#history questions

[qqueenofhades]

Hello, you said you were open to historical questions. If you don't mind, I have an incredibly specific one: during the High Middle Ages, in Europe, how did businesses advertise themselves? Town criers? Signs? Free samples? Word of mouth? All of the above? If I was a pilgrim, how would I find a place to stay the night?

If we're thinking specifically about lodging, it would depend very much on who you were and why you were traveling. You would most likely have friends or extended family in the place you were going, and you were more likely to stay in a private home rather than an inn, since medieval innkeepers (unlike modern hotels) were not obliged to offer you a room if they didn't like you for whatever reason. You would also have to share it with several strangers and possibly be extorted, since there were plenty of unscrupulous innkeepers who liked to charge additional fees for every extra service (such as a boy to remove your boots or a stable for your horse). So if you could avoid it, you might want to look for other options.

As such, your best bet for overnight room and board (at least if you were a man) would be the local monastery. Not only did this have the advantage of being fairly easy to find, it would also be free, since many monastic orders viewed it as a religious imperative to take in guests, and there were specific monks who were assigned especially to care for travelers. You might offer a few alms to the monastery or attend a prayer with the monks for the evening, or some other way to demonstrate your gratitude. Since long-distance individual travel purely for pleasure (with notable exceptions such as Ibn Battuta) was considerably uncommon in the Middle Ages, you would not often have to worry about places you didn't know at all.

However, that's where the pilgrimage comes in! Much like modern package holidays, medieval pilgrims often traveled in a large group under the organization and/or supervision of a company, they were highly structured and organized, and they had plenty of guidebooks to help them know where to go, where to stay (and what to avoid), the proper rituals to do and religious sights to see, and so forth. See for example the Codex Calixtinus (also known as the Codex Compostellus), which is a twelfth-century guide to the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route in Spain. Sometimes called the "first travelers' guidebook," it was part of the increasingly elaborate pilgrimage network to cities such as Rome, Jerusalem, and Canterbury (which along with Santiago de Compostela were the major pilgrimage destinations). So if you were a pilgrim traveling through unfamiliar lands, you would absolutely not have to worry about finding a place to stay for the night on your own; there would be your fellow travelers, guidebooks, word of mouth, advice from your local clergy (and whenever in doubt, as noted, hit up the local monastery). The Canterbury Tales are famously a group of fictional pilgrims who are all staying together and sharing their experiences. In the later Middle Ages, you would also have detailed personal memoirs like The Itineraries of William Wey and international banking institutions such as that offered by the Templars, to make it easier to pay for travel goods and services.

If you're interested in reading more about travel in the Middle Ages, especially as related to pilgrimage (which was undertaken both for sincere religious reasons and a desire to see the world), I recommend A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages by Anthony Bale, which investigates which medieval people traveled, where they went, what their experiences were, and how they negotiated basic practical realities such as finding a place to stay overnight. I don't know if this has answered your question per se about advertising, but it has hopefully pointed out that staying somewhere overnight was usually not a matter of individually paying for a room in a third-party commercial establishment. And if you were a pilgrim, you would definitely not have to figure that out by yourself, since it would be arranged with your pilgrimage group, whoever was supervising the trip, and the guidebooks written for people exactly like you.

[blueberry-bubbles130]

What would you say the ideal traits for a successful medieval feudalist monarch are?

For my ml au, Chloe uses the miraculous of Sacrifice and Devotion to transform into “Princess” after she loses the role of Queen Bee. Now “Princess” is a step down from Queen Bee in what Chloe initially wanted power/title wise. But in the story, it’s different. “Princess” reflective of the kwamii’s powers she using, the user that came before her and Chloe’s motive for using it is supposed to be the Ideal Monarch. Perfection in every form. A true embodiment of Sacrifice and Devotion.

Obviously though “Princess” is an ideal. An ideal fuelled by Chloe’s motive, a literal god placing aspects into her mind and people’s desires for a good ruler. That means there’s got to be a realistic outcome for trying to achieve this.

