I've always loved this thing. It must have sucked in some way; unreliable, expensive, hard to type on or something, since it never caught on. The idea is genius tho
memento mori
@tenposike
just a little scrapbook where i reblog posts on the topic of death and posts that celebrate life and history. no original content. content warning for death, possibly unreality and occaisonally outdated language
confusing comic about existing as a trans person during confusing times of trans visibility.
comominimo
went to miami to recover father sotirios. and made some new friends.
these animals... they are wise. I recruited them to avenge my dear brother. I was then escorted out of the sea world.
Better than the 1596 Marseille dolphin exorcism I suppose.
In 1596 dolphins were infesting the port of Marseille. Back in those days, y’see, dolphins didn’t have the cuddly image they enjoy today. They were pests and were causing damage.
So the cardinal of Avignon sent the bishop of Cavaillon to do something about them. In front of a huge crowd, the bishop sprinkled some holy water into the waters of the port and told the dolphins to begone. Whereupon the dolphins indeed turned tail in terror and fled, and were never seen again.
Still not as dramatic as Saint Bernard excommunicating the flies though.
What happened to the flies?
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux built a monastery in 1124, but it was plagued by flies. So the good saint promptly excommunicated them. By the next day the flied had died in such quantities that they had to be shoveled out.
Still not as nutty as the Basel rooster trial though.
*everyone in unison* um what rooster trial?
In 1474, a rooster in Basel did the heinous and unspeakable act of laying an egg. As everyone knows, an egg laid by a rooster will hatch into a basilisk (or cockatrice).
So to avoid the creation of a cockatrice (or basilisk), the rooster was tried, found guilty, and burned at the stake along with its egg. A huge crowd was present.
The “rooster” in this case was likely a hen that had developed male characteristics (it happens).
Still not as properly legal as the Savigny pig trial though.
Ok, clearly you want an excuse to talk about the pig thing, and I now DESPERATELY want to hear about the pig thing, so PLEASE tell us about the Pig Thing.
In 1457 a sow killed Jehan Martin, a five-year-old boy in Savigny. For that crime she was put on trial and judged guilty, and sentenced to be hanged from a tree.
Her piglets, however, were judged to have been innocent of the murder, and so were returned to the owner, with the caveat that he had to surrender them to the law if they were later found to have eaten any of the boy.
Not to be confused with a whole bunch of other, similar porcine trials.
I won’t mention the 1454 excommunication of eels in Lake Geneva then.
OK what did the eels do, and more pressingly why were they in communion with the church in the first place
Animals are expected to be part of the Church by default, that’s why they take excommunication so badly.
Felix Hemmerlin’s treatise on exorcism, cited by e.g. Wagner’s Historia Naturalis Helvetiae (1680), informs us that around 1221-1229, eels once infested Lake Geneva in huge numbers. So Saint William, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicated them and banned them from the lake, forcing them to live in only one part of it.
Plot twist: as far as we know, Saint William was never bishop of Lausanne.
There’s no way you have historical Christianity nonsense more silly than this to share
I’ve been trying to stay on brand and talk about animals only, but sure, few intersections of Christianity and the legal system get sillier than…
… the Cadaver Synod.
Pope Formosus (“Good-looking”) was pope from 891 to 896, and apparently accumulated a few enemies. After his successor Boniface VI enjoyed all of a 15-day papacy, the next pope elected was Stephen VI.
And he hated Formosus.
How much? He had the corpse of Formosus exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, and put on trial for his failings as a pope.
End result? Formosus was found guilty of papal fail. The corpse was stripped of its clothes, three fingers on its right hand were severed (no blessings for u), and it was tied to weights and dumped in the Tiber.
Needless to say Stephen VI came to a sticky end. An angry mob deposed him, he was strangled in prison, and Formosus’s corpse was fished up and reburied with honors. And the later popes passed edicts ensuring this kind of silliness would not happen again.
Tune in next time when I tell you about how a lawyer defended a city’s entire rat population.
Please, the rats, give us the rats, i beg....
The story of the rats of Autun is also the story of Barthelémy de Chasseneuz (or Chassenée, etc.), a highly original and highly talented defense lawyer. That’s him here.
When the town of Autun was infested by rats in the early 1500s, they were accused of eating the province’s barley crop and were duly summoned to be judged in an ecclesiastical court of law. Chasseneuz was the defense attorney.
How do you defend an entire swarm of rats? You don’t, is the answer. You delay. Chasseneuz’s original defense was “my clients live all over the place, one summons won’t be enough”. So he got a court summons to be posted in all the infested parishes.
