just learned today that there was a german monk who was obsessed with witches and women having sex so he wrote an entire book called the hammer of witches where in one part he describes in detail that witches have the ability to make people’s penises disappear and they keep the penises as pets and feed them oats

i’m serious

Because I was reminded of this post just now:

There is an article on JSTOR about this exact thing which is my favorite academic article title that I've come across in the tiny subfield of scholarship around witch beliefs, hunting and trials

The title, ladies and gentlemen:

There is enough talk of penis theft to fill an academic article.

Also if anyone would like an overview of the Malleus Maleficarum in general, Dr. Justin Sledge has a good one here which I think mentions the penis shenanigans (which are pretty much based on a) misogyny and b) a bit of beliefs about magic-vs-humorism) too:

For real though, SO much misogyny going on. Heinrich Kramer was a bizarre extremist even for his time, and despite how influential he is a lot of his contemporaries in the Church, a lot of nobility and even some literal inquisitors hated his guts (despite others "coming around") because his solution for everything was "execution" instead of "repentance".

One of the most important things I have learned today..

medieval voice - I'M BABY

Me:…so yeah, this white powder is a chemical our scientists make that makes cakes super super fluffy and bread insanely fast and easy to make. Like, no rising time at all!

Medieval peasant, holding a box of Arm and Hammer: glory be to God for His wonders in the world! And you can clean things with it too?

Me: oh, yeah, you can clean like everything with it, it’s amazing.

Medieval peasant, scrubbing the living hell out of a cooking pot: damn the future’s pretty nice. I’m so proud of you.

we’ve gone from the yee haw agenda to the ye olde thot programme

Ah yes, those slutty slutty Landsknecht shorts:

The bare-legged / hot-pants look was fairly common, since the whole point about being a Landsknecht (or Reislaufer, their Swiss equivalent) was to look outrageous.

Most period illustrations of Landsknechts are black-and-white woodcuts…

…though in 1905 a book called „Geschichte des Kostüms“ - History of Costume - assembled a bunch of black-and-whites and added colour.

If they look excessively gaudy, they’re not, because these next prints were coloured in-period by an artist called Erhard Schön, and it’s fair to assume he was representing what he saw.

In short - or in shorts - those reenactor costumes are spot on. :->

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.

I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?

I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”

I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P 

I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers. 

Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.

This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”

Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)

All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.

I’m trying to make medieval punk a thing.

@ everyone crying big tears abt notre dame burning:

so this covers the “scary ghost stories” but i’ve always been disappointed that the modern christmas canon has never delivered on the promise of “tales of the glories of christmases long long ago”

it pretty much skips directly from jesus to ebenzer scrooge, with never even, like a king arthur christmas tale

which is what as a kid i always assumed was just sthg i hadn’t gotten old enough to hear yet, the medieval christmas feasts and legends, but here we are and still nothing

makeitthroughthis said:

is grendel the first krampus

there is absolutely no reason hogwarts couldn’t’ve been founded as a monastic school for the education of the clergy, with two houses for women and two for men, except that the hp fandom is full of bitter atheists and people who don’t know shit about paganism & religious history

and also @saphura

well since you asked so nicely

here’s two things that i don’t think fanfic writers understand about pre-enlightenment europe:

first, there is zero evidence that paganism continued to exist as a practiced faith in western europe after about 900 CE. there is more evidence for demons. (reading on this, among other things) if you want to make the case that with the statute of secrecy, wizards erased all evidence of their existence as your justification for pagan wizards, that’s fine, but you’re then left with the question of where the stories about witches came from.

second, there was no way for a non-christian organization to function. period. it didn’t happen. jewish groups, especially pre-1492, were very small and very quiet; islamic groups kept out of christian europe; there were no other options. if you were a guild, if you were a school, if you were a group of any form, if you were a government–you were christian. it was explicit. there wasn’t even a conception of how to organize without invoking christianity.

so when, in or about 950, hogwarts was founded, it had to be founded in a christian framework. there’s a big, huge, gigantic problem though: in 950, education happened one-on-one, through tutors or apprenticeships. the only, only institution educating in a group format was the church.

why? because clergy came from all classes, because clergy were required to be (at least partially) literate, and because the majority of the population (in some places and eras, from any demographic) was not literate. religious institutions were the only places collecting significant numbers of children and giving them an education.

there were two forms of this: cathedral schools, which produced priests, and monastic schools, which produced monks and nuns. (some reading)

couple of reasons why hogwarts would be monastic and not a cathedral:

so. if you’re going to create a school in 950 in scotland that accepts students from all backgrounds with the goal of educating them, the most reasonable framework for this is the monastic school.

