Open Thread: Anachronisms?

Ramblites, I have a question.

I cannot seem to watch or read historical fiction anymore without running into a scene where a Lady Of Very High Birth has a big fight (sometimes she wins, sometimes she loses) over the right to breastfeed her own child. And in almost all of these cases, it really is settled historical fact that a wet nurse would have been used in the cases I'm running into. And that's part of the big fight: her husband or her mother or her whatever expresses shock and horror that My Lady Of Very High Birth would balk tradition like this.

And I'm wondering: what's the truth behind this?

On the one hand, I suspect this is a bit of modernity leaking into these stories: modern perspective coloring our historical fiction. On the other hand, I really don't know; maybe lots and lots of Ladies Of Very High Birth really wanted to nurse and maybe really tried to do so, but the patriarchy and lack of social support made it too difficult.

On the third hand, maybe there was a little of both -- Ladies Of Very High Birth who didn't want to nurse and ones who did -- and I've just been reading all the historical fiction of the Ladies who did.

Can anyone answer this question?

Has anyone else noticed this in Every Historical Fiction Ever or is it just me?

Any other recurring anachronisms* people want to share?

OPEN THREAD BELOW!

* I would have added "functioning birth control" because it was a pet peeve of mine that people could fornicate their butts off in historical fiction and not get pregnant, but then I read "Mary Boleyn" by Alison Weir and she dropped this tidbit without so much as a how'd-you-do:

Other methods of preventing pregnancy included inserting pepper or a sponge soaked in vinegar into the vagina, sealing the cervix with beeswax, having anal sex, or doing some “hard pissing” after intercourse.

Well, okay, then! o.O

47 comments:

Naomi Kritzer said...

I think this was addressed in the really excellent book "Mother Nature" by Sarah Hrdy. (No typo: her last name really is Hrdy.) My vague recollection (I read it a long time ago) is that wet nurses were embraced by the bourgeoisie merchant class because a woman unencumbered by nursing could get right back to work, and that at least during some periods of history, nursing your own children was something of a status thing for the upper class.

I have FOR SURE run into some profoundly annoying anachronisms related to childbearing in fiction. Probably the most memorably hilarious was probably "Clan of the Cave Bear," which the herbwoman has Ayla get up into a squat as some sort of last-ditch attempt to help with a difficult birth, as opposed to squatting being a perfectly normal way to deliver a baby in that culture. She also uses a sharpened stick to break Ayla's water. (I suppose this is no sillier than the fact that Ayla invents almost everything from needles to the freaking wheel.)

I picked up a Christian historical romance last year because it was free on Kindle and there were some hilarious medical anachronisms in there, justified with the character having "read some new theory" in a medical journal (?!) or something (and thus she's able to SAVE THE HERO from sepsis, or something. I remember that the hero has a compound fracture of the leg, and refuses amputation, and she came up with some solution that kept him from dying. Actually, what probably bugged me the most, anachronism-wise, was the little old Italian lady who acted like an Evangelical Christian. Even today, Italians are overwhelmingly Catholic, but if you wanted to give me a "Praise the Lord!"-ing old Italian lady in a modern context I wouldn't quibble. In 1870? Are you kidding me?

Laocorn said...

At one point Lady Macbeth says "I have given suck..." and goes on giving regicidal advice to her husband -- I used to wonder about that line, too!

The specific debate you bring up hasn't come up yet in what I've read of the _1632_ series (historical/alternate universe/one-way time travel story), 'though I guess it could always do so.

Ana Mardoll said...

ARGH, anachronistic religion BUGS me. I got so much flack for a negative review I wrote for Vine last year for what was, I realized belatedly, a Zondervan book.

It was a Sleeping Beauty retelling in Ye Olde Europe and the CATHOLIC protagonists go on for pages and pages and pages about their personal relationship with Jesus, and that they don't need a priestly intercessor, and they end up CASTING OUT DEMONS themselves, without getting the priest who lives literally right down the hall.

I was so freaking narked off. I thought I was getting a story, not Protestant propaganda.

EdinburghEye said...

One of the biggest anachronisms that bugs me a LOT is the presumption that most women were happy/contented with their status in society.

Granted it may be as difficult to portray a sense of discontent that is outside the language boundaries of modern feminism (say, as from 1790s onward) as it is to consider how individuals thought of sexual orientation / gender identity decades and centuries before the modern language with which to discuss them began to be invented (1870s onward) BUT...

Ballads, jokes, fairy stories, poems, novels... There is a wide range of sources from ANON onwards that make clear women were not content.

