#kyriakuses

[flashbackforward]

@kyriakuses​ replied to your post:  (i don’t know if i’ll ever post the full thing on... 

YOU MADE ME CRY 😭😭😭😭😭

YOU & ME BOTH

[tar-miriel]

U look v 1910s/20s w ur cute fringe!!!

v good, i accept this 

tell me which time period my face looks like is the meme and you should all do it

[tar-miriel]

me: i will face god and walk backwards into hell before i touch any multiplayer

hannah: Wow mim that was v me phrasing of u, Im so proud

me: dril truly gave us a gift w/ that one

hannah: YOU KNICKED IT OFF DRIL??

hannah: i THOGUHT U WERE BEING COOL AND REFERENCING MYTHOLOGY/EPIC POETRY

hannah: Oh my god fuck u mim

[thebastardofgloucester]

okay so hannah and I are talking about how Romantics did the best thing possible with their enormous privilege by going entertainingly overboard with everything and I remembered that in scotland there is a house shaped like a pineapple. 

it’s also a hotel. sleeping in the pineapple is most definitely on my bucket list. 

[flashbackforward]

@kyriakuses replied to your post:

LOVE U AND IM GLAD UR BACK!!!

ILY TOO <333 I've missed you all terribly. how’s things, bb?

[thebastardofgloucester]

so I went to a talk entitled: Anglo-Norman Attitudes: Antiquarianism in the Romantic Age given by art historian Rosemary Hill, on the basis of both the fact that Antiquarians are nuts and Romantic antiquarians even more so. I didn’t get quite as many insane anecdotes as I hoped, but there were a few good ones worth sharing.

- first, we have William Beckford, who without apparent regard for his safety as a gentlemen in the midst of Revolutionary Paris, spent the years of 1789 to May 1793 ‘shopping’ for antiquities to haul back to England before they were destroyed by the rabble. among his observations of the city, he commented that there were far fewer queues than he was used to and that you could even go to the opera now!

- Gervais de la Rue had an ambivalent relationship with the Revolution, as he was eventually forced to emmigrate to England, but also wrote about how he eagerly awaited the arrival of manuscripts looted by Napoleon’s armies, particularly those from the Vatican!

- Alexander Lenoir promoted himself as a ‘defender’ of ‘threatened’ antiquities, including several hilariously dramatic engravings of him fending off ruffians from despoiling historic tombs in St Denis. It is likely that some of these artifacts were only ‘threatened’ by his acquisitiveness.

- the tomb of Abelard and Heloise became a minor tourist attraction, to the point where the rather nondescript female figure lying beside Abelard (Heloise outlived him by a number of years) had its facial features altered to better resemble an 18th century ‘portrait’ of the 12th century woman. Abelard and Heloise’s tomb continues to be a popular secular pilgrimage site to this day.

- the Bayeux Tapestry went through a bit of an ordeal that led to a persistent historical myth. As it was too large to be brought to England to be examined by the Society of Antiquaries (and I suspect that the French weren’t really willing to loan it), a draftsman was commissioned to create a copy. Which is great, except for the part where he used wax on the original to better duplicate the details (cue shuddering from the audience). 

- in his drawing, the draftsman interpreted what was likely an un-named Saxon warrior throwing a spear as King Harold taking an arrow to the eye (just afterwards a figure is shown falling after being struck in the thigh by a mounted Norman captioned by the words ‘ hic harold rex interfectus est’ (here king harold is slain), which agrees with the contemporary accounts of Hastings). -

- Again, all fine, until the drawing was used to ‘restore’ the tapestry several years later, including the ‘arrow’ to the eye. A large number of people from legitimate scholars to school children to Horrible Histories now accept the ‘arrow in the eye’ (what was the bettin’/an arrow in his retina/would lead to his downfall?) as historical truth. And to be fair, it makes a better story, and casts the outcome of Hastings as turning on a moment of (mis)fortune, which is actually not that far off from the truth.

- In the 18th century, English antiquarians became particularly interested in Normandy (which had actually been broken in five departments by the Revolution), and started looting large amounts of ‘antiquarian fragments’. These fragments included architectural features such as the oriel window that now resides at Highcliffe Castle in Suffolk. This was...resented by some Frenchmen.

- Marie Caroline, Duchess de Berry (the last legitimate Bourbon heiress), was particularly enamored with Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, to the point where at one evening party she staged a full re-enactment of a scene from her life, with her as the queen. When she was later forced to flee from France to Scotland, she commissioned a portrait of herself in a typical mishmash of 16th and 19th century clothing, watching the shrinking coastline of France from a boat.

[tar-miriel]

hannah: anyone wanna talk about 1d and 'to his coy mistress'? bc I've been thinking about it a LOT