18th century trash

Van (or Vanya) | 28 | 🏳️‍🌈 | they or she | European | 18th century nonsense, mostly Voltaire, Émilie du Châtelet, other philosophers, Frederick the Great, with a side of frev, etc | sideblog @le-jardin-inculte

[your-disobedient-servant]

note: currently more active as @le-jardin-inculte

[eisbecherovka]

History is so good for nosy people

[amphibious-thing]

Its actually so fucked up that people will use d'Eon talking about her experiences with misogyny as evidence that she wasn't actually a woman. I'm sorry I forgot that women must love misogyny. Must love being treated as less than. Trans women doubly so apparently.

[emperornero]

im afraid i will start to quote this randomly outloud

[glorioustragedykid]

There's a weird 3 star movie out there ready to change your life forever

[cparti-mkiki]

it's always funny to see 19th century people torn between their appreciation for Our History and just how crass and embarrassing they find a good deal of written material from the past to be... preface to heroards diaries where the author is clearly consternated bc oh so fashionable early modern courts keep making dick ass shit and piss jokes

[ainecdote-remade-deactivated202]

tired of cannibalism as a metaphor for love or sex. can we get into cannibalism as a metaphor for colonization.

[sloppity-bilepiper]

1. Europeans using Egyptian mummies as medicine

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

4. Zombies (which I would class as cannibals, since they were human and need to eat humans to live) have a root in Haitian folklore and represented enslavement.

[vintagedean]

adding that, if you can find it, cannibal culture by deborah root is about exactly this. the way the white western world is a hungry, destructive force that cannibalizes non-white cultures and creates wealth and status through the cannibal colonization of those cultures.

here's the intro

i almost think there's an essay in bell hooks' black looks about this too? yes! just checked, there's an essay called "eating the other"

[romanceyourdemons]

an interesting thing about clothing in late medieval and early modern europe is that, while lower class people generally did wear brightly colored clothing instead of muddy brown clothes, there were very distinct differences in the color of clothing people of different classes wore. clothing was done with all natural dyes, of course, but they were either dyed locally with cheap and easily accessible ingredients, or they were dyed in holland, italy, the ottoman empire, or even further afield using a jealously guarded secret combination of difficult-to-access ingredients, including (crucially) better-quality fixatives. this means that not only did expensive imported fabrics maintain a dark, rich tone much longer than a locally dyed one, which would get a washed out look after a couple of years, but there were also certain colors that a working class farmer literally couldn’t afford to wear, and even though the difference between a cheap local lincoln green and an expensive imported popingay green might seem subtle to us people then seem to have been very sensitive to those differences. that’s also why the colors puritans tended to wear seem uncharacteristically bright to our modern eye—black was such a rich and expensive color that it would be inappropriate to wear to anything other than a portrait sitting, but the colors orange and kendall green were deeply humble in their origins

[tabellae-rex-in-sui]

I know that compared to today, a lot of 18c writing seems romantic/sexual when it was just how friends would write each other. But I'm sorry, Voltaire takes Being Gay with the Homies to a new level. He even writes the suggestive parts in Italian like he did in actually erotic letters to Madame Denis...

"Je joins les sentiments de la plus tendre reconnaissance à un attachement d'environ quarante années, mais j'ay des passions malheureuses et la jouissance de l'objet aimé m'est interditte par ordre du médecin. Si votre belle imagination trouve quelque tournure pour que je puisse bacciar vi la mano quand vous irez à Montpellier ce serait pour moy l'heure du berger. E perche no? Un gran Re m'ha bacciato la mano, a me, si, la brutta mano, per incitar mi a rimanere nel suo palazzo d'Alcina, ed io bacciero la vostra bella mano con un piu grande e saporito piacere. Ah! signore amabile, signore cortese e bravo, la vita si perde, si consuma et la speranza ancora si distrugge."

— 7 September 1753, Voltaire to le Duc de Richelieu

[TR: "I combine the feelings of the most tender gratitude to an attachment of about forty years, but I have unfortunate passions and the pleasures of the beloved object is forbidden to me by order of the doctor. If your beautiful imagination finds some twist so that I can kiss your hand when you go to Montpellier, that would be the hour of lovers for me. Why not? A great King has kissed my hand, me, yes, this ugly hand, to incite me to remain in his palace in Alcina, and I kissed your beautiful hand with a more grand and tasty pleasure. Ah! amiable lord, courteous and good lord, life is lost, is consumed and hope is still destroyed."]

I italicized that parts that were in Italian

And here's what "l'heure du berger" meant....

Voltaire, do you want us to think you blew Richelieu? Cuz you're making it sound like you blew Richelieu. My guy, whyyy did you write kiss your hand in Italian

[kleinecharlotte]

Art History Meme [1/6] Themes or Series or Subjects ↳ Rose Windows

[swallowtail-ageha]

Do you want a spicy, queer, kinky book with canonical intersex characters and cougars and a plot that will keep you on edge? Well, i have the perfect book for you! The 120 Days of Sodom is a page-turner that will keep you on the edge of your seat,

[heavensenthousepet]

you learn something new everyday. unless you're a historian. then you learn something old

[amphibious-thing]

anyway I think that we should celebrate d'Eon for manipulating and blackmailing the King of France into affirming her gender and also buying her a whole new wardrobe of women's clothes

[sclappin]

After three weeks of back-and-forth and a bit of confusion at the local print shop, I'm pleased to announce that June postcards for Postcard of the Month Club over on Patreon have gone out!

If you aren't a member of the PotMC tier, but would like to get this lovely group of well-dressed late-18th-century dancers anachronistically celebrating Pride, sign up before the end of the month, and they will be mailed to your home (or any address you provide me with) along with a brief handwritten note.

[amphibious-thing]

my favourite part of pride month is the increase of posts about queer history that get half the facts wrong

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[holythefirm-deactivated20230530]

Old writers used to be like ohhhh geeee i hope no one finds my private letters. ohhhhh my little letters they’re so beautifully written and personal i hope no one gets a hold of my big stack of personal letters ouhhh