智 [wisdom].
CORRECTION#2: the clothes from part one are from the WRONG DYNASTY!!! BY 1200 YEARS!!!! it's meant to be HAN not MING.
#9 Misreading the standards: Loser Liege's name is Yue, so I decided to go with Lè/Yuè 樂 [optimistic/music]. I made the Chad Liege's name Cháo 巢 [nest] which is pronounced identically to Cáo 曹, the infamous IRL warlord. Just like his IRL counterpart, he is the affable, lawful-evil boss who is kind to his employees. I went ALL OUT designing Lord Chad Chao's outfit. He's got so much drip the yangtze river is about to break its banks. Now THAT'S a main character!
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#10 Wardrobe Malfunction: the soldiers are now wearing clothes from the correct dynasty. i even gave them grass sandals! I really wanted to show how utterly outclassed they are, this is the difference between a peasant militia and a professional army. (They're in the exact same poses as part 1, except more terrified).
#11 mountain-water art: man i love doing traditional style backgrounds, the white space is very pleasing. Does it make sense to camp your coalition out in the mountains? No. Is it cool? Hella.
#12 you're a wizard, hairy: my favourite detail is the pigeon from day 11 sitting on the warlord's hat. I had to cut SO MUCH from this scene because there wasn't room. There was going to be musicians, jesters and strongmen. (Based of funerary figures)
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I wanted to make it clear that the Coalition Liege is the richest guy of all, but he is all style and no substance. He's got an army of dancing girls and drunk officers. You get the feeling that his Chief Strategist aka Fake Wizard aka Zhuge Liang Knockoff, disproves.
#13 Hua Mulan: RIP the Warlord's beautiful beard ;n; He's wearing one of the dancing girl's outfits and I like to think the ladies helped him do his makeup too. I wanted to add a little character moment for the Wife and Warlord. They're holding hands which is not strictly proper, but I wanted to show the intensity of the emotions.
#14 the supplicant: I really like the framing here, I wanted both faces to be visible so we can see what they're thinking.
#15 enemy of my enemy: the Warlord is finally in command and flying his standard Huáng 黃 [yellow]. He is wearing a wu guan with two pheasant feathers, for a high ranking military official.
#16 the romantic subplot: the Warlord and his Loser are tenderly holding hands while the Wife and Noble Steed looks on with approval. I wanted the handholding to be slightly awkward and kinda spontaneous, like they were both aiming for a manly, platonic hand-clasp but veered wildly off-course into homoeroticism. In the background, an oblivious Lord Chad is showing off the little wooden horse one of his new soldiers gave him (that guy's been carving it since part 1, it's high time we acknowledged his hard work).
Want to learn more about the (mostly) true story that inspired this post? Check out Romance of the Three Kingdoms! TV show, the book and the movie Red Cliff,
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pathetic-gamer · 12 days
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Pentiment's Complete Bibliography, with links to some hard-to-find items:
I've seen some people post screenshots of the game's bibliography, but I hadn't found a plain text version (which would be much easier to work from), so I put together a complete typed version - citation style irregularities included lol. I checked through the full list and found that only four of the forty sources can't be found easily through a search engine. One has no English translation and I'm not even close to fluent enough in German to be able to actually translate an academic article, so I can't help there. For the other three (a museum exhibit book, a master's thesis, and portions of a primary source that has not been entirely translated into English), I tracked down links to them, which are included with their entries on the list.
If you want to read one of the journal articles but can't access it due to paywalls, try out 12ft.io or the unpaywall browser extension (works on Firefox and most chromium browsers). If there's something you have interest in reading but can't track down, let me know, and I can try to help! I'm pretty good at finding things lmao
Okay, happy reading, love you bye
Beach, Alison I. Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria. Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2004.
Berger, Jutta Maria. Die Geschichterder Gastfreundschaft im hochmittel alterlichen Monchtum: die Cistercienser. Akademie Verlag GmbH, 1999. [No translation found.]
Blickle, Peter. The Revolution of 1525. Translated by Thomas A. Brady, Jr. and H.C. Erik Midelfort. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Brady, Thomas A., Jr. “Imperial Destinies: A New Biography of the Emperor Maximilian I.” The Journal of Modern History, vol 62, no. 2., 1990. pp.298-314.
Brandl, Rainer. “Art or Craft: Art and the Artist in Medieval Nuremberg.” Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 1300-1550. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986. [LINK]
Byars, Jana L., “Prostitutes and Prostitution in Late Medieval Bercelona.” Masters Theses. Western Michigan University, 1997. [LINK]
Cashion, Debra Taylor. “The Art of Nikolaus Glockendon: Imitation and Originality in the Art of Renaissance Germany.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, vol 2, no. 1-2, 2010.
de Hamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. Phaidon Press Limited, 1986.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver. Mariner Books, 2014.
Eco, Umberto. Baudolino. Translated by William Weaver. Mariner Books, 2003.
Fournier, Jacques. “The Inquisition Records of Jacques Fournier.” Translated by Nancy P. Stork. Jan Jose Univeristy, 2020. [LINK]
Geary, Patrick. “Humiliation of Saints.” In Saints and their cults: studies in religious sociology, folklore, and history. Edited by Stephen Wilson. Cambridge University Press, 1985. pp. 123-140
Harrington, Joel F. The Faithrul Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Hertzka, Gottfired and Wighard Strehlow. Grosse Hildegard-Apotheke. Christiana-Verlag, 2017.
Hildegard von Bingen. Physica. Edited by Reiner Hildebrandt and Thomas Gloning. De Gruyter, 2010.
Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Translated by Barry Windeatt. Oxford Univeristy Press, 2015.
Karras, Ruth Mazo. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. Routledge, 2017.
Kerr, Julie. Monastic Hospitality: The Benedictines in England, c.1070-c.1250. Boudell Press, 2007.
Kieckhefer, Richard. Forbidden rites: a necromancer’s manual of the fifteenth century. Sutton, 1997.
Kuemin, Beat and B. Ann Tlusty, The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe. Routledge, 2017.
Ilner, Thomas, et al. The Economy of Duerrnberg-Bei-Hallein: An Iron Age Salt-mining Center in the Austrian Alps. The Antiquaries Journal, vol 83, 2003. pp. 123-194
Lang, Benedek. Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008
Lindeman, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Lowe, Kate. “’Representing’ Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402-1608.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Sixth Series, vol 17, 2007. pp. 101-128
Meyers, David. “Ritual, Confession, and Religion in Sixteenth-Century Germany.” Archiv fuer Reformationsgenshichte, vol. 89, 1998. pp. 125-143.
