It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
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 …
Pissabed; mare's fart; dead man's fingers. Three of the hundreds of traditional English plant names which, once ubiquitous but now little-known, have been replaced by the much more prosaic taraxacum, jacobaea vulgaris and xylaria polymorpha. A victory for scientific categorisation, perhaps, but arguably a loss for colourful English folklore. Before the professional standardisation of botanical …
Continue reading Pissabed, mare’s fart, dead man’s fingers: Curious old plant names
Although European society has changed hugely since the Middle Ages, some documents and objects from the time still have the power to speak straight down the centuries and demonstrate that despite radically altered worldviews, we do have things in common with our medieval ancestors. I was reminded of this when I came across a collection …
Continue reading The Bank of Mum and Dad, funding students since 1200