(monastic schools were also notoriously apolitical, which would go a long way to explaining some things in the books…)

but wait! you say. what about christianity and magic?

i’m so glad you asked. medieval catholicism didn’t actually have a problem with harry potter magic, as long as it was dressed up in the appropriate forms.

quote from holy feast and holy fast by caroline walker bynum:

in other words, it’s not the things that people do that make them witches: it’s their relationship (or not) to God and the Church. things that we today would call magic–healing people by touching them, or saying incantations; turning one bread into many; transporting from place to place–all of these turn up in hagiographies of saints as miracles that they performed.

(complicating matters is that they did have a conception between good and bad witches, it’s just that all were damned. so you have good witches, who are doing good things, and bad witches, who are doing bad things, and saints, who are doing good things, and the quality of the thing…well it does matter, but it matters less than the position of the person doing it)

additionally, throughout the middle ages, you see records of people definitely doing magic which is contemporaneously acknowledged as magic who are…not getting burned as witches. the big easy example here is court alchemists & astrologers, who were all over the place telling the future and/or making things blow up and only really getting into trouble when their patrons did. (some reading)

there were also tumblr’s favorite women, the herbalist or local midwife (or, equally common, the wealthy widow). the line between “medicine” and “magic” was not all that well formed: if you knew that certain herbs with certain prayers would keep someone alive, who was to say that it was the herbs vs the prayers that did the heavy lifting? later there was a clear(er) distinction, but even then, the association of midwifery with witchcraft is not new and it is not unfounded. (more reading)

so there’s a deep, deep split here. because on the one hand, yes, people were (irregularly, but routinely) tortured and (less commonly) executed for witchcraft (under a variety of names). but on the other hand, people were socially rewarded for practicing magic within accepted forms, and while sometimes this was because the source of the magic was seen as different, sometimes it was not.

in this context, then, in this understanding that some people could (and did) work magic without being evil, in this society where education was the province of a very, very select group of people who were also (what a coincidence!) more likely to be workers of magic, in this situation that j.k. rowling seems to have absolutely no idea of–

hogwarts was a monastic school to produce good catholic magical monks and nuns.

(some more readings i didn’t have an excuse to share earlier: link (on merlin), link (on anglo-saxons), link (on things witches did), link (on what the witch hunters thought they were hunting and why))

and because i know you’re all wondering: hogwarts founder headcanons

helga hufflepuff is first and easiest, because helga is a midwife. you want an abortion? she can help with that. curse an ex-boyfriend? great! heal your child? she’s got that too. lost a cow? totally something she can help with. helga is a good christian, yes, and goes to church regularly, but it doesn’t occur to her for a while that some form of organized education might be helpful. she has her apprentices, and she grew up with tales about those who wanted too much, too badly, who didn’t think of the cost, and who did a deal with the devil as a result. but she thinks of this as the consequence of what she gets to do, which is putter around in her garden and make sure the crops come in on time. when they start talking about a monastic school, about a place to educate nuns in a little different way, a way that’s a little closer to god, she starts thinking about how to putter a little bigger and what that might mean.

salazar slytherin is the court alchemist. he came running north after an experiment went wrong (did it blow up? a little. was anyone hurt? not badly), looking for somewhere to go and someone to protect him–and this isn’t unusual, everyone has patrons and, and wizards don’t survive long without someone to explain to the church why these wizards are fine, thanks–and he finds that the local monasteries have more young children, young magical children than he’s used to, and he goes–oh. he is also 115% the reason why divination is a subject, because he is very good at explaining to people why their zodiac means they should leave their entire fortune to this brand new monastery, and he never, ever forgets that he has to rely on others, that his safety depends on people who secretly, deeply think he is a heretic, that he’s taking and educating and perverting their children, and that if they wanted to he and all his would die.

rowena ravenclaw is a nun. it’s not a profession she came to young; she came after her husband, after her daughter, after she was widowed and everyone looked at her a little differently, and a little sadly. after she started having visions, after her angry words started to hurt. so she went to a cloister, and discovered she was touched by god, and also that there were children here, like her daughter, who needed education and that she was very, very good at this. it’s rowena who reaches out to those she knows, here and there, saying, do you want to make this real? do you want to make this official? rowena has had a lot, and lost a lot, and found something else entirely, and is determined to take everyone along with her.