Murat, Zuleika. “Wall paintings through the ages: the medieval period (Italy, twelfth to fifteenth century).” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, vol 23, no. 191. Springer, October 2021. pp. 1-27.
Overty, Joanne Filippone. “The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300-1483.” Book History 11, 2008. pp. 1-32.
Page, Sophie. Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occullt Approaches to the Medieval Universe. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
Park, Katharine. “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissectionin Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol 47, no. 1, Spring 1994. pp. 1-33.
Rebel, Hermann. Peasant Classes: The Bureaucratization of Property and Family Relations under Early Habsburg Absolutism, 1511-1636. Princeton University Press, 1983.
Rublack, Ulinka. “Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany.” Past & Present,vol. 150, no. 1, February 1996.
Salvador, Matteo. “The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306-1458.” Journal of World History, vol. 21, no. 4, 2011. pp.593-627.
Sangster, Alan. “The Earliest Known Treatise on Double Entry Bookkeeping by Marino de Raphaeli.” The Accounting Historians Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 2015. pp. 1-33.
Throop, Priscilla. Hildegarde von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. Healing Arts Press, 1998.
Usher, Abbott Payson. “The Origins of Banking: The Brimitive Bank of Deposit, 1200-1600.” The Economic History Review, vol. 4, no. 4. 1934. pp.399-428.
Waldman, Louis A. “Commissioning Art in Florence for Matthias Corvinus: The Painter and Agent Alexander Formoser and his Sons, Jacopo and Raffaello del Tedesco.” Italy and Hungary: Humanism and Art in the Early Renaissance. Edited by Peter Farbaky and Louis A. Waldman, Villa I Tatti, 2011. pp.427-501.
Wendt, Ulrich. Kultur and Jagd: ein Birschgang durch die Geschichte. G. Reimer, 1907.
Whelan, Mark. “Taxes, Wagenburgs and a Nightingale: The Imperial Abbey of Ellwangen and the Hussite Wars, 1427-1435.” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 72, no. 4, 2021, pp.751-777.
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Yardeni, Ada. The Book of Hebrew Script: History, Palaeography, Script Styles, Calligraphy & Design. Tyndale House Publishers, 2010.
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breelandwalker · 1 year
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JSTOR Articles on the History of Witchcraft, Witch Trials, and Folk Magic Beliefs
This is a partial of of articles on these subjects that can be found in the JSTOR archives. This is not exhaustive - this is just the portion I've saved for my own studies (I've read and referenced about a third of them so far) and I encourage readers and researchers to do their own digging. I recommend the articles by Ronald Hutton, Owen Davies, Mary Beth Norton, Malcolm Gaskill, Michael D. Bailey, and Willem de Blecourt as a place to start.
If you don't have personal access to JSTOR, you may be able to access the archive through your local library, university, museum, or historical society.
Full text list of titles below the cut:
'Hatcht up in Villanie and Witchcraft': Historical, Fiction, and Fantastical Recuperations of the Witch Child, by Chloe Buckley
'I Would Have Eaten You Too': Werewolf Legends in the Flemish, Dutch and German Area, by Willem de Blecourt
'The Divels Special Instruments': Women and Witchcraft before the Great Witch-hunt, by Karen Jones and Michael Zell
'The Root is Hidden and the Material Uncertain': The Challenges of Prosecuting Witchcraft in Early Modern Venice, by Jonathan Seitz
'Your Wife Will Be Your Biggest Accuser': Reinforcing Codes of Manhood at New England Witch Trials, by Richard Godbeer
A Family Matter: The CAse of a Witch Family in an 18th-Century Volhynian Town, by Kateryna Dysa
A Note on the Survival of Popular Christian Magic, by Peter Rushton
A Note on the Witch-Familiar in Seventeenth Century England, by F.H. Amphlett Micklewright
African Ideas of Witchcraft, by E.G. Parrinder
Aprodisiacs, Charms, and Philtres, by Eleanor Long
Charmers and Charming in England and Wales from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, by Owen Davies
Charming Witches: The 'Old Religion' and the Pendle Trial, by Diane Purkiss
Demonology and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Sona Rosa Burstein
Denver Tries A Witch, by Margaret M. Oyler
Devil's Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore, and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, by Ethan Doyle White
Edmund Jones and the Pwcca'r Trwyn, by Adam N. Coward
Essex County Witchcraft, by Mary Beth Norton
From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages, by Michael D. Bailey
German Witchcraft, by C. Grant Loomis
Getting of Elves: Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials, by Alaric Hall
Ghost and Witch in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Gillian Bennett
Ghosts in Mirrors: Reflections of the Self, by Elizabeth Tucker
Healing Charms in Use in England and Wales 1700-1950, by Owen Davies
How Pagan Were Medieval English Peasants?, by Ronald Hutton
Invisible Men: The Historian and the Male Witch, by Lara Apps and Andrew Gow
Johannes Junius: Bamberg's Famous Male Witch, by Lara Apps and Andrew Gow
Knots and Knot Lore, by Cyrus L. Day
Learned Credulity in Gianfrancesco Pico's Strix, by Walter Stephens
Literally Unthinkable: Demonological Descriptions of Male Witches, by Lara Apps and Andrew Gow
Magical Beliefs and Practices in Old Bulgaria, by Louis Petroff
Maleficent Witchcraft in Britian since 1900, by Thomas Waters
Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England, 1593-1680, by E.J. Kent
Methodism, the Clergy, and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic, by Owen Davies
Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition, by Ronald Hutton
Monstrous Theories: Werewolves and the Abuse of History, by Willem de Blecourt
Neapolitan Witchcraft, by J.B. Andrews and James G. Frazer
New England's Other Witch-Hunt: The Hartford Witch-Hunt of the 1660s and Changing Patterns in Witchcraft Prosecution, by Walter Woodward
Newspapers and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic in the Modern Period, by Owen Davies
Occult Influence, Free Will, and Medical Authority in the Old Bailey, circa 1860-1910, by Karl Bell
Paganism and Polemic: The Debate over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, by Ronald Hutton
Plants, Livestock Losses and Witchcraft Accusations in Tudor and Stuart England, by Sally Hickey
Polychronican: Witchcraft History and Children, interpreting England's Biggest Witch Trial, 1612, by Robert Poole
Publishing for the Masses: Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets, by Carla Suhr
