#historyedit

[levithestripper]

John Silver and Cornelius Hickey sniling sneetly and their other various expressions for @odysseusilver BLACK SAILS and THE TERROR— John SIlver and Cornelius Hickey

[courtana]

JENIN, JENIN (2002) dir. Mohammad Bakri

[girlintheafternoon]

"I am not shy, I'm merely bored. They hang beautiful clothes on me and load me with jewelry, I step outside to say a few words to the people, and then I rush into my bedroom, tear off my finery, and write." - Elisabeth of Austria in conversation with Queen Elisabeth of Romania, 1880s

[diioonysus]

history + last words

[city-of-ladies]

"Here’s what we know about Julia Felix: she lived in Pompeii from at least 62 CE. She was possibly illegitimate but was definitely not a member of the social and cultural elite. She worked for a living setting up and running a very interesting business and, by 79 CE, she had planned to shift her focus from managing a business to owning property. We know all these things because twentieth-century excavations at her business uncovered an advert, carved in stone and attached to the external wall of her huge building. It reads:

"To rent for the period of five years from the thirteenth day of next August to the thirteenth day of the sixth August, the Venus Bath fitted for the nogentium, shops with living quarters over the shops, apartments on the second floor located in the building of Julia Felix, daughter of Spurius. At the end of five years, the agreement is terminated."

This find illuminated the building it was attached to, bringing what otherwise looked like a very large anonymous domestic house into dazzling focus. With this description of the purpose of each room written by the owner herself, archaeologists and historians could see the site through a whole new lens and they realised that they had discovered a Roman entertainment space for the working middle classes. It is, so far, a completely unique find and it is magnificent. It offers us, as modern viewers, two amazing things: a little glimpse into the lives of the commercial classes of the Roman Empire who are so often completely and utterly invisible, and a brutal reminder that so much of what we ‘know’ about Roman women in the Roman world comes from rules concerning only the most elite.

We’ll do that second part first, because it’s the least fun. Roman written and legal sources are pretty universal in their agreement that although women could own property, they could not control it; they had no legal rights, could not make contracts and were to be treated as minors by the legal system for their entire lives. In order to buy or sell property women required a male guardian to oversee and sign off on any transactions. This is a basic truism of women in the Roman Empire, repeated ad nauseum by sources both ancient and modern including me, and it is undermined by Julia Felix’s rental notice. 

The rental ad makes it pretty clear that Julia Felix is the owner-operator of a business complex including public baths, shops and apartments (there’s more too, as we’ll see), and she doesn’t seem to require anyone else to help her rent it out. She names her father – sort of; ‘Spurius’ might just mean that she is illegitimate – but this is effectively a surname, a personal identifier to differentiate her from other Julia Felixes in the area. It doesn’t mean her father was involved. Furthermore, the use of her father’s name as an identifier suggests that Julia didn’t have a husband and was either unmarried or widowed in 79 CE. The strong implication of her advert is that Julia Felix was an independent lady, a honey making money and a momma profiting dollars who could truthfully throw her hands up to Destiny’s Child.

We will never know if Julia escaped the flames and choking ash of 79 CE, fleeing as it swallowed her business and her home, but one discovery, made on 28 January 1952, suggests that she didn’t. The archaeologists, led by Amedeo Maiuri, uncovered on that day the skeleton of a woman who had fallen while running across the garden during the disaster. It’s clear this fallen woman was well off, because she was wearing a lot of gold jewellery. She carried four gold half-hoop earrings and wore four gold rings. Two of these rings were particularly expensive; both contained a red carnelian gem, one carved with a figure of Mercury, the other with an eagle. Around her neck she wore a necklace of gold filigree, dotted with ten pearls and hung with a green pendant. Someone stole both the necklace and earrings from the Pompeii Antiquarium in 1975 and no one, somehow, had ever bothered to photograph them so all we have are descriptions but the rings that survive are fine and expensive. The woman who wore them – was wearing them when she died – had real money to buy these objects and the woman who wore them did'nt leave Pompei in time.

 Moreover, when she was found it was clear that at the moment of her death she was heading not towards the street or towards safety, but towards the shrine to Isis in the garden where all the most valuable possessions were kept. The valuable possessions that Julia Felix grafted for and maybe couldn’t bear to leave behind. There’s no way to tell whether this skeleton is Julia Felix, whether these bones once stood and looked at the plots of land Julia bought and made plans, or whether they belong to a looter or a chancer or someone just caught out. But it’s nice to pretend that Julia Felix, who shaped the city’s roads around her dream and offered respite and luxury to workers and made a tonne of money doing it, died and was buried with the place that still bears her name."

A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, Emma Southon

[kate-bridgerton]

TUDOR WEEK 2024

Day 6: Favorite Tudor Couple - Elizabeth of York and Henry VII

The couple’s early years together may have been challenging, for Henry had to overcome his suspicions of his Yorkist bride and deal with her dangerous relations. Yet she clearly left him in no doubt as to where her loyalties lay. As time passed, he clearly grew to love, trust and respect her, and they seem to have become emotionally close. There survives good evidence that she loved him, and a moving account of how they comforted each other when their eldest son, Arthur, died. -- Alison Weir, Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen/Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World

[prideandprejudice]

