#history!!!

[bestofbroken]

I love you tumblr. #Julius Caesar

[humanpurposes]

I read something about GRRM being inspired by The Wars of the Roses/British history and it’s common for women of that time period to have been accused by men of bewitching people or being sorceresses (not really surprising but that usually stemmed from deep misogyny/envy). So it is a bit funny when people take the accounts of the maesters at face value when f&b plays around with people’s perceptions and builds a very narrow view of who these figures are.

I'm about to jump on this ask as an excuse for a fun lil history rant :) (apologies if that's not what you were signing up for but what else am I meant to do with my degree??) But I'll be merciful and put it under a read more.

Yeah! So GRRMs influences from English medieval history are evident, asoiaf is meant to be inspired by the Wars of the Roses and he has said the Anarchy was the inspiration behind the Dance of the Dragons. But you could draw similarities between the Wars of the Roses and the Dance as well.

What we see a lot of the time with medieval Queens and female figures around the middle ages is that they have been villainaised by their contemporaries, historians, and in the public memory in general. Helen Castor explains the stories of several Queens in She Wolves, which also has a documentary, so would highly recommend that. Essentially, women have traditionally been held to much harsher scrutiny for displaying any kind of ambition or agency when compared to men.

In the Wars of the Roses specifically, Elizabeth of York and her mother Jacquetta of Luxembourg were rumoured to practice witchcraft after Elizabeth unexpectedly married Edward IV and their family rose to prominence. On the Lancaster side, Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI is remembered by Shakespeare as the "She-Wolf of France" for attempting to assert her own power as Queen when her husband was incapable of ruling, and for defending her son's claim to the throne. And then we have Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, who orchestrated her son's rise to power and is also portrayed quite negatively in various historical fiction novels and TV shows.

It's only recently that we've begun to question these interpretations of female historical figures, and we see similar patterns in Fire and Blood, not just with Alys but also with Rhaenyra and Alicent. And this is because patriarchy loves to condemn women who step outside of traditional gender roles. This is why, historically, a woman's right to rule has been so contested, because in a system of personal monarchy, it matters what kind of person the monarch is. They have to be able to lead, to fight and defend their realm, they have to be intelligent and commanding, all attributes a medieval society believes women incapable of possessing. I've gone really off topic but my point it, it's important to understand the universe these characters are operating in. If they act in an unconventional way, they will be scrutinised for it, by their enemies, by those recounting the narrative in F&B, and apparently, by fans as well. Why do we think GRRM wrote F&B as a fictional history? The book itself is a comment on historical biases and unreliable narrators.

And to be fair, I'm not saying all these women are saints who are incapable of wrongdoing, fictional or historical, but I think it's incredibly reductive to blindly idolise or vallainise female characters and political players. We all know who the real enemy is that is MEN :) (not my man Aemond though, he's a feminist prrrr)

[percysart-archive]

france as one of those wwi soldiers (strasbourg)

[bennysiegcls]

I. May or may not have made an impulse decision.

On the other hand

Mogul of the Mob and Gragg’s Ben Siegel biography shall be mine soon.

[lostsometime]

so this week in my Art History class i learned that basically everything we all think we know about vincent van gogh might be wrong

NOT ONLY do they now think it’s possible/likely that he didn’t kill himself, it’s ALSO possible that he didn’t cut his own ear off either

in both cases, he might have been covering for someone else because he didn’t want to make trouble for them

in the ear scenario, it might have been done by another famous artist, paul gauguin

also they were living together at the time 

[lukeandjosh]

Joshua Rush’s story on 2/8/19.

[that-cheer-up-anon]

I’M SO MAD NOBODY TOLD ME THAT THIS WAS A THING