It is tough for a historical novelist to walk that tightrope - because the language of anachronistic feminism jars me as much as anything else - but it should be there. Because it was there.

Still.

I think there is considerable documentary evidence for "the royal wetnurse" being a standard part of princely households in that she's often listed in the accounts with her allowance of ale and beef, etc. Elizabeth Woodville, who wrote massively about how things were to be ordered in the royal Tudor household, discussed the proper attributes of selecting a wetnurse, which suggests a presumption that the queen wouldn't be breastfeeding her own children. And it's fairly established that, in court life, what the queen does is what all the other noble ladies will tend to do too.

Storiteller said...

The presumption that women weren't at all happy with their role in society was one of the things that struck me the most reading Count of Monte Cristo - because at the time, that wasn't even "historical" fiction. It was just fiction and all of the women, both good and evil, were doing something to change their position in life. I found it both really cool and frustrating that Eugénie Danglars is one of the most feminist characters I've ever read in adventure literature and she was written by a French dude in 1844.

Omskivar said...

Pretty much the entire setting of Eragon is one giant anachronism. It takes place in that vague high fantasy setting that encompasses anywhere from the Dark Ages to the Italian Renaissance (with a high focus on Western Europe, of course), and it shows really badly in Eragon's home town. He lives in a tiny, remote village on the outskirts of the Empire, yet everybody has glass windows and the blacksmith is also an accomplished carpenter who built a two-story house with carved trim around the doors, a spiral staircase, polished wood surfaces, and gargoyles. The hero knows what a cathedral looks like even though he's never seen one in his life, and he's completely unfazed walking into a bustling port city when he only left his home for the first time two weeks ago.

Loquat said...

Supposedly the ancient Romans had a plant called Silphium that was an amazingly effective contraceptive and abortifacient, but that was so finicky about it growing conditions it could only be cultivated in a certain region of Lybia and nowhere else. It went extinct by the first or second century AD, due to overharvesting and possibly environmental change.

So functioning birth control is very much not an anachronism for historical fiction set anywhere near the Mediterranean before AD 100.

Makabit said...

As for functioning birth control, it was out there, in Renaissance Europe, at least. Some of it was absolute nonsense, but some of it would have worked, at least some of the time. (As you can see in the Alison Weir quote...I'm not that 'hard pissing' is going to get you much of anywhere.)

They clearly used a version of the rhythm method, trying to avoid fertile periods of the month, although there seems to be confusion in some times and places about when that was. (One book from, IIRC, sixteenth-century Germany, recommends having sex during menstruation, because the womb is more open then.) Various sorts of cervix-blocking things were used. The peel of half a lemon, in some places, which I expect would be a pretty damn efficient blocker and spermicide. Some less effective things. Anal intercourse was apparently thought of a means to avoid pregnancy, and was much railed against by preachers.

As one of my professors commented, when discussing all this in the context of the diary of a seventeenth-century Puritan whose diary we were reading, the point of all of this usually was to have five children, not ten, so occasional failures of method were not seen as points against the method.

(I don't recall the Puritan's name, but he was great. My favorite moment was when he's driving his daughter to go into service in another household, and she starts crying. He comments that if his wife wouldn't have killed them both, he would just have turned around and taken her back home.)

cjmr said...

That would be why I didn't get more than halfway through Eragon...

Makabit said...

Eragon's not that unique, though, is it? Haven't read. Many, many fantasy worlds are just not all that well thought out in terms of technology, environment, agriculture...

Laiima said...

Last month I was reading a book about Irish immigrants to America ( because I'm of Irish descent on my father's side). I learned a lot of interesting things about the history of Irish immigrants in the US, especially before my grandparents arrived, which was not until the 1920s.

Anyway, what's relevant to this discussion (Naomi's comment in particular) is that the author compared how other immigrants were Catholic in America to how the Irish were Catholic in America. Like everyone else, I assumed that Italians were Catholic in a devout and like-Irish way, because I thought, naively, that Catholic = Catholic. Not so. Irish and Polish Catholics were very high authoritarian, which means pro-clergy, pro-tradition, pro-obedience. Even *blind* obedience is good. Other Eastern Europeans (like my Lithuanian forebears) AND ITALIANS were different. In both of these groups there was a strong tradition of freethinking and anticlericalism, which was in constant tension with how other Catholics thought they should be. Also Italians in particular apparently had all sorts of festas that were kind of syncretically-pagan/Christian, which the Irish hated. (And since most of the Catholic clergy in US cities were Irish, no matter who the believers were, this could be a problem.)

