Medieval Sex Tips.

A brand new translation of Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies is now available, and it sounds most intriguing. I’ll be ordering.

First published in 1503 in Lyons, Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies helped launch the French Renaissance version of the querelle des femmes, the debate over the nature and status of women. The three books included in this edition include arguments for gender equality, and a catalogue of virtuous women modeled on Boccaccio’s Famous Women and Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. Titled “The Book of True Love,” book 4 is especially important in gender history, importing and transforming the male-centered Neoplatonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino for pro-woman ends.

Medievalists has a look at some sex tips from the volumes.

1. The Right Age

Following Plato, Champier declares that the perfect age for women to marry is 16-20, and for men, 30-35. Any younger, and you might marry a girl who will be sick forever – “So instead of being served by them, [you] must serve them”, Champier warns. The only exception is if the young woman is tall. If she is short, you should definitely wait until she’s 21. And if both man and woman are over twenty-one, you’re in the clear: “the children will be attractive and have good temperaments, with well-proportioned members and will have good minds.” Be sure to wait, if at all possible, because if you have children earlier, “they will be imperfect and short.”

2. The Right Time

People should not have sex at just any old time of the year, Champier says. If you want to conceive, make sure you have sex in the spring, because it’s “warm and moist”, which is the best kind of humour. “Next after spring,” if you can’t manage it then, “winter is the season most conducive to conception, while summer is bad and autumn is the worst of all.” As for time of day, it can’t be right after eating. As we’ve always been told about swimming right after a meal, the consequences would be dire:

If a man, when he is full and has eaten, enters the world of the carnal, he weakens his body and his nerves and causes pain for himself in his legs and knees. He also causes obstructions all throughout his body and causes thick humors in his body; and if he does this regularly, his body parts retain too much water, he has great difficulty breathing, and his limbs start to shake.

If you thought it was safe to have sex before eating, think again:

If he acts carnally when he is hungry or thirsty or when he has an empty body or when his body has been bled … he damages his body and dries it out, and its natural heat dissipates, negatively affecting his sight, and sometimes he becomes paralyzed.

(Same goes for if you’re just been bled, bathed, worked, fasted, or been sad.)  You’ve been warned. Best to play it safe and just have sex first thing in the morning, “after a [good] night’s sleep.”

You can read the rest of the tips at Medievalists.net.

Word Wednesday.

Lurid / Roué

Lurid.

Adjective.

1a: causing horror or revulsion: gruesome; b: melodramatic, sensational, also: shocking.

2a: wan and ghastly pale in appearance. b: of any of several light or medium grayish colours ranging in hue from yellow to orange.

3: shining with the red glow of fire seen through smoke or cloud.

-luridly, adverb.

-luridness, noun.

[Origin: Latin luridus pale yellow, sallow.]

(1603)

Note: I have to say, this held surprises for me. I have never considered lurid to be light, let alone pale yellow! Lurid has always come across as very bold to me; daring and/or scandalous simply doesn’t scream pale or pastel to my mind. I never pictured it as a person being wan or ghastly pale, either. “His face was lurid.” Nope, that doesn’t sound right at all.

“Are my expectations possibly getting a little lurid? she wondered. Not really. After all, there is someone out to get me.” – The Burning Page, Genevieve Cogman.

Roué.

Noun.

A man devoted to a life of sensual pleasure: Rake.

[Origin: French, literally, broken on the wheel, from Medieval Latin rotare, from Latin, to rotate; from the feeling that such a person deserves this punishment.]

(1800)

Note: I found the origin of this fascinating.

“Don’t be,” Vale said, his tone as caustic as he could make it. “I hardly enjoy the experience. Your are one of the most notorious roués in London.” – The Burning Page, Genevieve Cogman.

Fairy Tale Art.

A wonderful site, full of enough fairy tale art to keep a person quite busy, sent along by rq: Art Passions. Fairy Tale art and artists encompass so very many styles, and the illustrations are crucial to the stories, they inflame the imagination, and illuminate the stories from within. In this particular case, serendipity strikes, as I brought home a book of short tales by Leigh Bardugo yesterday:

The first story, Ayama and the Thorn Wood, is a grand story which I enjoyed very much. I do have one noisy complaint however, and it has to do with the fairy tale art. In the story, Ayama is described thusly:

“Ayama was clumsy and apt to drop things. Her body was solid and flat-footed, short and round as a beer jug.”

