Apparently - this fleeted past me on Twitter a week or so ago, and is writ up here in more detail and with historical context - there are still people who are not living in caves and unaware that the Napeolonic Wars are over, who believe in dangerous menstrual toxins:
Secretly Murdering Your Husband: The one weird trick that baffled researchers.
( Read more... )

This is depressing: The Brink of Erasure. Way back in the late 70s, when I visited the National Archives of India as a professional archivist employed at an institution to whom one might have supposed they would extend a certain mutual courtesy, I wasn't even allowed to look at the finding aids without having applied, like, months in advance, when ( Read more... )

Big vagina energy: the return of the sheela na gig -
Not that they'd ever gone away, possibly the word there should be recuperation? recovery? re-evaluation? re-interpretation? Some say the explicit medieval carvings were fertility symbols; others that the figures were meant to ward off evil. Now a group of Irish feminists are bringing them back - ( Read more... )

What’s in a Name? Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them: It is easy to get caught in the trap of historical revisionism when it comes to women writers, but this revisionism is rarely along progressive lines - despite its claims. Instead, it is a conservative reimagining of women struggling to survive in a man’s world that erases the ( Read more... )

But every so often I've seen tweets cropping up being very gung-ho about the outcome of the Black Death being the Decline of Feudalism and the Rise of Peasant Power...
Well, I am not A Medievalist and I do not work on economic/labour history but simply on the basis of my undergraduate curriculum back in days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and ( Read more... )

Came across some discussion about whether eating soup (or slurping it up) with one's hands was some kind of Ye Olde Medyvle Re-enactment thing.
To which someone responded that, at some Medyvle Banqueting thing they had attended, the tomato soup was served in pottery bowls -
At which I went, okay, the pottery bowls may have been ye genuine ( Read more... )

Thank You for Not Eating Your Placenta.
Okay, I came through the 70s, I knew this was a hippy-type thing, making a lovely placenta-stew after childbirth -
And that article makes me think, gosh, I actually know that one of the things the placenta does is act as as a barrier to prevent various pathogens and whatnot getting to the foetus, because ( Read more... )

Dept of, Wot abaht bestiality,then?
No kidding: what I learned from becoming GoatMan
Enquiring minds that have seen a) that famous statue of Pan rogering a goat b) artworks featuring satyrs c) the general reputation of goats for being goatish want to know, was there any caprine rumpy-pumpy?
(Also, is there not something a tad oxymoronic about ' ( Read more... )

Apparently there is a December Posting Meme? I will offer to do the very low-key version of this, which is ask if anybody has any prompts they would like to give me, without committing to a particular day.
***
OMG! Soon after the rediscovery of Madame C-C-'s memoirs, an independent production company attempts to make a documentary tracking down the ( Read more... )

I've surely flagged up heretofore the 'popular mind''s very loose grasp on what happened when and issues of periodicity - the Long Elizabethan era (in which Milton, we are given to suppose, must have written under Gloriana's never-ending rule); the Almost Interminable Regency (Undead Prinny stalks the realm; no really, one Brighton Pavilion was ( Read more... )