Rethinking with Demons: The Campaign against Superstition in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe from a Cognitive Perspective, by Andrew Keitt
Seasonal Festivity in Late Medieval England, Some Further Reflections, by Ronald Hutton
Secondary Targets: Male Witches on Trial, by Lara Apps and Andrew Gow
Some Notes on Modern Somerset Witch-Lore, by R.L. Tongue
Some Notes on the History and Practice of Witchcraft in the Eastern Counties, by L.F. Newman
Some Seventeenth-Century Books of Magic, by K.M. Briggs
Stones and Spirits, by Jane P. Davidson and Christopher John Duffin
Superstitions, Magic, and Witchcraft, by Jeffrey R. Watt
The 1850s Prosecution of Gerasim Fedotov for Witchcraft, by Christine D. Worobec
The Catholic Salem: How the Devil Destroyed a Saint's Parish (Mattaincourt, 1627-31), by William Monter
The Celtic Tarot and the Secret Tradition: A Study in Modern Legend Making, by Juliette Wood
The Cult of Seely Wights in Scotland, by Julian Goodare
The Decline of Magic: Challenge and Response in Early Enlightenment England, by Michael Hunter
The Devil-Worshippers at the Prom: Rumor-Panic as Therapeutic Magic, by Bill Ellis
The Devil's Pact: Diabolic Writing and Oral Tradition, by Kimberly Ball
The Discovery of Witches: Matthew Hopkins' Defense of his Witch-hunting Methods, by Sheilagh Ilona O'Brien
The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature, by Michael D. Bailey
The Epistemology of Sexual Trauma in Witches' Sabbaths, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and Alien Abduction Narratives, by Joseph Laycock
The European Witchcraft Debate and the Dutch Variant, by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra
The Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor: Penis Theft in the Malleus Maleficarum, by Moira Smith
The Framework for Scottish Witch-Hunting for the 1590s, by Julian Goodare
The Imposture of Witchcraft, by Rossell Hope Robbins
The Last Witch of England, by J.B. Kingsbury
The Late Lancashire Witches: The Girls Next Door, by Meg Pearson
The Malefic Unconscious: Gender, Genre, and History in Early Antebellum Witchcraft Narratives, by Lisa M. Vetere
The Mingling of Fairy and Witch Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Scotland, by J.A. MacCulloch
The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations, by Owen Davies
The Pursuit of Reality: Recent Research into the History of Witchcraft, by Malcolm Gaskill
The Reception of Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft: Witchcraft, Magic, and Radical Religions, by S.F. Davies
The Role of Gender in Accusations of Witchcraft: The Case of Eastern Slovenia, by Mirjam Mencej
The Scottish Witchcraft Act, by Julian Goodare
The Werewolves of Livonia: Lycanthropy and Shape-Changing in Scholarly Texts, 1550-1720, by Stefan Donecker
The Wild Hunter and the Witches' Sabbath, by Ronald Hutton
The Winter Goddess: Percht, Holda, and Related Figures, by Lotta Motz
The Witch's Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England and Scotland, by Emma Wilby
The Witches of Canewdon, by Eric Maple
The Witches of Dengie, by Eric Maple
The Witches' Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, or How to Explain Away the Impossible, by Gustav Henningsen
To Accommodate the Earthly Kingdom to Divine Will: Official and Nonconformist Definitions of Witchcraft in England, by Agustin Mendez
Unwitching: The Social and Magical Practice in Traditional European Communities, by Mirjam Mencej
Urbanization and the Decline of Witchcraft: An Examination of London, by Owen Davies
Weather, Prayer, and Magical Jugs, by Ralph Merrifield
Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England, by Malcolm Gaskill
Witchcraft and Magic in the Elizabethan Drama by H.W. Herrington
Witchcraft and Magic in the Rochford Hundred, by Eric Maple
Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany, by Alison Rowlands
Witchcraft and Sexual Knowledge in Early Modern England, by Julia M. Garrett
Witchcraft and Silence in Guillaume Cazaux's 'The Mass of Saint Secaire', by William G. Pooley
Witchcraft and the Early Modern Imagination, by Robin Briggs
Witchcraft and the Western Imagination by Lyndal Roper
Witchcraft Belief and Trals in Early Modern Ireland, by Andrew Sneddon
Witchcraft Deaths, by Mimi Clar
Witchcraft Fears and Psychosocial Factors in Disease, by Edward Bever
Witchcraft for Sale, by T.M. Pearce
Witchcraft in Denmark, by Gustav Henningsen
Witchcraft in Germany, by Taras Lukach
Witchcraft in Kilkenny, by T. Crofton Croker
Witchcraft in Anglo-American Colonies, by Mary Beth Norton
Witchcraft in the Central Balkans I: Characteristics of Witches, by T.P. Vukanovic
Witchcraft in the Central Balkans II: Protection Against Witches, by T.P. Vukanovic
Witchcraft Justice and Human Rights in Africa, Cases from Malawi, by Adam Ashforth
Witchcraft Magic and Spirits on the Border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, by S.P. Bayard
Witchcraft Persecutions in the Post-Craze Era: The Case of Ann Izzard of Great Paxton, 1808, by Stephen A. Mitchell
Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic, by Edward Bever
Witchcraft, by Ray B. Browne
Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery, by Diana Paton
Witchcraft, Politics, and Memory in Seventeeth-Century England, by Malcolm Gaskill
Witchcraft, Spirit Possession and Heresy, by Lucy Mair
Witchcraft, Women's Honour and Customary Law in Early Modern Wales, by Sally Parkin
Witches and Witchbusters, by Jacqueline Simpson
Witches, Cunning Folk, and Competition in Denmark, by Timothy R. Tangherlini
Witches' Herbs on Trial, by Michael Ostling
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jewellery-box · 1 year
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Printed cotton day dress with sleeve inserts
American, ca. 1833
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Frequently satirized by caricaturists, enormous gigot, or leg-of-mutton, sleeves were the defining characteristic of women's fashionable dress at the height of the Romantic period around 1830.   Ballooning out from the shoulder and tapering tightly at the wrist, their exaggerated proportions deliberately evoked similarly voluminous sleeves of the late sixteenth century and enhanced the ideal hourglass silhouette with its small waist and full, rounded skirts. Crescent-shaped down-filled pads often kept the sleeves properly expanded; pinned to the corset underneath, they could be used interchangeably with different gowns.
Most unusually, this floral-printed cotton day dress retains its sized linen sleeve supports that were clearly intended to be worn with this dress. Attached to the interior shoulder seams with tape ties, they are an exceptionally rare survival of an undergarment with its original attire.