Given this description, why in the fuckety fuck is Ayama drawn like this?:

This never should have gotten a pass from anyone, let alone the author. It is not a crime to depict characters correctly, and all girls do not need to be tall and thin with a teeny waist. FFS, seeing this sort of thing is infuriating, and it went a long way to souring a very good story. In the story, Ayama is strong, courageous, imaginative, and thoughtful. In the drawing, she’s just another generic pretty, skinny girl. That’s not doing anyone any favours. We all come in different shapes and sizes, and that’s a message all kids need. What they don’t need is yet another cookie cutter shape to try and stuff themselves into, regardless of fit.

May Is Mental Health Month: What To Read.

For a list of good reading having to do with mental and emotional health, head over to Rumpus. I’m not big on special days or months, they rarely penetrate most people’s skulls, but this is a timely reminder to be more mindful to others. In that vein, I’ll leave you with this video by The Amity Affliction. It’s harsh, but it’s a damn good reminder to make every effort not to be an oblivious ass. (Added the follow up song.)

The Amity Affliction -All Fucked Up.

The Amity Affliction – I Bring the Weather With Me. (Lyrics below the fold.)

[Read more…]

Word Wednesday.

Reck / Reckon

 
Reck

Verb, Intransitive Verb.

1: Worry, Care. To have care, concern or regard. 1b: To take heed.

2: archaic: to be of account or interest: Matter.

Transitive Verb

1: archaic: to care for; regard.

2: archaic: to matter to: concern.

[Origin: Middle English, to take heed, from Old English reccan; akin to Old Norse roekja to have care, German (ge)ruhen to deign, akin to Old High German ruohhen to take heed.]

(Before 12th Century.)

Note: I grew up using reck and reckon. I still use reckon, because most people recognize it, but I had to give up reck, it’s unfortunately been lost to most people. I would say I don’t reck instead of I don’t care, and doesn’t reck rather than doesn’t matter.

Reckon

Verb, Transitive Verb

1a: count <reckon the days to Christmas> b: estimate, compute. c: to determine by reference to a fixed basis.

2: to regard or think of as: consider.

3: chiefly dialectal: think, suppose.

Intransitive Verb

1: to settle accounts.

2: to make a calculation.

3a: judge b: chiefly dialectal: suppose, think.

4: to accept something as certain: place reliance.

-reckon with: to take into consideration.

-reckon without: to fail to consider: ignore.

[Origin: Middle English rekenen, from Old English –recenian (as in gerecenian to narrate); akin to Old English reccan.]

(13th Century.)

The girl had the good grace to blush. “I came in to get a Valentine’s card,” she said, “only I can’t choose. Look.” She pointed to the display near the counter. “Funny, sexy, or romantic – what d’you reckon?” – The Witch’s Daughter, by Paula Brackston.

The Philosophy of Beards.

Thomas Gowing felt the mighty yet fragile English Beard to be threatened with extinction by an invasive foreign species, the Razor. So he set out to defend the furry face mammal in every conceivable way. The resulting lecture was received so enthusiastically by a bushy-faced audience in Ipswich that it was soon turned into The Philosophy of Beards (1854) — the first book entirely devoted to this subject.

It is Gowing’s ardent belief that the bearded are better looking, better morally and better historically than the shaven.

[…]

In the last section, Gowing gambols through the ancient and modern past, attaching a beard or lack thereof to thousands of years of heroism and cowardice, honour and deceit. Viewing history through the prism of the beard makes things nice and simple: “The bold Barons outbearded King John, and Magna Charta was the result,” … “Henry the 7th shaved himself and fleeced his people”. Napoleon I only allowed men in his empire to have an “imperial”, an upturned triangle of a beard, as a way of letting them know “that they were to have the smallest possible share in the empire”.

