Life is hard. And expensive. So take a break from studying for that exam. Treat yo self to this blog for 5 minutes, 5 hours, or 5 years. Have a question? I have an answer. Have a problem? I can listen. Need someone to cut up your onions? Hire them. Life isn't free. Basic Info: Gender - Classified. Name - On a need-to-know basis. Location - Definitely not Pluto. Favorite thing - Use your intuition skills. My one otp to rule all otps: Caesar and Cleopatra. Disagree? Fight me.
“The Christian ritual year saw the redemption offered at Easter coincide with the springtime, and Christmas provided the symbolism of new life at the darkest time of the year. Everyday life fitted into this framework. Business transactions and legal documents were dated according to feast days; even today, rents are often due at Michaelmas. The great festivals of Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter and Pentecost were marked in royal court and village alike; the great fasts of Advent and Lent, and the weekly fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on the eve of saints’ days, were an accepted part of life, while local loyalties were expressed through devotion to a host of different local saints.”
—
Lucy Wooding, Tudor England: A History
During the half century after Henry VII’s accession in 1485, the Church saw both material and spiritual investment at every level, from the founding of new institutions and the expansion of existing churches, to the development of new feast days and the arrival of a vigorous print culture. All of these were underpinned by the continuing strengths of monastic observance, liturgical tradition and popular religious custom. All forms of Christianity idealize notions of regeneration, and early Tudor religion saw many different debates unfold about how to build better religious institutions and stronger patterns of devotion.
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“What [Richard]’s promise secured was that on 1 March 1484, Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters at last emerged from sanctuary at Westminster, where they had been living since 30 April the previous year. The Crowland chronicler says that Elizabeth had been ‘urged by frequent intercessions and dire threats’, and there is no suggestion that she had been reassured that her sons by Edward IV were alive, as has sometimes been argued. On the contrary, without them her position looked extremely weak, compounded by the deaths of her executed brother Earl Rivers and her son Sir Richard Grey, and the absence of another son, Thomas, Marquess of Dorset, and two other brothers, Lionel and Edward Woodville.”
—
David Horspool, Richard III: A Ruler and his Reputation
For his part, Richard guaranteed that Elizabeth’s five daughters ‘shalbe in suretie of their lyffes and also not suffre any maner hurt by any maner persone or persones to theim or any of theim in their bodies and persones to be done by wey of Ravisshement or defouling contrarie their willes’. To this he added that he would not imprison them ‘within the Toure of London or other prisone’. It is hard to read all this as anything other than the promise of a man who had already done great harm to a family not to do any more. The mention of the last place Elizabeth’s sons had been seen alive is particularly suggestive. Kings did not normally have to promise that individual subjects wouldn’t suffer at their hands. Normally, as the sureties Richard extracted from pardoned rebels demonstrate, it was the other way round.
bear in mind that i'm mostly interested in medieval english history, but... do you really think that all women suffered miserable, joyless lives? that no man ever loved his wife? that no gay person ever lived in peace? that no child ever grew up to live a life they loved? that no parent ever saw their disabled child and cared for them anyway? that nobody ever had sex, and enjoyed it? that no priest was ever truly virtous, that nunneries were always places where women were sent away to be locked up? do you really think that it was just suffering day in, day out, unless you were the richest of the rich? do you really think that simply living in a different time made people stupid, senseless, violent? do you really think that people living in the past were so different from us, that they never had thoughts and feelings and dreams to rival our own?
do you really think that people in the past were not people?
“What [Richard]’s promise secured was that on 1 March 1484, Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters at last emerged from sanctuary at Westminster, where they had been living since 30 April the previous year. The Crowland chronicler says that Elizabeth had been ‘urged by frequent intercessions and dire threats’, and there is no suggestion that she had been reassured that her sons by Edward IV were alive, as has sometimes been argued. On the contrary, without them her position looked extremely weak, compounded by the deaths of her executed brother Earl Rivers and her son Sir Richard Grey, and the absence of another son, Thomas, Marquess of Dorset, and two other brothers, Lionel and Edward Woodville.”