Although British cottons continued to be imported into the United States in the post-Revolutionary years, it may be that this sturdy twilled cotton with pink, blue, and green blossoms and meandering vines set off against a rich, brown ground is of American manufacture. By the 1820s, the domestic printed cotton industry had increased significantly from its tentative beginnings in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with large firms established in New England and along the Hudson River.  Floral-patterned cottons were a perennial favorite for day dresses in the 1820s and 1830s, especially for the warmer months from spring to early fall. Probably made by the wearer herself rather than a professional seamstress, the gown and its sleeve inserts demonstrate that American women were well aware of, and followed as closely as possible, current fashions from abroad.
Cora Ginsburg
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By Leslie Patrick
1 August 2023
Anne Boleyn (c. 1501 or 1507 – 19 May 1536), King Henry VIII's second queen, is often portrayed as a seductress and ultimately the woman responsible for changing the face of religion in England.
In reality, she was a fiercely intelligent and pious woman dedicated to education and religious reform.
But after her arrest and execution on false charges of adultery and incest in May 1536, Henry VIII was determined to forget her memory.
Her royal emblems were removed from palace walls, her sparkling jewels tucked away in dark coffers, and her precious books disappeared from the pages of time.
One of Boleyn’s books that has reappeared is the Book of Hours, a stunning prayer book, printed around 1527 with devotional texts designed to be read throughout the day, features hand-painted woodcuts — as well as a rare example of the queen’s own writing.
In the margins of one of the beautifully decorated pages, she penned a rhyming couplet followed by her signature:
“Remember me when you do pray, that hope doth lead from day to day, Anne Boleyn.”
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The book vanished with Boleyn’s execution in 1536, then resurfaced around 1903 when it was acquired by the American millionaire William Waldorf Astor (31 March 1848 – 18 October 1919) after he purchased Hever Castle, Anne Boleyn’s childhood home in the English countryside.
The hiding place of the disgraced queen’s devotional tome had been a mystery for centuries, until recent research by a university student uncovered hidden signatures that helped trace its path through history.
The discovery
The book’s whereabouts in the 367 years between Boleyn’s death and its reemergence remained puzzling until 2020 when Kate McCaffrey, then a graduate student at the University of Kent working on her master’s thesis about Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours, found something unexpected in the margins of the book.
“I noticed what appeared to be smudges to the naked eye,” recalls McCaffrey, assistant curator at Hever Castle since 2021.
Intrigued, she borrowed an industrial-strength ultraviolet light and set it up in the darkest room of Hever Castle.
Ultraviolet light is often used to examine historical documents because ink absorbs the ultraviolet wavelength, causing it to appear darker against the page when exposed.
“The words just came through. It was incredible to see them underneath the light, they were completely illuminated,” the curator recalls.
McCaffrey’s theory is that the words were erased during the late Victorian era when it was popular to cleanse marginalia from books or manuscripts.
But thanks to her extraordinary detective work, these erased words turned out to be the key that unlocked the tale of the book’s secret journey from certain destruction at the royal court to safety in the hands of a dedicated group of Boleyn’s supporters.
The guardians
Indeed, various pages throughout the text reveal the names and notations of a string of Kentish women — Elizabeth Hill, Elizabeth Shirley, Mary Cheke, Philippa Gage, and Mary West — who banded together to safeguard Anne's precious book and keep her memory alive.
While it’s unclear how the book was initially passed to these women, Anne Boleyn expert Natalie Grueninger suggests it was gifted by Anne to a woman named Elizabeth Hill.
Elizabeth grew up near Hever Castle, and her husband, Richard Hill, was sergeant of the King’s Cellar at Henry VIII’s court.
There are records of the Hill’s playing cards with the king, and there may have been a friendship between Elizabeth and the queen that prompted Boleyn to pass her prayer book on before her execution.
“This extended Kentish family kept the book safe following Anne’s demise, which was an incredibly brave and bold act considering it could have been considered treasonous,” says Grueninger, podcaster and author of the book The Final Year of Anne Boleyn.
Anne’s Book of Hours was passed between mothers, daughters, sisters, and nieces until the late sixteenth century, when the last name makes its appearance in its margins.
“This story is an example of the women in the family prioritizing loyalty, friendship, fidelity, and a personal connection to Anne,” says McCaffrey.
“The fact that the women have kept it safe is a really beautiful story of solidarity, community, and bravery.”
The book, currently on display at Hever Castle, is a touchstone of the enigma that was Anne Boleyn.
Castle historian and assistant curator Owen Emmerson points out that the book contains Anne’s DNA on the pages from where she touched and kissed it during her daily devotions.
“This was a really beloved possession of hers,” says Emmerson.
“Because of what happened to Anne Boleyn, we don’t have a vast amount of information in Anne’s own words. But the physical remnants of her use of the book, and the construction of that beautiful little couplet, have her identity in them.”
While Anne’s Book of Hours has finally found its way home, the research into this intriguing historical mystery is not yet over.
McCaffrey continues to chart the book’s provenance through the centuries to find out where it was hiding all this time.
The discovery of the inscriptions illuminates the book’s furtive journey, providing us with a glimpse into the controversy, loyalty, and fascination that Anne Boleyn has engendered for the past 500 years.
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balkanradfem · 3 months
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"Growing flax to make linen was one of the oldest human activities in Europe, particularly in the Rhineland. Archeologists have found linen textiles among the settlements of Neolithic cultivators along the shores of Lake Neuchâtel in the Jura Mountains west of Bern, Switzerland. These were elaborate pieces: Stone Age clothmakers of the Swiss lakeshores sewed pierced fruit pits in a careful line into a fabric with woven stripes. The culture spread down the Rhine and into the lowland regions.
The Roman author Pliny observed in the first century AD that German women wove and wore linen sheets. By the ninth century flax had spread through Germany. By the sixteenth century, flax was produced in many parts of Europe, but the corridor from western Switzerland to the mouth of the Rhine contained the oldest region of large-scale commercial flax and linen production. In the late Middle Ages the linen of Germany was sold nearly everywhere in Europe, and Germany produced more linen than any other region in the world.
At this juncture, linen weavers became victims of an odd prejudice. “Better skinner than linen weaver,” ran one cryptic medieval German taunt. Another macabre popular saying had it that linen weavers were worse than those who “carried the ladders to the gallows.” The reason why linen weavers were slandered in this way, historians suspect, was that although linen weavers had professionalized and organized themselves into guilds, they had been unable to prevent homemade linen from getting onto the market. Guilds appeared across Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries but many of the items they produced for exchange, like textiles and soap, were also produced at home right up through the nineteenth century. The intricate regulations of the guilds—determining who could join, how they would be trained, what goods they would produce, and how these could be exchanged—were mainly designed to distinguish guild work from this homely labor. That linen making continued to be carried out inside of households—a liability for guilds in general—lent a taint to the linen guild in particular.