[…]

Finally, he dismisses as “a foul libel” the idea that ladies don’t fancy a beard. He declares, presumably without much survey data to hand, that “Ladies, by their very nature, like everything manly,” and cannot fail to be charmed by a fine flow of curling comeliness.”

You can read much more at The Public Domain Review, including the book itself. The book has also been recently republished by the British Library, for the first time since 1854. You’ll find a link at The Public Domain. I’d think the book would be a fine gift for anyone’s bearded friends and loved ones.

You might also be interested in Beards of Time:

Two photographs of the same unknown man, each taken at a different studio in Texas – Source: left and right.

Two photographs of the same unknown man, each taken at a different studio in Texas – Source: left and right.

Stitching Medieval Manuscripts.

I have a deep and abiding love of Medieval Manuscripts, there’s always more to discover and wonder over, and here’s a new and delightful discovery to me, the early repairs of manuscripts, where beautiful embroidery was utilised to repair flaws in the parchment.

A plain-colored stitch incorporated into a drawing. Gerald Raab/ Courtesy Staatsbibliothek Bamberg.

A plain-colored stitch incorporated into a drawing. Gerald Raab/ Courtesy Staatsbibliothek Bamberg.

In the Cantonal and University Library in the ancient city of Fribourg, Switzerland, is a 14th-century manuscript with some gloriously beautiful defects. Scattered throughout the text are small tears and holes. And many of them have been carefully, intricately stitched together with colorful thread.

[…]

Holes in the parchment weren’t always dealt with, but when they were, any repairs needed to be done before it could be written on. This might include both patching over holes and evening out edges, explains Sciacca. The repair method could be crude or rudimentary—“Frankenstein” repairs, as Sciacca jokingly calls them—but, as writer Paul Cooper recently highlighted, sometimes they could be quite beautiful.

In that same 14th-century text in Fribourg, a single page is elegantly adorned with two sets of thin stitches, one pink, one green. Elsewhere in the same manuscript there are rainbow-hued repairs of different shapes and sizes. In a text held at the Engelberg Abbey library in Switzerland, stitches at the edge of the page create a “rope”, as Sciacca refers to it, to fill in the edge of the parchment. And from the same library, the missing side of one page has been patched with an additional square of parchment.

A series of repairs made in James of Voragine’s 14th-century Golden Legend. Courtesy Cantonal and University Library Fribourg, Switzerland, Ms. L 34.

A series of repairs made in James of Voragine’s 14th-century Golden Legend. Courtesy Cantonal and University Library Fribourg, Switzerland, Ms. L 34.

As medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel points out, these repairs must have been common in certain monasteries. “Where I was finding a lot of these embellishments were in manuscripts that came from either nunneries, or from what they call in Germany, double cloisters,” Sciacca says. “So you have this paired male and female monastic community. They live separately, but they’re allied with each other, and they’re physically located next to each other. So it seems that this may be part of what was, in fact, women’s training, what was nuns’ training, which was to practice embroidery. And they were doing it not just on textiles, but also actually in manuscripts.”

Stitching wasn’t the only way to make the best of flawed parchment. There are instances of holes being incorporated into illustrations, or used to reveal an illustration on the following page. The stitches themselves could even be embellished. In a text in Germany’s Bamberg State Library, a curve of plain-colored stitching is surrounded with the drawing of a man so that the thread resembles his skeleton.

You can read much more, with lots of links, and see much more at Atlas Obscura. Fascinating!

Word Wednesday.

Stark

Adjective.

1 a: rigid in or as if in death. b: rigidly conforming (as to a pattern or doctrine): Absolute <stark discipline>

2: archaic: strong, robust.

3: utter, sheer <stark nonsense>

4 a: barren, desolate. b 1: having few or no ornaments, bare <a stark white room> 2: harsh, blunt <the stark realities of death>

5: sharply delineated <a stark contrast>

-starkly, adverb.

-starkness, noun.

[Origin: Middle English, stiff, strong, from Old English stearc; akin to Old High German starc strong, Lithuanian starinti to stiffen.]

(Before 12th Century)

²Stark

Adverb.