godric is a monk. he is not a very good monk. he is not big on the seclusion or the copying. he is very big on living in the community and helping them (he would make a decent fransciscan if he was born 500 years later). he’s an absolute stickler for penance, for himself or for anyone else, and also for justice. he became a monk because he got in an argument with a neighbor, and the next day the neighbor’s cow died, and there was an accusation made, so he decided that the appropriate solution was to vanish and made his way to ireland to become a monk. he sees people every day who don’t know what they can do, who do know what they can do but not how, who are hurting others and helping others and want only to know why, whether this was from god or from the devil, and he does his best to help them. but he can’t help but think that there must be some better way to do this, that if there was a monastery just for monks like him, they might be able to do something.

and they do.

i love this format of fanfic

You know this strongly implies that you can then trace the HARD-split of Magic-Muggle society to the Reformation, and it’s probably Calvin’s fault, and that’s beautiful.

@ch-ch-ch-ch-cherrybomb

And it makes sense for Hogwarts to fall under the Monastic school banner because if you look into the history of Monastic schools in Scotland, they were very good at sticking them in out of the way places. For example: by a loch in the Highlands, far away from any distractions (I would say google Fort Augustus Abbey school, but right now the Benedictine abbey/former boarding school is part of a historic child abuse inquiry so… maybe don’t).

And you know John Knox would have been That Asshole calling for the school to be shut down but that nothing came of it until James I/VI took the throne and went on his “witchcraft is evil uwu” thing and the wizarding society went “…. you know what? We’re just gonna… be over here.” It also explains why the Weasleys are so numerous if they never learned anything about contraception beyond the rhythm method in the wizarding world.

Maybe medieval people happened upon a T-Rex fossil and came to a relatively logical conclusion that dragons existed.

I’ve read a couple books on this actually, thats exactly what happened. Also cyclops are from looking at bones from a certain type of baby elephant. The giant note hole and tiny eyes made it look like a single eye.

Yep, can confirm! And what’s even funnier to me is that back in the dark ages, Greek people used to find a lot of prehistoric bear skeletons - and those look exactly like human skeletons, except they’re like eight feet tall or something - so they naturally assumed those were the heroes of legend, and made armour and clothes for them and reburied them with the most splendid and sacred religious ceremonies they could think of? Fast forward five centuries, Athens’ all modern and rational, philosophers and scientists aren’t taking any shit from anyone - but the problem is, people will randomly find graves containing giant-ass warriors, so that’s something that can’t be explained away and yeah, demigods were a thing and yeah, they used to be eight feet tall and sorry I don’t make the rules.

Some scientists suspect that the origin of the cyclops myths came about because of elephant skulls, which are vaguely human in shape but with a honking big hole in the middle for the trunk but easily mistakable for an eye socket without any flesh

this is the first time i’ve ever seen an elephant skull outside an elephant and i don’t like it much

— i love medieval bestiaries so much

Yeah that’s why they all died at 30 because they were so unhealthy but cool

Pretty sure it was the plague not heart disease.

Pretty sure it was the Plague, childbirth, food spoiling, maltreated infections, smallpox, pneumonia, and/or generally unsanitary living conditions (such as dumping sewage and waste in the streets) and not health conditions caused by excess body fat.

Not to mention that the Renaissance standard of female beauty being plumpness and full-figured forms came from the fact that it was a status symbol. Plump, pale, full-figured women were wealthy women who didn’t have to spend their days in hard labor or raising children (or both) and stood a better chance of bearing healthy babies than commoner women did.

Cultural “Oh Snap” I hate it so much when people pull out the “unhealthy” excuse for having a reason to body shame a person.

“Women died young in the 1700s because they were fat” is an amazingly ignorant statement

ppl didn't die at 38 anyways, the infant mortaity rate was super high which skews the average / median lifespan down to 38. if you lived through childhood you lived a normal life to old age at 60-80, even in the plague years.

debate: is a really long sword-length but still otherwise knife-like knife valid to be considered a knife, or is it now a sword because it’s long

@nagunkgunk

It’s a knword and it’s Valid

I don’t wanna like Kill The Joke but this brings up a really cool fact about swords in ~14th-16th century Germany! The only people who were allowed to own Real Swords were the royalty and nobility BUT! Everyone else was allowed to own knives. The definition of a knife, however, was based on not length but handle construction, and to some extent how it was sharpened. The handle had to be constructed Like So with 2 pieces of wood sandwiching the metal tang.