In the seventeenth century, guilds came under pressure from a new, protocapitalist mode of production. Looking for cheaper cloth to sell on foreign markets, entrepreneurs cased the Central European countryside offering to pay cash to home producers for goods. Rural households became export manufacturing centers and a major source of competition with the guilds. These producers could undercut the prices of urban craftsmen because they could use the unregulated labor of their family members, and because their own agricultural production allowed them to sell their goods for less than their subsistence costs.
The uneasiness between guild and household production in the countryside erupted into open hostility. In the 1620s, linen guildsmen marched on villages, attacking competitors, and burning their looms. In February 1627 Zittau guild masters smashed looms and seized the yarn of home weavers in the villages of Oderwitz, Olbersdorf, and Herwigsdorf.
Guilds had long worked to keep homemade products from getting on the market. In their death throes, they hit upon a new and potent weapon: gender. Although women in medieval Europe wove at home for domestic consumption, many had also been guild artisans. Women were freely admitted as masters into
the earliest medieval guilds, and statutes from Silesia and the Oberlausitz show that women were master weavers. Thirteenth-century Paris had eighty mixed craft guilds of men and women and fifteen female-dominated guilds for such trades as gold thread, yarn, silk, and dress manufacturing. Up until the mid-seventeenth century, guilds had belittled home production because it was unregulated, nonprofessional, and competitive. In the mid-seventeenth century this work was identified as women’s work, and guildsmen unable to compete against cheaper household production tried to eject women from the market entirely. Single women were barred from independent participation in the guilds. Women were restricted to working as domestic servants, farmhands, spinners, knitters, embroiderers, hawkers, wet nurses. They lost ground even where the jobs had been traditionally their own, such as ale brewing and midwifery, by the end of the seventeenth century.
The wholesale ejection of women from the market during this period was achieved not only through guild statute, but through legal, literary, and cultural means. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women lost the legal right to conduct economic activity as femes soles. In France they were declared legal “imbeciles,” and lost the right to make contracts or represent themselves in court. In Italy, they began to appear in court less frequently to denounce abuses against them. In Germany, when middle-class women were widowed it became customary to appoint a tutor to manage their affairs. As the medieval historian Martha Howell writes, “Comedies and satires of this period…often portrayed market women and trades women as shrews, with characterizations that not only ridiculed or scolded them for taking on roles in market production but frequently even charged them with sexual aggression.” This was a period rich in literature about the correction of errant women: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1590–94), John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1629–33), Joseph Swetnam’s “The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women” (1615). Meanwhile, Protestant reformers and Counter-Reformation Catholics established doctrinally that women were inherently inferior to men.
This period, called the European Age of Reason, successfully banished women from the market and transformed them into the sweet and passive beings that emerged in Victorian literature. Women accused of being scolds were paraded in the streets wearing a new device called a “branks,” an iron muzzle that depressed the tongue. Prostitutes were subjected to fake drowning, whipped, and caged. Women convicted of adultery were sentenced to capital punishment.
As a cultural project, this was not merely recreational sadism. Rather, it was an ideological achievement that would have lasting and massive economic consequences. Political philosopher Silvia Federici has argued this expulsion was an intervention so massive, it ought to be included as one of a triptych of violent seizures, along with the Enclosure Acts and imperialism, that allowed capitalism to launch itself.
Part of why women resisted enclosure so fiercely was because they had the most to lose. The end of subsistence meant that households needed to rely on money rather than the production of agricultural goods like cloth, and women had successfully been excluded from ways to earn. As labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris has argued, “In pre-industrial societies, nearly everybody worked, and almost nobody worked for wages.” During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monetary relations began to dominate economic life in Europe. Barred from most wage work just as the wage became essential, women were shunted into a position of chronic poverty and financial dependence. This was the dominant socioeconomic reality when the first modern factory, a cotton-spinning mill, opened in 1771 in Derbyshire, England, an event destined to upend still further the pattern of daily life."
- Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing
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artifacts-archive · 7 days
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Crib of the Infant Jesus
South Netherlandish, 15th century
Miniature cradles for the Christ Child were popular devotional objects in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and were venerated, especially in convents, where they were often presented to women taking their vows. This splendid cradle comes from the Grand Béguinage of Louvain, Belgium, established for lay women in the twelfth century. It is decorated with carved representations of the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi on either end. The biblical family tree of Christ is illustrated on the embroidered coverlet.
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viasplat · 1 year
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I typed up the Pentiment bibliography for my own use and thought I’d share it here too. In case anyone else is fixated enough on this game to embark on some light extra-curricular reading
I haven’t searched for every one of these books but a fair few can be found via one of the following: JSTOR / archive.org / pdfdrive.com / libgen + libgen.rocks; or respective websites for the journal articles.
List below the cut!