As was noted, however, Catholics would never talk about 'a personal relationship with Jesus'. As a person raised Catholic, I never heard those words together until I moved to Indianapolis, and the people saying those words were Evangelical Christians who were anti-Catholic. indeed, they kept insisting that Catholics were not Christian. I kept wondering where they had learnt their Christian history -- did they not know that all Protestants came from Catholics? therefore if Catholics were not Christian, then they weren't either.

Will Wildman said...

There were pumpkins for Samhain.

There were pumpkins... for Samhain... in second-century England? ...Wibble?

I admit that I don't normally aim for immersive accurate representation when writing pseudo-historical fiction, so I regard with some degree of respect those who do try and nevertheless fail, but sometimes people just don't try at all and the result is amazing.

cjmr said...

True, but most of them people don't act aghast that you aren't a big fan of because you homeschool...unlike Eragon.

Omskivar said...

I really only brought Eragon up because I'm deconstructing it right now, so the anachronisms are fresh in my mind. Usually I can skip past one or two; I was willing to overlook the glass windows and even the whitewash, for instance, but so many of them piled together at once is just unbearable to me.

Nina said...

I just "Mother Nature" and that was the first thing I thought of too! Also, Hrdy points out that breast-feeding can suppress fertility and that this fact has probably been fairly widely known. So there may well have been some upper class women who (in addition to status or whatever) might not want another child too quickly.

Makabit said...

Homeschoolers are all supposed to like Eragon?

Because the author was homeschooled?

Makabit said...

Just tell them, as snootily as possible, "I'm educating MY child to be able to to create an intellectually and historically realistic fantasy setting. What a pity everyone doesn't share my values."

Marie Brennan said...

There were some time periods in England where London mothers would (if they could afford it) send their kids to be nursed in the countryside, away from the freaking *appalling* infant mortality rates of the city.

Which backfired somewhat later on, as the kid acquired immunity to country germs instead of city ones, and often got sick upon returning. But it was still probably a net gain.

Makabit said...

So functioning birth control is very much not an anachronism for historical fiction set anywhere near the Mediterranean before AD 100.

The jury is kind of still out for me on the silphium front. Yes, it may have been used for contraceptive purposes, as well as many others, but so were a lot of other things, many of which don't work, or don't work very well. I think our fascination with it stems from the fact that it's extinct, and we can't really find out how well it did or didn't work.

Maybe I'm overly cautious, since, as those who know (and hopefully love) me will attest, my giant pet peeve in fantasy or historical literature is herbal or magical birth control that works exactly like modern hormonal birth control. (My wrath toward George R.R. Martin on the subject of 'moon tea' is mighty indeed.)

cjmr said...

Ridiculous, isn't it?

Mary Kaye said...

I am bothered by fantasy-setting people who know how disease works, and never consider any theory other than that it's a transmissable agent with some relation to cleanliness. They don't regard it as a curse or judgment of the gods, or a moral failing, or a lifestyle failing, or black magic, or an attack by an enemy. They don't blame the night air or a bad smell or exposure to a foreign food.

But I was bothered much worse by one novel where the bad guys besieged the heroine's city and threw in corpses, and it started a plague--people were dying on the streets. But then the heroine managed to lift the siege, and everyone was happy again. I don't know if the author forgot about the people dying on the streets, or imagined they would suddenly all get better, or ....? but it was a book-meets-wall moment for sure.

Makabit said...

In general, the character who bucks the received medical wisdom of the day, and happens to do exactly what a modern professional would recommend gets my back up.

I make exceptions to this. (Yes, Margaret in _A Vision of Light_ invents forceps in the fourteenth century. I love Margaret, and I'm willing to go with it.) But overall...

cjmr said...

Forceps are at least a mechanical device that are *plausible* to have been invented earlier. Just a pivot point, spoons, and simple leverage...

Naomi Kritzer said...

Makabit, regarding realism -- I think the scenario where someone for her own reasons is delighted to have an excuse to defy her mother is the sort of thing that easily transcends time and culture. And in a culture where some people were using wet nurses and some people weren't, and you've got a family that sort of straddles the divide -- you've sold me on this idea just from your setup, honestly.

The pumpkins-for-Samhain thing reminded me of one of my other pet peeves: food anachronisms. Pumpkins, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes are all New World foods that did not exist in Europe (or Asia or Africa) before Columbus (and for quite a while afterward; new foods take time to catch on). Most people at least know about corn but potatoes are so deeply embedded in our psyche as a staple of the Irish and the Russians that a lot of people assume that potatoes are native to Europe. Ditto tomatoes and Italy.

