Female moonshiners, 1921
The Romans admired moonstone, as they believed it was born from solidified rays of the Moon.
if i was a pirate captain i would get a movie projector and play a movie on the big sails every friday night for my boys to kick back and enjoy some time off unless we were under attack
Pirates legit did the 16-17th century equivalent of this. When things were slow, they would put on plays, act out dramas of stories they knew, or freestyle. The most preferred model of original productions was courtroom drama: “trying” each other for piracy. The “accused” would list off their many, dramatically and humorously embellished crimes, and be equally dramatically sentenced. Sometimes there was a daring escape, sometimes just a really maudlin death scene, but a good time was had by all.
Beautifully written, insightful article about the very real utility and inherent justice of reparations this Juneteenth.
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Failing, as they cannot help but fail, to be each other’s all, the husband and wife become each other’s only. The sacrament of sexual union, which in the time of the household was a communion of workmates, and afterward tried to be a lovers’ paradise, has now become a kind of marketplace in which husband and wife represent each other as sexual property. Competitiveness and jealousy, imperfectly sweetened and disguised by the illusions of courtship, now become governing principles, and they work to isolate the couple inside their marriage. Marriage becomes a capsule of sexual fate. The man must look on other men, and the woman on other women, as threats. This seems to have become particularly damaging to women; because of the progressive degeneration and isolation of their “role,” their worldly stock-in-trade has increasingly had to be “their” men. In the isolation of the resulting sexual “privacy,” the disintegration of the community begins. The energy that is most convivial and unifying loses its communal forms and becomes divisive. This dispersal was nowhere more poignantly exemplified than in the replacement of the old ring dances, in which all couples danced together, by the so-called ballroom dancing, in which each couple dances alone. A significant part of the etiquette of ballroom dancing is, or was, that the exchange of partners was accomplished by a “trade.“ It is no accident that this capitalization of love and marriage was followed by a divorce epidemic - and by fashions of dancing in which each one of the dancers moves alone.
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Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth”, in The Art of the Commonplace
Quick Notre-Dame news roundup: 1300 Paris time, April 16, 2019
For those of you who may have been following this event: a few highlights as of just before 1 PM Paris time:
- The Parisian fire service has officially declared the fire to be completely extinguished.
- There were, extremely fortunately, no deaths. One fireman has been hospitalized with injuries described as “serious”.
- All of the major “portable” relics and works of art housed in the cathedral were safely removed (at the time of the evacuation of people who were in there for Mass when the fire broke out). Most of these are being temporarily housed in the Paris City Hall. The “crown of thorns” relic and the “tunic of St. Louis” are “in a safe place”, according to Paris’s mayor. The fate of various religious paintings inside the cathedral, these being a lot less portable, is unknown at the moment.
- About the cathedral’s stained glass: Reports that have come in over the last hour from independent sources describe ALL THREE OF THE ROSE WINDOWS AS HAVING SURVIVED. At least one of them, I believe the Rosace Ouest, may have to be taken out of the cathedral wall for its own safety as its surround may have been damaged. But anyway: if you heard earlier reports of any of these windows “blowing out in the fire”, those reports were apparently inaccurate.
- The cathedral’s organ has been severely damaged, but not destroyed, as some previous reports indicated.
- Police still say that this fire is, as far as they can tell, accidental in nature.
As regards the immediate future of Notre-Dame: The cathedral will now most likely be closed to visitors for some years while repairs get under way.
Needless to say, this is going to cost a great deal. In immediate response:
- The Mayor of Paris has called for an international funding conference to be called.
- Two French billionaires – François-Henri Pinault (who is rather refreshingly being described as “the husband of Salma Hayek” by some media sources) and LVMH chief executive Bernard Arnault have respectively pledged €100 million and €200 million to the reconstruction effort. If you know any billionaires, this seems like a good time to tell them to step the heck up and show off in front of the others, as it seems unlikely that all the reconstruction and repair work needing to be done can possibly cost less than €1 billion… and for all I know, I’m sadly lowballing here.