Beach, Alison I, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria. Cambridge University Press, 2004
Berger, Jutta Maria. Die Geschichte der Gastfreundschaft im hochmittelalterlichen Mönchtum die Cistercienser. Akademie Verlag GmbH, 1999
Blickle, Peter. The Revolution of 1525. Translated by Thomas A. Brady, Jr. and H.C. Erik Midelfort. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985
Brady, Thomas A., Jr. “Imperial Destinies: A New Biography of the Emperor Maximilian I.” The Journal of Modern History, vol.62, no.2, 1990. pp. 298-314
Brandl, Rainer. “Art or Craft? Art and the Artist in Medieval Nuremberg.” Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 1300-2550. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986
Byars, Jana L., “Prostitutes and Prostitution in Late Medieval Barcelona.” Masters Theses. Western Michigan University, 1997
Cashion, Debra Taylor. “The Art of Nikolaus Glockendon: Imitation and Originality in the Art of Renaissance Germany.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, vol.2, no.1-2, 2010
de Hamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. Phaidon Press Limited, 1986
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver. Mariner Books, 2014
Eco, Umberto. Baudolino. Translated by William Weave. Boston, Mariner Books, 2003
Fournier, Jacques. “The Inquisition Records of Jacques Fournier.” Translated by Nancy P. Stork, San Jose University, 2020
Geary, Patrick. “Humiliation of Saints.” In Saints and their cults: studies in religious sociology, folklore, and history. Edited by Stephen Wilson. Cambridge University Press, 1985. pp. 123-140
Harrington, Joel F. The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013
Hertzka, Gottfied and Wighard Strehlow. Große Hildegard-Apotheke. Christiana-Verlag, 2017
Hildegard von Bingen. Physica. Edited by Reiner Hildebrandt and Thomas Gloning. De Gruyter, 2010
Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Translated by Barry Windeatt. Oxford University Press, 2015
Karras, Ruth Mazo. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. Routledge, 2017
Kerr, Julie. Monastic Hospitality: The Benedictines in England, c.1070-c.1250. Boydell Press, 2007
Kieckhefer, Richard. Forbidden rites: a necromancer's manual of the fifteenth century. Sutton, 1997
Kümin, Beat and B. Ann Tlusty. The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe. Routledge, 2017
Ilner, Thomas, et al. The Economy of Dürnberg-Bei-Hallein: an Iron Age Salt-mining Centre in the Austrian Alps. The Antiquaries Journal, vol. 83, 2003. pp. 123-194
Làng, Benedek. Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008
Lindeman, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2010
Lowe, Kate. “'Representing' Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402-1608.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Sixth Series, vol. 17, pp. 101-128
Meyers, David. “Ritual, Confession, and Religion in Sixteenth-Century Germany.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 89, 1998. pp. 125-143
Murat, Zuleika. “Wall paintings through the ages: the medieval period (Italy, twelfth to fifteenth century).” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, vol. 12, no. 191. Springer, October 2021. pp. 1-27
Overty, Joanne Filippone. “The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300-1483.” Book History 11, 2008. pp. 1-32
Page, Sophie. Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013
Park, Katharine. “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring 1994. pp. 1-33
Rebel, Hermann. Peasant Classes: The Bureaucratization of Property and Family Relations under Early Habsburg Absolutism, 1511-1636. Princeton University Press, 1983
Rublack, Ulinka. “Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany.” Past & Present, vol. 150, no. 1, February 1996. pp. 84-110
Salvadore, Matteo. “The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John's Discovery of Europe, 1306-1458.” Journal of World History, vol. 21, no. 4, 2011. pp. 593 - 627
Sangster, Alan. “The Earliest Known Treatise on Double Entry Bookkeeping by Marino de Raphaeli”. The Accounting Historians Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 2015. pp. 1-33.
Throop, Priscilla. Hildegard von Bingen's Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. Healing Arts Press, 1998
Usher, Abbott Payson. “The Origins of Banking: The Primitive Bank of Deposit, 1200-1600.” The Economic History Review, vol. 4, no. 4, 1934. pp. 399-428
Waldman, Louis A. “Commissioning Art in Florence for Matthias Corvinus: The Painter and Agent Alexander Formoser and his Sons, Jacopo and Raffaello del Tedesco.” Italy and Hungary: Humanism and Art in the Early Renaissance. Edited by Péter Farbaky and Louis A. Waldman, Villa I Tatti, 2011. pp. 427-501
Wendt, Ulrich. Kultur und Jagd: ein Birschgang durch die Geschichte. G. Reimer, 1907
Whelan, Mark. “Taxes, Wagenburgs and a Nightingale: The Imperial Abbey of Ellwangen and the Hussite Wars, 1427-1435.” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 72, no. 4, 2021, pp. 751-777.e
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2008
Yardeni, Ada. The Book of Hebrew Script: History, Paleography, Script Styles, Calligraphy & Design. Tyndale House Publishers, 2010
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pintoras · 20 days
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Lavinia Fontana (Italian, 1552 - 1614): Portrait of a lady, three-quarter length, dressed in a white and gold embroidered gown, holding a glove in one hand and a rose and a pink in the other (via Sotheby's)
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suzannahnatters · 11 months
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IT'S TIME YOU ALL HEARD ABOUT MY GIRL ARCANGELA TARABOTTI, SALTIEST NUN IN CHRISTENDOM
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So, I first heard about Arcangela Tarabotti while I was doing the study for my novella THE CITY BEYOND THE GLASS, which is set in Renaissance Venice and inspired by a real historical practice: At one point during the sixteenth century, nearly sixty percent of all the noble women in Venice lived in convents. And the vast majority of them were there against their will.
For complex dynastic reasons (or basically…money and prestige), only one son and one daughter in each generation of Venetian noble families were permitted to marry during this period. The remaining sons resorted to the famous Venetian courtesans to find the companionship which was denied them in marriage, while the spare daughters were locked into convents. The system was unsustainably wasteful and had to be abandoned within a few generations, but by that time it was already too late - many of the old patrician families of Venice were already going extinct. (You can read more on this in Jutta Gisela Sperling’s book Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice).
While it lasted, the system had plenty of opponents. In 1619, Patriarch Giovanni Tiepolo said, "More than two thousand patrician women…live in this city locked up in convents as if in a public tomb. …They are noblewomen, raised and nurtured with the highest delicacy and respect so that if they were of the other sex, they would command and govern the world."
Even when they have suffered oppression, women throughout history have challenged the status quo, and the women of Venice were no different. Arcangela Tarabotti is the foremost example.
Arcangela was just 11 years old when her father sent her to the convent of Sant'Anna. He considered her to be unmarriageable because she had a physical disability, which she had in fact inherited from him. She would spend the rest of her life there, taking vows as a nun in 1623…a fact about which she was in a white-hot fury.
"Why, then, do you defy the works of the Most Just One by decreeing that many women should live all together, alike in dress, dwelling place, food, and conduct, when the Lord of Lords makes it a miracle of His infinite wisdom for all things He created to be different? Why do you want to bend to your whim contrasting wills created so by nature? It is nothing less than wanting to change and correct the deeds of a Creator who cannot err."
During her early years in the cloister, Arcangela gained a reputation for rebellion and outspokenness. At one stage, it took a direct command from the Patriarch himself to force her to cut her hair. Despite this, Arcangela was able to access a high standard of education at the convent and became a philosopher and writer, corresponding with an impressive network of the thinkers of her day. She wrote multiple works critiquing the misogyny entrenched in Venetian society - including a scorching expose titled Paternal Tyranny.
“Only hell itself bears a likeness to the suffering of these enforced slaves of Christ," Arcangela wrote concerning the Venetian women imprisoned in nunneries. "Over the gate of Hell, Dante says, are inscribed the words ‘Abandon every hope, who enter here.’ The same could be inscribed over the portals of convents.”
