and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest @mchoratio - Tumblr Blog

there are very few ancient artifacts that make me more emotional than roman tombstones that thank the reader for stopping by and wish them well. there's simply something so sweet and gentle to me about imagining a traveler stopping along the road to read someone's final dedication and being sent away with the blessings of a thankful ghost

thoodleoo

marcus caecilius: good luck and good health to you. sleep without a care.

me:

shreekofjoy

Tybalt (The Shakespeare Character) is named after Tibert (The Prince of Cats), a character from the then popular story Reynard the Fox. Mercutio, in fact, mocks him as 'The Prince of Cats' in reference to this.

Therefore, I propose we name him "Garfield" in all modern retellings of Hamlet

mightymo63

Wasn't Tybalt a character in Romeo and Juliet?

shreekofjoy

I am stupid.

erratic-dragon-fruit

I mean as long as we’re here we should put Garfield in hamlet anyway

“Why isnt there a girl version of the ww2/ancient rome/napoleonic war/cold war history boy” one teenage girls are very much interested in those topics as well they just tend to speak up less about it because those spaces are full of misogynist assholes. Two it’s because reporting back from the field the main camps of interest for teenage girls tend to be messy dynastic collapses (the Plantagenets, the Romanovs, Maria Antoinette), what I’m gonna call disaster history (the Titanic, Chernobyl, the triangle shirtwaist factory fire that one is serious business to them), gross wacky medical shit, and most popular of all what I would describe as a naescent desire to get to the heart of all human evil and understand what could motivate it (imperialism, genocide, eugenics).

pagecommando

There are now more female academics/faculty/students/etc in more historically 'male-identified' hist/anth subjects and it's to the fucking better because we get more and different work on topics a lot of people thought got put to bed a while ago, even just taking a whack at new sources. 2018 Appears to be a pivotal year but the shift was decades in the making for female military historians!

In an important article over at Eidolon, Nadejda Williams discusses the visibility of female military historians within the field of ancient

There is a lovely expression in my adoptive home of Georgia: “bless your heart.” It can be used as a genuine expression of sympathy, but…

It is no longer 1980. Women have been producing some of the most innovative scholarship in military history in the past couple of decades. Not all of them would necessarily classify themselves as military historians, but all of them are doing path-breaking work that presents a more complex and nuanced picture of Greek and Roman warfare than one might find in such standard classics of the field as Kendrick Pritchett’s monumental (pace Finley) five-volume tour-de-force The Greek State At War. Overall, I would argue that women’s work on military history, whether ancient or modern, exemplifies the best of what historians now call “New Military History” — the study of war that looks beyond battles and campaigns. Acknowledging that war was a horrific and painful process that affected real people, women’s scholarship on war is much more likely than the scholarship of men to deal with those issues related to suffering and trauma to both combatants and civilians. As a result, also, many women scholars who work on war consider gender issues as they relate to war. Others look at the impact of war on society more broadly. To give just a few examples of great women scholars who are publishing on various aspects of Greek and Roman military history, the folklorist Adrienne Mayor has won a slew of awards for The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. One of Mayor’s earlier books, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, challenges the more traditional narrative of Greek warfare as driven by honor and tradition. I assign it every time I teach Greek and Roman Warfare, and every time, the students say that it is their favorite book in the class.

amphibious-thing

I wish we could have a nuanced conversation about queer erasure without one side screaming all historians are homophobic and are trying to hide queer history from you and the other side screaming no historians are trying to hide anything from you and any critic of academia is anti-intellectualism.

Historians are people. Like any other kind of people they each have their own biases that affect their work. Some historians are queerphobic and will absolutely hide queer history from you intentionally. Some historians are not queerphobic but will perpetuate queer erasure by not actively questioning the research of the queerphobic historians who came before them. And some historians are not queerphobic and are actively trying to undo the damage of queer erasure.

amphibious-thing

Me: Some historians are not queerphobic but will perpetuate queer erasure by not actively questioning the research of the queerphobic historians who came before them.