1: in a stark manner.

2: to an absolute or complete degree: Wholly <stark naked> <stark mad>

(13th Century)

“But someone had left the lights on active mode, and their reflections made the night simultaneously bright and spooky. Flashing off trees, creating gargoyles that lurked in the stark shadows of the underbrush, making people move in stylized slow motion all around me.” – In Dark Woods, Jeannette de Beauvoir.

Home.

Back home from chemo. I’ve done surprisingly well today, good energy, and constantly stuffing my mouth, which makes for a grand change. We had a leisurely time after chemo was done, around 3 pm. We stopped at the bookstore, and I brought home a stack of books, as usual. And then we had an exploratory trip through the new Co-op market, they have some very impressive produce at reasonable prices, so we’ll definitely be back. Then we did our regular market shopping and headed home. I’m hoping tonight won’t have any nasty surprises. Anyroad, I’m going to go cuddle up with a book and my giant glass of Nesquik/Malted Milk/Ovaltine. I am not setting my clock, so when I show up tomorrow, who knows, might be rather late in the morning.

As for the stack of books, none of these authors are known to me, so an adventure. I started Midnight At The Bright Ideas Bookstore on the way home because I am a complete sucker for any book which takes place in a library or bookstore setting. I’m not far in, but I already love many of the characters, and there’s a delicious horror-type mystery unfolding in this wonderfully odd bookstore.

I’ll see you all tomorrow sometime.

Word Wednesday.

Silly / Thralldom / Sally

 
Silly.

Adjective.

1 archaic: Helpless, Weak.

2a: Rustic, Plain b obsolete: Lowly in station; humble.

3a: Weak in intellect: Foolish b: exhibiting or indicative of a lack of common sense or sound judgment.

4: Being stunned or dazed.

[Origin: Middle English sely, silly happy, innocent, pitiable, feeble, from Old English sælig, from sǣl happiness; akin to Old High German sālig happy.]

(14th Century).

“Don’t be sil—” began Jim; then he remembered just in time that the word “silly” had a very different meaning in the middle ages. It meant “innocent” or “blessed” — which was not what he meant at the moment.” – The Dragon at War, Gordon R. Dickson.

Thrall.

Noun.

1a: a servant slave: bondman, serf. b: a person in moral or mental servitude.

2a: a state of servitude or submission. b: a state of complete absorption.

–thrall, adjective.

–thralldom, noun.

[Origin: Middle English thral, from Old English thræl, from Old Norse thræll.]

(Before 12th century).

“Unhand, dog!” he snapped, in his best baronial manner. “Do you think I fear thralldom by any witch-device?” – The Dragon at War, Gordon R. Dickson.

Sally.

Noun.

1: an action of rushing or bursting forth; especially: a sortie of troops from a defensive position to attack the enemy.

2a: a brief outbreak: outburst. b: a witty or imaginative saying: quip.

3: a venture or excursion usually off the beaten track: jaunt.

[Origin: Middle French saillie, from Old French, from saillir to rush forward, from Latin salire to leap; akin to Greek hallesthai to leap.]

(1560)

“Ah, well, just a thought,” said Brian. “I’d been thinking – a quick sally to slash a few throats, then back through the gates and close them behind us.” – The Dragon at War, Gordon R. Dickson.

Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death.

The Knight.

The Knight.

The Dance of Death by the German artist Hans Holbein (1497–1543) is a great, grim triumph of Renaissance woodblock printing. In a series of action-packed scenes Death intrudes on the everyday lives of thirty-four people from various levels of society — from pope to physician to ploughman. Death gives each a special treatment: skewering a knight through the midriff with a lance; dragging a duchess by the feet out of her opulent bed; snapping a sailor’s mast in two. Death, the great leveller, lets no one escape. In fact it tends to treat the rich and powerful with extra force. As such the series is a forerunner to the satirical paintings and political cartoons of the eighteenth century and beyond. For example, Death sneaks up behind the judge, who is ignoring a poor man to help a rich one, and snaps his staff, the symbol of his power, in two. A chain around Death’s neck suggests he is taking revenge on corrupt judges on behalf of those they have wrongfully imprisoned. In contrast, Death seems to come to the aid of the poor ploughman, by driving his horses for him and releasing him from a life of toil; the glowing church in the background implies this old man is on his way to heaven.