Also: when I was in college, I spent a semester studying abroad in Nepal. Part of my time there was spent in a homestay in a rural village where no one had electricity or running water. People used candles for light, cooked over wood fires, and did all their farming with hand tools. Most of the adults were not aware of the germ theory of disease and used a mix of useful and harmful remedies for common illnesses (the folk treatment for diarrhea: withhold water, because clearly this child has had too much.) Anyway, it gave me a whole new perspective on realistic writing about pre-technological societies.

Marie Brennan said...

Makabit: actually, I've stopped being annoyed by Fantasy Birth Control. Because you know what? It's fantasy. And birth control is a major, major factor in women's freedom to do something with their lives other than pop out a kid every year until they die of it or hit menopause. I forget who it was that pointed out to me how much of a female wish-fulfillment trope that is, but now that I see it as such, I'm actually all in favor of it. Why should we consider that any less realistic than half the other things built into fantasy worlds?

(It's true that Fantasy Birth Control is also a male wish-fulfillment thing, since it lets the guys get laid without having to worry about knocking up their partners. It caters to both genders.)

Re: anachronistic medical wisdom -- oy. Let me just say, having once forced myself to stick to my period guns on that front, I completely sympathize with authors who can't quite bring themselves to do it. I wanted Jack Ellin to be an intelligent, forward-thinking doctor . . . in seventeenth-century England. During the freaking Great Plague of London. A hundred thousand people dying around him, and I wasn't allowed to have him magically know it was transmitted by fleas, however much I wanted him to. The best I could manage was to have him advocate for pest-houses -- i.e. centralized quarantine, rather than boarding the sick up in their houses with their healthy relatives -- which was an actual thing at the time, though not yet widely accepted.

It really, really sucks to have to write a character that's supposed to be sympathetic -- and smart! -- yet has some totally wrong-headed ideas about how to keep people from dying.

Obstetrical forceps, btw, were invented at least as early as the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, the family who invented them (the Chamberlens) kept them as a trade secret for a good hundred years . . . but in light of that, you could get away with saying somebody else had the same idea even earlier.

Joolya said...

I read a lot of HF in the 90s, and not much since then, and I never noticed this. I can't think of a single instance, in fact. So I reckon this is a modern development in the last ten years that corresponds to a big pro-breast feeding cultural shift. Whereas I think that fifteen years ago it wasn't as big of a thing, and a moral imperative only for a minority of women.
Art mirrors life?

Kirala said...

It usually bothers me when a society has centuries of technological development in the space of a decade or so Because Of Genius. Pern went from eleventh-century technology in the first books to sporadic nineteenth-century technology even before they rediscovered the magic technology cave (as I think of it). I find it hard to believe that an eleventh-century blacksmith with an alchemy hobby could develop the telegraph. (My apologies to anyone well-versed in historical technology if my time estimates are way off.)

Scott said...

Re: anachronistic food

Turkey legs! I pretty much grew up in Ren Faires, and all of them that I've been to -- ALL OF THEM -- serve turkey legs. Turkeys are North American. It doesn't really annoy me, but the more I learn about these things, the funnier I find it.

chris the cynic said...

Don't be silly. Those aren't turkey legs. They're the legs of magically enlarged chickens.

Amaryllis said...

Marie Brennan: Re: anachronistic medical wisdom -- oy. Let me just say, having once forced myself to stick to my period guns on that front, I completely sympathize with authors who can't quite bring themselves to do it.

Which is why I always liked Patrick O'Brian's Stephen Maturin. He's presented as a genius of a physician: brain surgery is as nothing to him, in 1802. But it's also nothing to him to go into the surgery covered with the dirt of the street, or the ship, without so much as cursory hand-washing. Or to sit down to dinner after surgery with the blood still on his shirt-sleeves. Germs? Who ever heard of germs? (Well, at least a few scientists had speculated that there might exist some such organisms, but a true germ theory of infectious disease was still a few decades away. I always wondered if Stephen survived to see it.)

Another anachronism that bugs me: people from the more reserved periods of history exhibiting modern attitudes toward what the nuns used to call "public displays of affection." Yes, BBC, I'm looking at you: you really think that Anne Elliot would hug and kiss Captain Wentworth in a public streat?

And speaking of historical fiction, allow me to squeal for a moment: Bringi Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's sequel to Wolf Hall is out! And, from the early reviews, just as good.