—
David Horspool, Richard III: A Ruler and his Reputation
For his part, Richard guaranteed that Elizabeth’s five daughters ‘shalbe in suretie of their lyffes and also not suffre any maner hurt by any maner persone or persones to theim or any of theim in their bodies and persones to be done by wey of Ravisshement or defouling contrarie their willes’. To this he added that he would not imprison them ‘within the Toure of London or other prisone’. It is hard to read all this as anything other than the promise of a man who had already done great harm to a family not to do any more. The mention of the last place Elizabeth’s sons had been seen alive is particularly suggestive. Kings did not normally have to promise that individual subjects wouldn’t suffer at their hands. Normally, as the sureties Richard extracted from pardoned rebels demonstrate, it was the other way round.
Since it's a season of...something...mostly lights...do me a favour would you? You know this image of Tutankhamun?
The documentary it comes from was terrible. It grossly exaggerated some deformities present on Tutankhamun's mummy, and is not even remotely how he looked in real life. The people who did this study never had access to his mummy, and really fudged their conclusions for a 'showstopper documentary' so much so that the Egyptian government was angry about it.
Lets list the things that are wrong!
The 'wide hips' only exist on this model because they wanted him to look more 'Amarna like'. The loin cloths found in his tomb are all standard size.
He doesn't have an overbite. This is a result of poor mummification and Carter's poor treatment of the mummy when removing it from the death mask.
He does have a cleft palate, but it's in the soft palate and he wouldn't have noticed it.
He doesn't have a severe club foot. Medical professionals have examined him repeatedly over the years. None have ever pointed it out bar the noting of a 'slight rotation' which wouldn't have been noticeable when he walked if this is indeed a club foot and not another mummification mess up. He would not have needed a staff to walk with this slight rotation. Some staffs in his tomb show wear, but it is normal in Egyptian society to walk with a staff as a sign of power. He has 120 and only 3 show slight wear.
The articles about him 'always being seated and thus very disabled' fail to note that it is common for Pharaoh's of this period to be depicted seated, and there are numerous depictions of him standing doing actions too.
This documentary made him look as bad as possible, based on terrible science, and now every time someone doesn't depict him 'gross and disabled' people complain that he's not 'ugly enough', which is ableist as hell alongside the already ableist exaggerated CGI depiction.
I would sincerely like this terrible recreation to die. Many thanks.
There isn't a better modern reconstruction, as far as I'm aware. I don't particularly like them anyway! They're always off in some way, and Egyptian ones tend to have much paler skin than they should.
One of my favourite images of Tutankhamun is this one from the top of an ivory box found within his tomb:
It's just a lovely scene of him, together with his wife, enjoying the lotus blossoms. The image is a step away from the Amarna art that's more dynamic, and closer to the more archaic rigid style Egypt is known for, but still retains the dynamism of the previous style.
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“The first documentary evidence of Torrigiano’s link to the Tudor court is in 1510, when Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, arranged for him to repair a (now lost) terracotta bust of Mary Tudor then in Bruges that had been made at the time of her engagement to Margaret’s nephew, Charles of Castille. Several art historians have suggested that Torrigiano was not only the restorer of the piece but its original sculptor, and if so this would have marked the second Italian contribution to Mary’s ephemeral espousal to Charles.”
—
Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (2005)
A Brescian, Pietro Carmeliano, was the first Italian humanist to translate the sphere of his activities definitively to England, which he did in the early 1480s […] Carmeliano contributed the introductory and closing poems appended to a longer Latin prose encomium composed by its publisher, Richard Pynson, to celebrate the formal engagement of Henry VII’s daughter Mary to Charles of Castille in 1508. Accompanying the first of these poems, the Tudor rose and Beaufort portcullis, each topped with a crown, are linked with emblematic devices associated with England’s royal heritage:
One aspect of Henry’s effort to consolidate his family’s power was to seek advantageous foreign marriages, hence the engagement of an English princess and a Spanish prince while both parties to the contract were still only children.
"these two monarchs tweaked some aspects of the coronation process of Elizabeth Woodville and Anne Boleyn to make them more respected in their role as consort" re H8 and E4. That's so interesting and I didn't know that at all! What did they do/change?
I haven't looked at it in too much detail (I have read more about Elizabeth Woodville's coronation), but what comes to mind is the use of certain items of regalia that were usually assigned to the king's coronation — St Edward's sceptre and crown. Nicola Tallis argued that 'they served as a useful tool to distract the populace’s attention from Elizabeth and Anne’s low-born origins'.