Holbein drew the woodcuts between 1523 and 1525, while in his twenties and based in the Swiss town of Basel.

The Miser.

The Miser.

The Monk.

The Monk.

These woodcuts are beautiful and highly detailed. In Holbein’s hands, Death makes its feelings known; Death is quite gentle in the cases of the old woman and old man, poor folk, and those of the peasant class. On the other side, Death is more than a little rude, as in the violin playing as Death drags the Duchess out of her bed. Death is not kind when it comes to the abbot, the abbess, or the monk.

One notable thing makes these beautiful woodcuts all the more astonishing, the size of them:

Holbein’s achievement is the greater because of the miniature scale he was drawing in. Reproductions obscure just how tiny the wooden blocks were — no bigger than four postage stamps arranged in a rectangle. The blocks were cut by Hans Lützelburger, a frequent and highly skilled collaborator of Holbein’s. Lützelburger had cut forty-one blocks and had ten remaining when Death surprised him too. The blocks were then sold to creditors, and eventually printed and published for the first time in Lyons in 1538 as Les simulachres and historiees faces de la mort.

You can read and see much more at The Public Domain.

The Book of Exposition: The Secrets of Oriental Sexuology.

15th Century erotica! Oh my. This looks to be very interesting, and I do plan on reading it. Unfortunately I can’t do that right away, the day before chemo is always a busy one.

A decade or so after the famed Orientalist Richard Burton translated Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi’s The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight (1886), an anonymous translator became the first to critically assess and introduce for Anglophone audiences another of the Middle East’s more controversial and enigmatic texts — Kitab al-Izah Fi’ilm al-Nikah b-it-Tamam w-al-Kamal, or The Book of Exposition — a collection of fifteenth-century erotica. Despite there being much dispute over the authorship of the work, from both Western and Middle Eastern scholars over the centuries, The Book of Exposition is nowadays credited to a fifteenth-century Egyptian polymath called Jalal ad’Din al-Suyuti (1445-1505). Although perhaps best known for his co-authorship of Tafsir al-Jalalayn (Tafsir of the Two Jalals), a classical Sunni exegesis of the Quran, al-Suyuti was also a prolific erotologist, writing at least twenty-three treatises on various aspects of the sexual arts.

The two dozen stories he presents in The Book of Exposition are an exploration of promiscuity and sexual taboos under the societal constraints of the Arab-Islamic world. In “The Strange Transformation that Befell a Certain Believer’s Prickle” a man is granted a “Night of Power” in which he is given three wishes to be fulfilled by Allah.

[…]

In his opening essay and commentary, An English Bohemian sets out to dispel Victorian attitudes to sexuality through the idolisation of the Oriental — setting up “Oriental Sexuology” as a mystical alternative for aspiring libertines/hedonists. He doesn’t just limit himself to the Orient in his examination of sexuality. He offers an insight into the sexual customs of other lands he claims to have travelled and researched extensively as a former practitioner of medicine: from Loango to the Aztecs, Paraguay to Samoa, Europe to Arabia. Despite his intentions, we perhaps end up learning more about Western attitudes to sex than the those of the non-European cultures he examines. His assertions, in their elevation of Orient over the Occident, appear to be motivated more by a desire to rebel against the prevailing establishment of his own culture than offering a nuanced picture of a foreign culture’s attitudes to sex.

You can read more at The Public Domain Review (the book is also available there), or go straight to the book here.

Word Wednesday.

Panache

Noun.

1: an ornamental tuft (as of feathers) especially on a helmet.

2: dash or flamboyance in style and action: verve.

[Origin: Middle French pennache, from Old Italian pennacchio, from Late Latin pinnaculum small wing, related to pinnacle.]

(1553)

“Potential enemy?” Ponce de Leon made a face. “It lacks panache. I prefer to be called ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’.” – Unbound, Jim C. Hines.