Contrary to the polemicists of her day, Arcangela maintained that women were fully equal to men and even argued that they should be able to become lawyers and judges. "Both male and female were born free, bearing with them, like a precious gift from God, the priceless bounty of free choice. If in God’s eyes woman is not less privileged than you with respect to her physical or spiritual qualities, why do you wish her to seem created with such great inequality, you enemies of the truth, proclaiming her to be subject to your impulsive, mad whims? In short, woman is deserving of less respect than you only when you have reduced her to this state by your scheming."
"When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff," she argued.
Tarabotti maintained that she did not condemn all men simply for being men: "Stricken by a guilty conscience, some men will say that I speak with excessive temerity about all men in general. They are greatly mistaken. If they behave justly, they will be protected from my attacks and those of others. I separate the just from the wicked (who are the subject of my discourse), since not all men are bad and not all women are good."
As a keen amateur historian, I’m accustomed to wincing when people assume that all women living before about 1920 were ignorant, oppressed, and unable to inherit or control property (as if world history was not long and diverse and filled with creative, bold, and influential women). For a limited time during the Renaissance, however, things really were incredibly bad for Venetian women. To find out more about Arcangela and her times, I highly recommend Letizia Panizza's translation of PATERNAL TYRANNY, published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press!
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natequarter · 5 months
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the ethics of execution are interesting. if you look at how sixteenth century executions are depicted and talked about, most are generally not considered tragedies. the executions that are considered tragic are generally those that are considered 'unjust' or which paint the person executed as a victim. people who fell into particular demographics, like being unusually young/old, being a renowned catholic/protestant, or being a woman, tend to be painted as victims unjustly murdered - particularly young women, à la lady jane grey and katherine howard. what these attitudes fail to consider is that execution is always unfair and unjust. and on the other side of how we view executions, we have an unfortunate tendency of saying that people who genuinely did commit crimes or otherwise were unpleasant in some way had it coming. but there is no point at which the death penalty stops being awful and starts being a deserved punishment. thomas more's execution is (rightfully) seen as unfair and uncalled for - was not thomas cromwell's the same? when we're not busy calling anne boleyn a slut, it becomes obvious that she was murdered on essentially fabricated charges - did the same thing not happen to henry howard? when executions concern men, we do not automatically consider them tragedies. there must be extenuating circumstances - like religious persecution, age, or mental illness - for a death to be deemed a tragedy. and yet, someone died. someone's life was cut short for no reason. is that not a tragedy in its own right?
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In England until the late sixteenth century, individual identity had been imagined not so much as the result of autonomous, personal growth in consciousness but rather as a function of social station, an individual's place in a network of social and kinship structures. Furthermore, traditional culture distinguished sharply between the nature of identity between men and women. A woman's identity was conceived almost exclusively in relation to male authority and marital status. She was less an autonomous, desiring self than any male was; she was a daughter, wife, or widow expected to be chaste, silent, and, above all, obedient. It is a profound and necessary act of historical imagination, then, to recognize innovation in the moment when Juliet impatiently invokes the coming of night and the husband she has disobediently married: "Come, gentle night; come, loving black-browed night, / Give me my Romeo" (3.2.21-23).
Recognizing that the nature of desire and identity is subject to historical change and cultural innovation can provide the basis for rereading Romeo and Juliet. Instead of an uncomplicated, if lyrically beautiful, contest between young love and "ancient grudge," the play becomes a narrative that expresses an historical conflict between old forms of identity and new modes of desire, between authority and freedom, between parental will and romantic individualism. Furthermore, though the Chorus initially sets the lovers as a pair against the background of familial hatred, the reader attentive to social detail will be struck instead by Shakespeare's care in distinguishing the circumstances between male and female lovers: "she as much in love, her means much less / To meet her new beloved anywhere" (2. Chorus 11-12, italics added). The story of "Juliet and her Romeo" may be a single narrative, but its clear internal division is drawn along the traditionally unequal lines of gender.
Because of such traditional notions of identity and gender, Elizabethan theatergoers might have recognized a paradox in the play's lyrical celebration of the beauty of awakened sexual desire in the adolescent boy and girl. By causing us to identify with Romeo and Juliet's desire for one another, the play affirms their love even while presenting it as a problem in social management. This is true not because Romeo and Juliet fall in love with forbidden or otherwise unavailable sexual partners; such is the usual state of affairs at the beginning of Shakespearian comedy, but those comedies end happily. Rather Romeo and Juliet's love is a social problem, unresolvable except by their deaths, because they dare to marry secretly in an age when legal, consummated marriage was irreversible. Secret marriage is the narrative device by which Shakespeare brings into conflict the new privilege claimed by individual desire and the traditional authority granted fathers to arrange their daughters' marriages. Secret marriage is the testing ground, in other words, of the new kind of importance being claimed by individual desire. Shakespeare's representation of the narrative outcome of this desire as tragic -- here, as later in the secret marriage that opens Othello -- may suggest something of Elizabethan society's anxiety about the social cost of romantic individualism.
gail kern paster, "romeo and juliet: a modern perspective," accompanying essay to the folger edition of romeo and juliet; emphasis mine at the parts that made me most wanna scream & shout
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chthonic-cassandra · 5 months
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Many of the women go to the baths in parties of twenty at a time and wash each other in a friendly manner [....] But it is common knowledge that as a result of this familiarity in washing and massaging women fall very much in love with each other. And often one sees a woman in love with another one just like a man and a woman. And I have known Greek and Turkish women seeing a lovely young girl, seek occasion to wash with her just to see her naked and handle her...
Luigi Bassano da Zara, page in Topkapi Sarayi (Ottoman palace in Istanbul) during the sixteenth century, quoted in John Freely, Inside the Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul
With this stuff it's impossible to know how much is orientalist fantasy for a western audience, but I still think it's fascinating that da Zara did write this and thought it was what his audience would want to read.
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bullet-prooflove · 11 months
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Real: Alexander 'Tig' Trager x Reader
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Tagging: @nu1freakshow @mortal--soul @yourwinchesterbros @buddinglinguist @spookyboogyuniverse @nessamc @ritasantosworld @bl4ckt00thgr1n @anime-weeb-4-life @redpoodlern @ravencrow83
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It’s at the first wrap party for Cara Cara that Tig seeks you out. He’s seen you around the studio before, clad in a black jeans that fit that ass of yours perfectly, ballet flats and a thin scoop shirt that hangs just right, leaving enough to the imagination. You’re the only one in the place that doesn’t have their tits or ass out, so yea, he takes notice.
At the party he keeps an eye out for you, he never gets a chance to say more than a few words to you on the day-to-day side of things, you’re constantly running round with a camera in your hand, usually up close in someone’s business. He’s not actually sure of the work you do so he asks Bobby.