People in the notes: but also remember *myth started by queerphobic historians that has since been debunked*

amphibious-thing

Anyway no people didn’t all write passionate romantic love letters to their buddies. This is an extreme simplification of an outdated understanding of romantic friendship.

my-deer-friend

The language used in these [queer eighteenth century] letters is unlike the language used by most contemporary writers in the letters that they wrote to other men, even to men with whom they were intimate friends. […] These [friends] spoke with unselfconscious warmth of their affection and love for the men to whom they wrote. But they did not speak of dreaming of the other; did not mention physical contact, as in "I attempted to seize on thee"; did not compare their friendship to that of famous lovers; and did not use language like “half of my soul.” They did not use the rhetoric of romantic love.

Bentman, R. (1992). Thomas Gray and the Poetry of ‘Hopeless Love’. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3(2), 203–222.

Anyone who actually reads real historical letters and not just tumblr takes can learn to spot the difference.

amphibious-thing

I don’t mean to single you out but I do want to address this. I think this idea that using modern labels is unethical as you put it gets passed around without really understanding why we shouldn’t use modern labels.

The reason we shouldn’t use modern labels is so that we can better understand the historical culture by using historical language. Refraining from using modern labels without doing the work to really understand historical language and culture is pointless and does nothing but add to the erasure of queer history as we strip ourselves of any language. You have to follow through to the second part otherwise it’s pointless.

Sure maybe don’t call a molly gay but call him a molly at least!

amphibious-thing

I completely agree. Using modern labels in a casual context really isn’t a big deal imo.

Honestly I think part of the issue is that this academic concept of not using modern language in order to preserve the nuance of historical language and culture often looses it’s original intent once its brought into non-academic spaces. It so easily becomes don’t call someone gay that’s insulting which is not the original intent.

It ends up being perverted by cisnormativity and heteronormativity because while people may not have actually used the modern labels cisgender or heterosexual they are still presuming historical figures are cisgender and heterosexual.

I think d’Eon is a good example of this. People will say you shouldn’t call d’Eon transgender because that word did not exist in her lifetime which seems sensible enough. But then this progresses into you should refer to d’Eon as a man and use masculine language when referring to d’Eon in complete disregard for the fact that d’Eon described herself as women and used feminine language for herself. The second sentiment goes completely against the original reason for not using modern labels in the first place.

If no one was transgender before the word transgender was coined it becomes easier to argue that transgenderism is a modern trend. And so what started as a good academic approach to studying queer history ends up being co-opted by bigots who want to give their bigotry a veneer of intellectualism.

luntfontanne

Posters for National Theater of Korea's production of Macbeth, designed by Yuni Yoshida and photographed by Noh Juhan. [1][2]

ospreyonthemoon

I can't believe people have been performing macbeth for 401 years and we still haven't run out of sick poster ideas

krasnyel

their addiction to serving despite having like 5 seconds worth of screen time should be studied

menelaiad

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (½)

eflatminorseven

thinking about edvard munch's "The Sun" (1911)

like yeah thats how it feels. thats what it feels like to exist sometimes. he gets it

teddy2145

Also very big! Takes up two stories!

fluentisonus

i met one of my aunt's archaeologist friends/colleagues earlier today & he was telling me about legends that not too far from here there's the ghosts of a roman legion that people see walking up the cliff towards the edge of the sea and then off the edge of the cliff and onwards, because the coastline has receded so much since roman times that the 'land' they're used to walking on goes on far past the point it falls into the sea today. and like. OUGH. I don't even strictly believe in that type of ghost but I'm Obsessed with this image of them still interacting with landscape that has crumbled into the sea & completely disappeared over the thousands of years since they were alive. ghost landscapes Real

ilions-end

everyone shhh for a second and look at this ink doodle of diomedes and glaucus hugging by 18th century painter antoine-jean gros

horaitos

it’s so important to me that the passion’s slave speech is right after the nunnery scene and right before the pipe scene. btw

afieldinengland

154707

For heaven’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings

Richard II (2013) [pt. 2] [pt. 3]

hamletthedane

Idk how to articulate this but I don’t trust any actor who says their dream role is hamlet - it’s almost always just an ego thing…….UNLESS they also dream of playing Richard II.

Then it’s apparent that they’re just obsessed with playing the most pathetically tragic sad little meow meow they possibly can