Only one edge was allowed to be sharpened, but oftentimes a small part (a couple inches) of the short edge (e.g. the edge that wasn’t sharp) would be sharpened, and weapon design often allowed for this

In this way, something that looked like This, a messer of just over a meter in length…

…would be legally considered a knife, and therefore allowable for non-nobility to possess. (you can also see the bit on the back of the tip that would be sharpened)

So @swordmutual, there’s a not definitive but certainly interesting historical perspective on your question

black and asian vikings 100% definitely existed (also, saami vikings)

you know how far you can get into eurasia and africa by sailing up rivers from the baltic and mediterranean seas? pretty fucking far, and that’s what vikings liked to do to trade

then, you know, people are people, so love happens, business happens, and so ppl get married and take spouses back home to the frozen hellscape that is scandinavia (upon which i’m guessing the horrorstruck new spouses went “WHAT THE FUCK??? FUCKING GIVE ME YOUR JACKET???????”)

and sometimes vikings bought thralls and brought them home as well, and i mean, when your indentured service is up after however many years and you’re a free person again, maaaaaaaaaaaaybe it’s a bit hard to get all the way home across the continent, so you make the best out of the situation and you probably get married and raise a gaggle kids

so yeah

viking kingdoms/communities were not uniformly pure white aryan fantasy paradises, so pls stop using my cultural history and ethnic background to excuse your racist discomfort with black ppl playing heimdall and valkyrie

Also we KNOW they got to Asia and Africa. 

Why?

Because Asians, Africans, and Vikings TOLD US SO. 

Also, we know there was significant mercantile trade between Scandinavia and parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Northern India, Kashmir, North and Eastern Africa because there is evidence in burial sites.

Check that out: the goods Vikings and Scandinavians were getting from their trade with the rest of the world was so important they buried themselves with it, as part of their treasure hordes.

We KNOW this.

There’s a reason you can still see many of the trade routes from the ancient world etched into the very earth.

Plus, we know that some Scandinavian cultures that participated in Viking raids had established minority communities of ethnically Mongolian folks living among them during the periods when such raids were common, and it’s difficult to credit that none of them would have signed on.

Islamic Ring in Viking Grave

Vikings in Persia

Black Vikings

Vikings in North Africa

Buddha statue in Viking hoard

Vikings brought Native American woman to Europe

Unflattering texts in Arabic about Vikings

Original text by Ahmad ibn-Fadlan

More about the Islamic World and Vikings (some Vikings converted to Islam! sort of sketchy site tho)

Viking technology came from Afghanistan

More on trade route determination via metallurgy

… is that enough? :)

Yet another on the pile of reasons why it monumentally honks me off when pusillanimous, pseudointellectual white supremacist scum try to use Scandinavian culture as a crutch for their arguments and act like Norse mythology agrees with their biases. No it fucking doesn’t, bitch. Odin would personally kick you in the dick for being a witless coward and then send your ass to the Realm of the Dishonored Dead.

that last comment, lol

This is the greatest progression of events I have ever read, where’s my historical gay romance novel about this

KING JAMES, CAN YOU CHILL?

Local King Cannot Stop Promoting His Boyfriend

where’s the lush period drama about this series of events?

fun thing about king James, this guy was fairly public about his bf (more public than what was acceptable). He threw lots of extravagant parties with his man on his arm. It pissed off the church obviously so to get them off his back, he’s the one that ordered the third translation of the Bible from Hebrew to English (the King James Version aka the Authorized Version) so the Bible every hot blooded all American Christian reads today was literally just written so a very gay king could fuck his boyfriend in peace.

!!!!!

Top 10 Medieval Butt-Licking Cats

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The nastiest habit of medieval cats seen via illuminated manuscripts.

10. Regular licking

9. Licking and mouse-hunting

8. Licking, mouse-hunting and bird-stealing

7. Hey cat! Stop licking your butt on the Book of Maccabees or you’ll get an arrow!

6. Otter-like cat

5. Devil and the cat worshippers licking the cat’s butt

4. Prayerbook cats

3. Weirdly long tongue

2. Villard’s cat

1. Licking Cat of Apocalypse

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