Below you’ll find links to interesting history-related articles I’ve read recently, some Easter-adjacent folklore that inspired me to create a little stop-motion animation, and an item about the history of writing/language. Enjoy!
History writing
- Despite the commonly believed etymology of the term, it turns out that in no stage or screen version of ‘Gaslight’ is there an exchange between husband and wife about the dimming of lights in which he tells her she’s imagining it in an attempt to drive her insane.
- 18th Century naval warfare inadvertently saved the papers, and the story, of an international woman wine trader from London.
- A fascinating insight into the practice of Tudor-era miniature portraits and the contemporary experts who decode them.
- More fascinating insights, this time into ancient prayers, charms, and folk remedies associated with pregnancy.
- Meet Wallace Kirsop, the now-92-year-old man who pioneered the study of rare books in Australia and helped establish the concept of special collections in its institutions.
History
Did you grow up with any superstitions around eggshells? From at least as early as the 1st Century AD – as described by Pliny the Elder in his ‘Naturae Historiae’ (‘Natural History’), for example – some people have associated eggshells with a fear of spells and curses, which made them “break the shells […] immediately after eating them, or else pierce them with the spoon that they have used”. In the 16th Century, Reginald Scot was describing in his ‘The Discoverie of Witchcraft’ how believers attributed to witches, among other nefarious traits, the ability to “saile in an egge shell […] through and under the tempestuous seas”. By at least the early 1800s, the two themes had combined into a belief in various places across the UK that egg eaters must crush their shells to prevent witches stealing them to use as boats. In 1934, Elizabeth Fleming wrote a poem about it, called ‘Eggshells’, the first verse of which I’ve animated here:
Writing
If you could time travel, how far back do you think you could go before you stopped being able to understand English? Colin Gorrie created an experiment for you to find out.