“Official job is photography and videography; she works with the girls to create unique content for the website.” The other man tells him, reading through the accounts with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “That one-of-a-kind shit subscribers pay for, the stuff that doesn’t make it into the movies, special requests.”
“She ever been in front of the camera?” he asks.
“Not in the time I’ve been here.” Bobby tells Tig with a shrug of the shoulders.
That’s not a no, because the thing is, he thinks he’s seen you once. He’s got a memory for faces, that and the tattoo on your left bicep he’s caught a glimpse of a couple of times. He recognises it, it’s a unique piece. He has a thing for art and beautiful women, especially the two together.
It doesn’t take long for the party to get out of control. Booze, drugs and high-end pussy, it makes the guys a little crazy, hell, up until recently it would have made him damn right insane. He’d be the first one getting his cock sucked by that red head in the corner but he’s not here for that tonight. He’s here for you.
He finds you in one of the back offices, it’s a small space tucked in the corner of the infrastructure, away from the noise and hubbub of the party. It’s shrouded in darkness, fairy lights illuminating the coving, giving the place a sensuous glow. He knows what this is for you, a sanctuary away from the noise, his home is the same way. His life is the club, he’s there more often than not but his house… Sometimes he needs that space to breathe.
His gaze lands on the pictures you have stuck to the wall, not the usual ones you see in a porn studio but different shit in black frames, dark artwork drawn in thick pencil lines. It’s the stuff of myths and legends, he recognises Persephone, her hand holding an anatomical heart instead of the pomegranate that kept her in hell. Medusa in all her glory, stoic, beautiful and cracked, an exact replica of the piece on your left arm. The third Pandora’s jar, a vessel of smoke, death and everything else in between.
“I thought it was a box.” He says into the air between the two of you, pointing his beer bottle towards the images.
You’re perched on a roller chair in front of a desktop computer with two screens in front of you. You have Photoshop open and you’re editing the shadow on Lyla’s cleavage.
“Mistranslation by some asshole in the sixteenth century.” You tell him, before twisting in your chair to face him. “What can I do for you Mr Trager?”
You make his breath catch in his chest, those eyes of yours could bring a man to his knees. He imagines it, his hands on your hips, drawing those jeans down slowly. He doesn’t know that the fuck it is about you that captures him, but here’s something there under the surface, something a part of him recognises and wants to claim as his.
“Tig.” He corrects you, leaning against the doorframe before jerking his head towards the noise behind him. “You planning on joining the party?”
“Not my scene.” You tell him, frankly, tilting your head to one side. “If you’ve come here looking for another hole to fuck, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“Nah.” He says, dropping down into the wheelie seat beside of you. He scoots back and forth experimentally, testing the motion of the chair. “If I wanted that I would have stayed at the party, plenty of it going on there.”
“So, what do you want?” You asked him.
Straight to the point, he liked that. He likes a lot of things about you. The way you talk to the girls in that calm, soothing voice of yours when one gets a little overwhelmed, the fact you see them as people trying to make their way through this world. The jokes you tell to set them at ease when you’re up close and personal. The professionalism you exhibited despite the fact you’ve had Ima up in your face and screaming because you’d told her her tits needed just a little more powder to take away the shine of the light. A good shoot can make or break you, you’d reminded her, holding up the camera. Get on my bad side and you can forget about all the gifts your subscribers send you.
Tig shrugged his shoulders. What does he want? It’s not the first time he’s through about the answer. The two of you have only been in the same vicinity for a handful of moments but he senses there’s something there, you’ve laughed at his jokes. He’s got a rep for being crazy, for fucking anything that moves, for trying everything once and he means everything. When you look at him, he feels like you cut through all of that bullshit and you just see him. A man, so fucking damaged that the only way for him to stay sane is to be a little crazy.
“A conversation from someone who isn’t drowning in pussy or had a cock in their mouth in the past thirty minutes.” He tells you, because truthfully that shit is getting boring.
He’s tired of fucking, he’s lost track of the women he’s given it to over the years, some of the acts he has participated in. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s a way of filling up this weird emptiness in his chest, of chasing a rush, of relieving some pressure. He’s done some extreme shit over the years chasing that high, stuff he should be ashamed of, and he isn’t. He knows there’s something broken in him, there always has been but he’s never felt as complete as when you gripped his hand when one of the set pieces took a tumble and scared the shit out of you both. The way you looked at each other and cracked up, he misses having someone to share little moments like that with.
When you laugh, it’s fucking gorgeous, like a breath of fresh air rushing through his system. It makes him feel lighter somehow, like despite all the dark shit he’s seen there’s a little bit of beauty in the world.
“So you didn’t come in here to try and fuck me?” You ask him with a twinge of humour to your voice.
He wonders if you’re disappointed by that. He doubts it, you work on a porn set with a bunch of bikers who are tapping shit left, right and centre. He has a fair idea of who’s tried to make you an offer you can’t refuse and what your response has been. He doesn’t begrudge anyone a little fun but if he’s with you, he’s wants to be the only one on your mind. The only one whose bed you’re in.
You must see something in the expression on his face, because your cheeks colour and you shift just slightly. He knows when a woman’s attracted to him, he can sense it a mile away. He’s not the type of man to mess around, he goes directly for the kill.
“Darlin’ the things me and you would do together, it would be fucking beautiful.” He tells you, bringing his chair a little closer to yours. Your knees bump, it’s the briefest touch, denim on denim but your body heat, it feels like fire on his skin. Fuck, he’s never felt anything like this before, it’s frightening but thrilling all at the same time. “I’d be so fucking good to you.”
“I like you.” You tell him, your hand coming to grip his jaw, tilting his face so that his eyes are on yours, and fuck if that doesn’t do something to him. He’s not used to being submissive like this, he doesn’t bend not to anyone, but for you he’s almost keening at the attention. It’s everything he can do not to fucking whimper. “I think you’re funny, I think you’re fierce and I think you’re loyal but I also know that you’re ostentatious and I need real.” You tell him, tapping a finger on his chest through the leather of his kutte.
“I can do real.” He promises you, his hand enclosing over yours before he gently clasps it to his cheek. His gaze meets yours as his stubble brushes over your pulse point. He sees the hues around your iris darken, your breath hitching as his lips brush over the sensitive flesh.
The way you look at him, it almost has him losing his mind.
His heart though, that’s long gone
You’d stolen it the moment you’d clasped his hand on crowded porn set.
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