Ana Mardoll said...

Another anachronism that bugs me: people from the more reserved periods of history exhibiting modern attitudes toward what the nuns used to call "public displays of affection." Yes, BBC, I'm looking at you: you really think that Anne Elliot would hug and kiss Captain Wentworth in a public street?

[Random] This one's tricky. According to Alison Weir, in Tudor times it was perfectly natural for a woman to kiss a man on the mouth when being introduced for the first time. And they really DID have plunging necklines; HBO didn't make that up. I wouldn't have guessed that.

Scott said...

I suppose it would also work to pass them off as pheasant. I don't really know how large a pheasant is, though.

Naomi Kritzer said...

My favorite magical birth control method is in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Sharing Knife" series. The magical people with Second Sight can see in a woman's aura when she's fertile, and if the woman doesn't want to get pregnant they avoid intercourse.

Makabit said...

I've never been sure what the turkey legs are supposed to represent, other than the famous pop image of Henry VIII, and I don't even know where that came from. Possibly some large game bird? I don't know what it would be, though.

EdinburghEye said...

A pheasant is smaller than a turkey.

I went to a Ren Faire once, staying with friends in Arizona. It was very, very American.

I still recall with considerable embarrassment a story getting handed back to me many years ago by a medieval historian I'd asked to sanity-check it, because her very first comment was "Beer. Or ale. NOT TEA."

(I'd handwaved the "tea" as "any infusion of hot water over herbs" but she was right in any case, as I'd have known if I'd stopped to think about whateveritwasthequeenwasdrinking for more than five seconds. Even if I was writing in an alternate medieval Europe where they already knew about tea, this was first-libation-of-the-day and would therefore naturally have been ale, or beer if it was post-hops.)

Makabit said...

One of the best things I've ever seen--ever--was the 'time travel booth' at the beginning of "The Coppergate Experience". The Coppergate Experience is a ride through an animatronic tenth-century York, that's built into the Jorvik Museum in York. The ride itself is hilarious, as is the script they've released, so you understand what those people were saying in Norse, but the part at the beginning is best.

They park you in front of a video screen, and the movie starts with two young people in current dress, on the street outside. Then they run you backward, stopping periodically. The young people's clothing changes, and the street outside changes, but...and this was what enchanted me...the way the young people interact also changes. In the eleventh-century one he is gazing at her, all pale with longing, but in the eighteenth-century one he is cheeky and aggressive, while a minute before, in the Regency moment, they were proper and correct. They're a pair of young 'dating' people on the street in all of them, but the body language, and their interaction, changes from generation to generation.

Re: plunging necklines. Legend has it that Henry VI, who was very pious, used to beg the ladies at court to raise their necklines. Since this was the fifteenth century, when court dress was cut way down, the ladies appear to have ignored him.

EdinburghEye said...

So I reckon this is a modern development in the last ten years that corresponds to a big pro-breast feeding cultural shift.

It comes up as a fairly consistent theme in Norah Lofts' novels, one of my favourite writers of historical romances. She was born 1904, first novel published 1936: she died in 1983.

Looking at a chronological list of her novels, the very earliest one that I remember definitely having a Noble Lady Who Insists On Breastfeeding was The Lost Ones, first published 1969 - though the issue of "do I or don't I breastfeed" comes up in other earlier novels, that's the one I remember where the Queen got her way.

Norah Lofts always belonged to the "gritty realism" school of historical writing, though - her characters take bathroom breaks, women have periods and worry about getting pregnant - and the only "contraception" ever successfully used is a monthly brew of pennyroyal tea, which might actually work - though as an early abortifacient rather than a contraceptive. Also she was, apparently, the first fiction writer to look at the life of Richard I, go "He was gay, wasn't he?" and write him accordingly.

kitryan said...

We just did a production of Anna Karenina (I have not read the book) where Anna is upset that she was deemed too fragile to breast feed her daughter, who now needs to be seen by the doctor, since the wet nurse doesn't have enough milk. Unsure where that fits in with local/temporal mores.

Naomi Kritzer said...

I went to the Jorvik Museum!

What I remember was the SMELL. O M G. I don't know who decided that Smell-O-Vision was a good idea, but that was an aspect of time travel that really did not improve my experience even if it enhanced my sense of What Things Were Really Like.

Storiteller said...

Turkey legs! I pretty much grew up in Ren Faires, and all of them that I've been to -- ALL OF THEM -- serve turkey legs.