While the king’s sceptre was made of gold, the Liber Regalis, which set out the protocol for the crowning of a king and his consort, stated that a queen’s sceptre should be made of gilt. However, Elizabeth Wydeville is known to have used St Edward’s staff, which was the same as that used by kings. It is also likely that St Edward’s was the same sceptre as that used by Elizabeth of York, described as ‘the scepter of gold in her right hand’, and the one referred to in similar terms that was used by Anne Boleyn. That Elizabeth Wydeville and Anne Boleyn were given permission to use this item is momentous and serves to underline the crucial role jewels played in assisting with the reinforcement of a queen’s status, necessary in both of these instances.
However, I can't help but wonder: if Elizabeth Woodville and Anne Boleyn were assigned those items because they needed to inspire respect in their subjects given their lower birth status, what was the need for Elizabeth of York to have also used the king's sceptre during her own coronation? Derek Neal also commented on those changes:
Elizabeth Woodville apparently "helde in the right hande pe Septor of Saint Edward & in the lefte hande the septor of pe Reaume". None of the ordines make any mention of two sceptres. Still more irregularly, Elizabeth Woodville is said to have had these symbols in hand when she entered the sanctuary, rather than being given them by the consecrator [...] The simplest explanation is that one of these two "sceptres" was actually the rod, which the queen receives in her left hand when she is crowned together with the king, and which is never mentioned in the ordo for the queen alone. But a "septor of pe Reaume" does not sound much like the ivory rod used, for example, in the coronation of Richard III and Anne Neville. Nor is the queen's sceptre, which in a double coronation was quite different from the king's, anywhere else called the sceptre of St. Edward, whose very name evokes ancient imagery of English sovereignty [...] The same section of Elizabeth of York's coronation is also somewhat unclear. The younger queen received both rod and sceptre, though with what formula we do not know;
In whose interest would it have been to associate Elizabeth Woodville with recognizable symbols of kingly authority? And who would have made such a decision? It is tempting to see it as a feature of the lavish display of Elizabeth's coronation, as a deliberate effort of Edward IV to remove lingering associations of her low birth and enthrone her as a fit consort - thus validating his own choice. Those who actually viewed the coronation service, and who would have been most aware of its symbolism, would have been those most worth impressing. Interpreting the changes for Elizabeth of York is more complicated.
In my opinion, Elizabeth of York's coronation does complicate the view that the changes in Elizabeth Woodville's and Anne Boleyn's were deliberate ploys 'to distract the populace’s attention from Elizabeth and Anne’s low-born origins' as it has been argued not only by Tallis but also by other authors. A contemporary noted that St Edward's crown (associated with English kings) was used during Anne Boleyn's coronation, but there simply is no evidence of the kind of crown that was used in the solo coronation of other queens — we know Queen Edith's crown was used in a double coronation as dictated by the Liber Regalis, but what about a solo coronation?
As Nicola Tallis said herself, it might simply be that 'queens were permitted to use the same regalia as kings when it was not in use, placing them on a level with their husbands.' Perhaps the kind of comments made by Elizabeth's and Anne's contemporaries highlighting St Edward's items say more about their own acceptance of those queens, than about changes made in the solo coronation of English queen consorts? I don't know, but it's worth considering.
Of course, there is more about the coronation of those queens than just the items used during the ritual. Elizabeth Woodville didn't simply have a coronation, she also had a presentation ceremony at Reading Abbey before her crowning in Westminster. Anne Boleyn was created marquess of Pembroke before her coronation. Those two ceremonies were also very important in the process of legitimising those queens and exalting their status. In the last ask I had the 'tweaking' of the coronation ritual (which might not have been a tweaking after all!) in mind but there's more to it all 🌹x
“The status of a queen as royal consort, and the ways that status should be expressed ceremonially, were well understood before the reign of Queen Mary I, and despite the various assaults on the dignity of the office by Henry VIII. Even in the unusual event of a joint coronation — celebrated in recent English history in 1308, 1483 and 1509 — the high standing of the queen had been made clear. […] Once married, queens could exercise considerable patronage and, on occasion, all the delegated political power of royal wife or mother. In brief, a queen had long functioned ‘both as an agent and as a symbol of royalty’. She was, indeed, the sharer of royal power.”
— Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor as ‘Sole Quene’?: Gendering Tudor Monarchy
— Retha Warnicke, “Margaret Tudor, Countess of Richmond, and Elizabeth of York: Dynastic Competitors or Allies?” in Unexpected Heirs in Early Modern Europe (2017)
The prescriptive texts of Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, detailed the proper protocol for the queen’s confinement, the christening of the baby, and the churching of the queen […] A version of these also appear in the Household Articles of 1494, but these lack some of the more personal touches of Margaret. Either the majority of the Articles for confinement, baptism, and churching came from Edward IV’s time, or Margaret, after initially contributing to the 1494 Household Articles, revised her work to better conform to actual practice and research she had done. Margaret Beaufort was a scholar in her own right.
+ Margaret’s text follows the original Latin guidebook for the royal baptism more closely than what appears in the Household Articles; it is more nuanced and specific […] This is where Margaret’s work shines; it makes the pomp and ceremonies doable.
Happy 59th Birthday Empress Masako! (b. 09 December 1963)
The Imperial Household Agency has released a new pictures of Empress Masako in occasion of her 59th birthday. Taken on December 5 at the Imperial residence | December 09, 2022
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“if Mary’s regime was harsh, it was not uniquely so. It may, however, have been unusually efficient - a mark of Mary’s determination to put her country to rights and restore the age-old faith. It is also important to remember that the reason these prosecutions for heresy were able to take place is that so many ordinary citizens were actively involved in searching out Protestants. This was not the work of a vindictive queen and a handful of callous bishops, but the judgement of a society.”
Elizabeth continued to support her sisters throughout her life, paying for much of the upbringing of Katherine’s children, and for the burial of Katherine’s son Edward. She also regularly sent money for her sister Bridget, who was a nun at Dartford, although these sums were far smaller than those given to her married sisters. Like Elizabeth Woodville’s sister Anne and her sister-in-law Lady Scales, Elizabeth of York’s sisters were probably at times among her senior ladies-in-waiting.
— Joanna L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445-1503
“It [marriage plots — made by Roman Catholics in Europe who sought to convert or kidnap Arbella Stuart] had already been hinted at some four years earlier, but now it was openly discussed, and though there is no evidence that she gave it the least encouragement, or was indeed ever officially approached concerning it, the bare contemplation of such a marriage made the queen furiously angry. From this time for many years Arbella became, quite innocently, the centre of so elaborate an intricacy of plot and counter-plot that no succeeding generations, working patiently through masses of State and Private Papers in every variety of code and cipher, have been able entirely to unravel it. The girl herself, not strikingly lovely, but pleasant looking, seems to have owed such personal charm as she possessed more to her expression than to the regularity of her features. Her eyes, usually painted as blue, are sometimes described as hazel; her hair was fair, her figure good, her hands white and beautiful, and the brightness and intelligence of her smile particularly attractive. But it was seldom or never for herself that poor Arbella was desired — merely as a pawn in the great and endless game of king-and queen-making.”
Arbella Stuart, A Biography by B.C. Hardy (from page 59)
This image, illustrated by Donato Spedaliere, shows Ivan Dolgoruky’s 12th-century Kremlin. was as much township as fortress, with the oak-beamed walls of the gorod enclosing both his own citadel as well as churches, orchards and the estates of the prince’s followers and more substantial Muscovites.
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On this day in history, 25 November 1487:
Elizabeth of York is crowned queen of England.
By medieval standards all saints were expected to be figures whose extraordinary faith and ability elevated them above their fellow men and women. St Katherine of Alexandria, however, was believed to be exceptional not just in comparison to ordinary people, but even in comparison to other saints. A great deal of evidence survives to suggest that in both presentation and reception, St Katherine was believed to be a uniquely privileged and therefore powerful saint; in fact, the sheer volume of material evidence produced by her cult from the eleventh to the early sixteenth centuries suggests that she was one of the most popular saints in medieval Europe.
(Jacqueline Jenkins & Katherine Lewis, St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Western Medieval Europe)
“To begin with,” she said, “I started thinking of all you said the other day and I realized I am indeed an historical phenomenon of sorts. Except for my sister, who is very ill in London, I am the last Russian Grand Duchess, and more than that - I am the last member of the dynasty who was born in the purple.”
The Last Grand Duchess - Ian Vorres
History and Other Things: A Blog @myhistoryobsession - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