“Lucrezia Borgia was the daughter of Rodrigo Borgia, the powerful Renaissance figure who later became Pope Alexander VI, and Vannozza dei Cattanei. Her brothers included Cesare Borgia, Juan Borgia, and Gioffre Borgia. She served for a time as de facto ruler of the Holy See during her father's absence. The fall of the power of the Borgias followed with her father's death in 1503 despite Cesare's immense capabilities. Cesare, gravely ill, was planning the conquest of Tuscany, but could do nothing without continued papal patronage. The new pope, Pius III, supported him, but his reign was short and was followed with the accession of the Borgias' deadly enemy, Julius II. While moving to Romagna to quell a revolt, Cesare was seized and imprisoned near Perugia. All Borgia lands were subsequently acquired by the Papal States. After exile to Spain, in 1504, followed by imprisonment and escape, Cesare joined his brother-in-law, King John III of Navarre; dying in his service during a military campaign in 1507. Meanwhile, Lucrezia, no longer needing to play a major political role at the court of Ferrara — which became a center for the arts and letters of the Italian Renaissance —was able to live a more normal life and turned to religion in her final years. She died on June 24, 1519 at the age of 39, due to complications occurring during the birth of her eighth child.”

[queencatherineparr]

Catherine Parr in Art* vs Catherine Parr in Firebrand [Costumes designed by Michael O'Connor]

*Catherine sat for the Family of Henry VIII portrait in lieu of Jane Seymour who appeared in the portrait.

[anneboleynqueen]

She wanted everything, but settled for nothing. (insp)

Anne Boleyn in The Tudors (2007-2010)

[isabelleneville]

𓅃 ANNE BOLEYN WEEK 2024 𓅃

day seven | free day

To say it’s archetypal isn’t actually doing it justice. It’s flat-out impossible to envision Anne Boleyn without her pearl-and-gold “B” necklace – a fact that filmmakers and book cover designers seem to agree with. ... We think Anne owned at least four ‘initial’ pieces during her lifetime; it seems she had her famous “B” of course, an “A”, an “AB” and an “AH” for her and Henry. - Erin Lawless

ANNE BOLEYN'S "B" NECKLACE

[nat111love]

THOSE ABOUT TO DIE ↳ Season 1 ↳ Episode 5 ↳ Betrayal

[levithestripper]

Jack Rackham’s slutty little necklace 🫶🏻💗 BLACK SAILS— Jack Rackham in 01x06 “VI”

[cesareeborgia]

↳ house woodville & house boleyn + parallels (requested by anonymous)

[girlintheafternoon]

Anne's girlhood has been overlooked in the popular imagination. It is also a period that has been misrepresented, reduced to the upper-class equivalent of reform school. But Anne Boleyn's French girlhood was neither a punishment for bad behaviour nor a hotbed of flirtation.

Instead, the girl-centred atmosphere of the French court was a quiet and intimate world defined by close bonds with other women, forged over the performance of music, shared religious beliefs, and love of learning.

During the years Anne Boleyn spent in France, she participated in female friendships that extended across nations as well as generations.

- Deanne Williams, Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Performance and Pedagogy 

[platypusesforarms]

Pompeii, Italy | Pompeii - The New Dig

In AD 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius entombed Pompeii in metres of pumice and ash preserving the city and its people for two millennia. Today, Pompeii's ruins are the archaeological wonder of the world.

[city-of-ladies]

"Women could be found working on construction sites, if only occasionally, including in specialized roles such as carpenters and masons. The research is found in the article, “Appropriate to Her Sex?” Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” by Shelley E. Roff.

She surveyed a wide variety of records from throughout Western Europe, including tax records, inventories of wages paid on construction sites, and municipal accounts, and discovered numerous instances of women working alongside men on construction sites as far back at the 13th century. Most of these women were employed as day laborers, carrying out tasks such as moving water and building supplies around the sites, digging ditches and serving as assistants to bricklayers and stonemasons. For example, in the Spanish city of Seville during the 14th century, women were hired to dig trenches for the foundation of a new city wall, while at the nearby city of Toledo, one or two women were hired each day for the construction of the city’s cathedral, where they gathered lime and worked on the roof. Meanwhile in the French city of Toulouse, almost half the laborers working on the Perigord college site were women. Ross also finds several examples from England and Germany.

Roff notes that previous historians have seen many examples of women working on construction sites in their research, but they had believed that these were just abnormal exceptions caused by economic crises, or because the male population had been killed off through war or disease. But her new study suggests that women construction workers were more than just odd occurences. She explains that “the expansion of urban centers starting in the thirteenth century set off a trend of increasing female employment for day laborers and in the crafts, which only began to contract on occasion for women working in the crafts in the sixteenth century with ensuing economic crises.”

She also notes that in almost all accounts surveyed, the women were paid at a lower rate than the men, which would make the “a cost-effective solution” for site supervisors looking for ways to reduce expenses. The women who took these jobs would have come from society’s poor – those women who could not maintain their households and families just from their husbands’ (if they had one) income.

Roff also finds records showing women taking part in specialized building trades. In London in 1383, Katherine Lightfoot is recorded as the supplier of 2,000 painted tiles for bath in the King’s palace. Meanwhile, tax records from Paris during the years 1296 and 1313 reveal the existence of two female masons, a tiler and a plasterer. These women were not poorer individuals, rather they were the wives of male craftsman, and in some cases their widows. The 15th-century French writer Christine de Pizan noted in her book The Treasury of the City of Ladies that craftswomen, “should learn all the shop details so that she can properly supervise the workers when her husband is away or not paying attention.”

Women workers could be found on the medieval construction site, Medievalists.net