- Additionally, the French government will be putting a fundraising effort into train in the immediate future. Advice: for the moment, don’t donate to any Kickstarters purporting to help the cathedral. This is routinely the time when the scammers come out in force.
For further news: strongly suggest you check French media sources for news as close to the point of origin as possible.
If you’re a Francophone, you may want to watch the France24 news channel’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/france24
Their English-speaking side is here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/france24english
Their Spanish channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUdOoVWuWmgo1wByzcsyKDQ
Their Arabic channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/france24arabic
They’re also on Twitter at @France24.
…Thanks, all.
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Do you have any recommended books/resources on medieval Africa?
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asked by Anonymous
Ooh, yes. An excellent topic.
The easiest place to start is with The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages, which I myself have recently discovered and want to read more of at some point (you know, as if I don’t have enough other things to do). Musa I of Mali, also known as Mansa Musa, has recently been getting some renewed attention, as he was the richest man who ever lived with a truly incalculable net worth (the fourteenth-century Malian Empire was so wildly rich that it’s the reason the place name “Timbuktu” became synonymous in English with the word for a mysterious, wealthy, far-away city). The BBC recently did an article on him, though they apparently couldn’t help giving it a lightly racist title (”Mansa Musa: How the richest man who ever lived lost it all.”) They may have changed it now, but uhhh, homeboy didn’t lose his gold, he famously gave away so much of it on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325 that he briefly crashed the Egyptian economy. He also funded lavish building projects, civic infrastructure, and the University of Sankore, which has a claim to being the oldest university in the world and boasted the largest collection of books in Africa since the Library of Alexandria. Many of those medieval Malian manuscripts still exist today.
If you have an institutional login, you can check out ‘The Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Kings of Mali’ in Journal of African History. There is also From Babylon to Timbuktu: A History of Ancient Black Races (though the reference to the European ‘Dark Ages’ makes me side eye a little, ngl). A study of ancient and medieval Africa was actually just (2018) published, entitled African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, and covers both the Mali Empire and its successor, the Songhai Empire. The 17th-to-20th-century iteration of that was the Ashanti Empire, and West Africa generally has a particularly rich medieval tradition focusing on figures like the historico-legendary king Sundiata, who has his own epic poem (he was the great-uncle of Mansa Musa). There is also The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa.
The medieval Muslim traveller and scholar Ibn Battuta also visited Ghana and Mali as part of his explorations (it’s debated just how many places he actually got to, but he claimed to have made it across parts of Africa, the Near East, Asia, and as far as China in the fourteenth century. You can check out his book (now titled Travels in Africa and Asia, 1325-1354). A biography of him entitled The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer also gives more context on him, and he’s generally a very fascinating figure. So yes.
Anyway, I feel like I’m definitely forgetting something, but that should hopefully be enough to get you started.
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To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
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Howard Zinn, ‘A Power Governments Cannot Suppress’ (via scientificphilosopher)
via reddit.com
Fascinating. Good post.
Silver does this also, which was probably handy for silverware before antibacterial dish soap was invented.
That’s mentioned in the article as well. They also stated that a copper or silver container can disinfect a pot of water in a few hours. im gonna add a copper vessel to my emergency provisions now. @yourunclejingo you may find this stuff interesting too.
Its almost like our ancestors did shit that made sense even if they didn’t always fully understand why.
Does this…imply that lycanthropy is a bacterial infection?
And we’re back
What’s Up With Anglo-Saxon Names?
Anglo-Saxon names tended to be made up of two elements, combined to have a particular meaning. For instance, Æthelstan (considered the first King of England united) is formed from Æthel, meaning “noble” and Stan, meaning “stone.”
Within families the first part of a name might be reused many times. It was a sort of marker that people were related – each would get a unique second half, of course. Sharing a name’s first part appeared especially common in aristocratic families. But it seems to have been widespread among Anglo-Saxons.
In the 1000s, when England was conquered by the Danes and then the Normans, new naming practices were introduced and the two-part naming structure fell out of usage.
Some resources!
