It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
I was recently rather amused by a chapter in an 18th-century advice manual for women, entitled 'On being over-fond of animals'. This anti-pet diatribe comes from a 1756 publication called The Wife, which also features charmingly-named chapters such as 'The danger of living in the same house with any Relation of the Husband's', 'Sleeping in different Beds', and 'The …
In her 1771 novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, Sophie von La Roche, writing no doubt for an audience of genteel ladies, portrayed the waltz as a "shameless, indecent whirling-dance [which] broke all the bounds of good breeding". The early version of the German waltz which she was describing was a variant of the Ländler, a …
Dancing, wrote Philip Stubbes in 1583, is altogether a "horrible vice". In his infamous work The Anatomie of Abuses, Stubbes protested, "what clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smouching and slabbering of one another: what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised everywhere in these dancings". For dancing "provoketh lust, and the …