When the rats didn’t show up after the elapsed time delay, Chasseneuz proceeded to explain at length why. The rats didn’t come to court, he said, because of their enemies the cats, which are everywhere and always vigilant and hungry. “You cannot expect my clients to undertake a journey which would put them in mortal danger”, he argued in complete seriousness. “Thus they have the legal right to turn down a summons that endangers them”.
As far as we know, the rats never did appear in court, and remained unprosecuted.
Chasseneuz went on to have a distinguished career as a lawyer and was allegedly killed by a poisoned bouquet of flowers.
Catholics did not take the great schism very well it seems.
Has a worm ever gotten struck by lightning
Meiji period fashion was some of the best in the world, speaking purely from an aesthetic standpoint you can really see the collision of European and Japanese standards of beauty and how their broad agreement even in particulars (the similarity between Japanese and Gibson girl bouffants, the obi vs the corset, the obi knot vs the bustle, the mutual covetousness for exotic textiles, the feverish swapping of both art styles and subjects) combined and produced some of the most interesting cultural exchange we have this level of documentation for. Europeans were wearing kimono or adapting them into tea gowns, japanese were pairing lacy Edwardian blouses with skirt hakama and little button up boots. haori jackets with bowler hats and European style lapels. if steampunk was any good as an aesthetic it would steal wholesale from the copious records we have in both graphic arts and photography of how people were dressing in this milieu.
«The botany professor,» from Kkokei Shimbun, October 20, 1908.
she's wearing a kimono blouse or haori, edwardian skirt or hakama, gibson girl bouffant, a lacy high-collar blouse with cravat and brooch, and a pocket watch with chain
1910-1930 (Taishō era, right after Meiji, which I should have included in my OP) men's haori with western lapels
I have a love for both kimonos and bustle dresses, so I love seeing how the two fashions influenced each other over this period. And thanks to Pinterest, I have pictures!
Victorian tea gown that clearly started as a kimono. It still has the long furisode sleeves, but now they’re gathered at the shoulder and turned around so that the long open side is facing the front instead of the back. Similarly the back is taken in with curved seams to fit the torso and pleated below that for the skirt.
Woodblock of a woman in a a bustle dress made with colorful patterned fabrics and examples of how a woman could style her hair with it.
More prints to showcase hairstyles, two women wearing western wear and two women wearing kimonos.
This next one’s modern, but it involves hoopskirts so I’ll add it in because it makes me so happy. There’s been different styles of wedding fashion that take kimonos and give them a more modern look. Often this involves taking a kimono and then cutting and resewing it into a new dress. Very pretty, but it can’t ever be worn like a traditional kimono again. But now there’s another trend where the bride wears a hoopskirt with a white skirt, then you take the kimono and drape it on. The back of the kimono covers the front of the dress, the long sleeves fall across the sides or the back, and you still wear an obi with it. The result is pretty and the kimono itself doesn’t have to be altered at all.
And because you mentioned steampunk, I have to add in these two:
Personally I’m a big fan of Taisho Meisen kimono, which are what happen when the Japanese textile industry abruptly gets access to aniline dyes, new spinning and weaving technology, and the concept of Art Deco:
Mona Hatoum, Grater Divide, 2002
Mild steel, 204 cm x variable width and depth
Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist. From Artform’s 2021 Rape is a Border:
Take Grater Divide, 2002. The work is ridiculous: a standing metal cheese grater more than six feet high. Installed in a gallery, it works as a room divider, but the holes make privacy impossible. The wall is a weapon rather than a shield: A person undressing behind it could be cut as well as peeped at, opened up by sharp edges made for shredding. The work is not only an enlargement of a grater, however, but also a miniaturization of a divide, prototyping, in particular, the West Bank barrier Israel had begun to construct on appropriated Palestinian land. A person traveling through a border checkpoint may be asked to undress—strip searches are not prohibited by Israeli law. In the United States, they have been allowed ever since the 1985 Supreme Court case United States v. Rosa Elvira Montoya de Hernandez, which originated with the cavity search of Hernandez, who was traveling to Los Angeles from Colombia. In both countries, the coercive invasion of bodies is more likely to be visited on people of color, who are disproportionately singled out for selective or heightened “screening.” This word’s very meaning is reframed, or enlarged, by the Grater Divide. Gloria Anzaldúa, the queer Chicana theorist of Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), called the United States–Mexico border an “open wound” where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” All borders are graters: not solid walls but permeable ones whose pores are sharpened to pierce what passes through.