Almost everything in Ren Faires is an anachronism. You don't go to Ren Faires for historical accuracy - they're about as close as watching Beauty and Beast and thinking it's a good representation of that time in France. You go to pretend that living in Renaissance times was fun, to watch people sing funny songs, and to eat turkey legs.

The Jorvik Museum was hilarious, albeit too expensive for me to go a second time with my husband after going with my parents. It was as if the Peter Pan ride had been taken over by non-Disney Vikings. The smell-o-vision was awesomely weird as was the dude on the toilet.

Fluffy_goddess said...

The breastfeeding thing comes up a lot in social history, because it's kind of all over the place. There's a certain amount of evidence that even the same woman might breastfeed some children, but not others -- a noblewoman's *job* was basically Produce Heirs in a lot of marriages, so her first two or three babies would be handed to a wetnurse on the basis that she had to get pregnant again fast. Later, if she was still producing children after they had whatever number they needed/wanted, she might be allowed to nurse, although by that stage it wasn't always easy.


I've been running into the anachronism of Nuns Who Act Like They Stepped Out Of Sister Act lately, which just throws me out of the book and makes me grumble. Renaissance Nuns: not likely to be orphans! not likely to be peasants! not likely to be anything other than rich and of powerful families! Also, some of the stuff on how they were raised is, frankly, hair-raising. Women given to the convents young because the bequest there is a little less than a suitable dowry would be, and then taught to alternately infantilize and sexualize Jesus because they'd previously been taught to prepare for motherhood.... Plus the alternate uses for candles. Oh dear god, the things they did with candles.

Makabit said...

The dude on the toilet was odd, but the smell didn't particularly bother me--no worse than your average barnyard.

I liked the little boy who keeps yelling "Erik Bloodaxe rules OK".

Makabit said...

I've heard about some of the more outrageous Venetian convents and all, but I'd always assumed that there were also less decadent and bizarre religious communities, with women from more normal social backgrounds.

There's an endearing case in one of Gene Brucker's books about crime in Renaissance Florence, involving a prostitute who had joined a convent community. Ended up in cour because her former pimp was harassing the sisters. He wanted her to come back to work, but failing that, he wanted some money she took off him, and a prayer book she also stole from him (perhaps figuring she'd need it more than he would in her new profession). I don't recall how it turned out.

Viola said...

I'm currently writing recipes for a weekly newspaper, published in a city that bears a striking resemblance to eleventh-to-thirteenth-century-ish Cambridge. With magic and demons and fae and That Kind Of Thing.
For reasons I cannot fully explain, the recipes all involve swamp creatures.

I've already broken setting by including mashed potato, but potato is so hard to avoid in catering that it's pretty well canonical that it exists in-game. But for the most part - no tomatoes, no chilli peppers, no paprika, no chocolate, no coffee. Lemons are expensive luxuries. Ovens don't have temperature controls, beyond maybe "cool" and "hot". No refrigeration. No ice. Honey, not sugar.
Figuring out how to cook things that are familiar enough to the players to be amusing without committing anachronism is an interesting challenge. Swamp-creature pie and swamp-creature bacon and potted swamp-creature are funny enough to be worth it, though.

(Pheasants are tiny. A whole pheasant per person is not a paticularly generous portion.)

EdinburghEye said...

According to Alison Weir, in Tudor times it was perfectly natural for a woman to kiss a man on the mouth when being introduced for the first time.

*Belatedly* Erasmus of Rotterdam, visiting his good friend Sir Thomas More in 1497, remarks on the delightful custom of English kissing.

"If you go to any place you are received with a kiss by all; if you depart on a journey yon are dismissed with a kiss; you return, kisses are exchanged; they have come to visit you - a kiss the first thing ; they leave you - you kiss them all round. Do they meet you anywhere? - kisses in abundance. Lastly wherever you move there is nothing but kisses - and if you had but once tasted them ! how soft they are ! how fragrant ! on my honour you would not wish to reside here for ten years only, but for life!"

Erasmus was a Catholic priest, but evidently very obliging in falling in with the customs of the country. After all, it would be rude. And Erasmus seems to have been the soul of enthusiastic courtesy.

Ana Mardoll said...

This was so fascinating. Please history-geek whenever you like!!

chris the cynic said...

one that lasts a thousand years or more without some alteration just strikes me as a fail.

When I wrote a thing with a thousand generation thingy, the reason that I set that period in a preagriculture precivilization setting was because I could think of no other setting where that kind of sustained lack of change would be possible.

It seems like once you move beyond hunter-gatherer change is relentless.

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