I want both Gabriel and Andre to be realistic outcomes for trying to achieve (I’ll talk about Darkblade later) Gabriel is the corruption of that ideal turned into well….Hawkmoth. He’s become corrupt and is causing great instability in Paris with magic. Whereas Andre’s outcome of trying to achieve the ideal is pushing himself to a limit that he can no longer physically handle. He’s becoming very physically ill as a result and prone to manipulation from others, which is causing further instability in Paris. (Audrey’s also facing the same issue, but without the politics part) With her parents declining health being Chloe’s motive for becoming “Princess”

I just want to know what people personally think would make a good medieval monarch so I can try and fit those aspects into “Princess” to make that ideal a bit more developed.

[odessadenby]

There's something I really want to know and I hope someone's niche historical research has discovered the answer.

How did people understand static electric shock before electricity was fully discovered? Did they believe some deity was lightly smiting them? I must know.

[odetofury]

Question because idk how to google this and i'm pretty sure someone on here will know so you know that medieval art style that looks almost cartoonish that the monks drew in the margins of books? What is that called?

This style

[embraceanewmaneachnight]

hey history buffs specifically of Native American history, are there any cases of white European settlers integrating into Native American tribes?

this question has always scratched my brain and I don’t know how to phrase this question in a way google understands.

[rachel-sylvan-author]

"How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History's Deadliest Catastrophes" by Cody Cassidy

Guys!! I read "The Nature of Fragile Things" about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake two days ago, recommended it yesterday. I read this yesterday to recommend today and!! It teaches how to survive the 1906 earthquake! Yay book corroboration! 😊 It's so random but it made me super happy and I hope it makes you happy too!!

Thank you @readingbeagle for recommending this! It was fun! ❤️

[perrysoup]

History Question!

It’s shown in cartoons to an exaggerated extent, and it’s seen here. The butt area is HUGE. Why????

Is the French royalty again….i swear to god if it’s Louis’ fault…

Green Hostess Dress

c. 1889

Label: A. Félix Breveté / 15. Faub. St. Honoré Paris

Albany Institute of History & Art

[aroaceleovaldez]

i had a thought of "do people not know what AUs are anymore?" and then i remembered nobody explains fandom stuff to new people anymore so it is entirely plausible people genuinely don't know what AUs are and nobody has explained it to them, so for today's lucky 10,000:

"AU" stands for "Alternate Universe" or "Alternative Universe" (same difference) and is basically any thought scenario for a fandom that isn't canon and can't fit within the canon universe. If it takes place in the canon universe but something is notably different, that is typically what's known as a "Canon divergent AU," because it diverges from canon.

an AU can be absolutely anything. There's a couple of widespread pan-fandom au scenarios that often get thrown around, like coffee shop aus, genderbend aus, hanahaki aus (hanahaki is a whole thing in itself i'd recommend researching on your own), etc. One you might hear sometimes is "crossover AU" which is when you have characters from one fandom interacting with characters from another.

You can have as many aus as you want. They can be whatever you want and you can do whatever you want in them. It's a sandbox for you to play around in and explore how things would be different or how the characters would act in those circumstances or environments. Maybe they have different relationships with each other. Maybe they behave slightly differently. Or you can just say "Okay, [x] is true. How did they get here? How would things have to be different for this to occur?" which can also be fun.

If you are ever confused about why people ship something that seems completely out of the blue or doesn't make sense to you in the canon setting, there's a good chance they like it in an AU setting! Not everything everybody is interacting with is necessarily the canon! Not everybody wants things to exist in canon and just want to explore playing dolls in a different sandbox and that's okay. And their sandbox might look a lot different than yours, and that's also okay. You have the freedom to make your sandbox whatever you please. Do whatever you want forever. Get funky with it. AUs are fun.

Okay that's my schpeal. everybody go have fun and play nice now.

[reality-detective]

1963 Refrigerator 🤔

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[qqueenofhades]

For the history questions, what historical period has given you the most inspiration for your writing/muses?

I feel like it's a cop-out if I say "hmm, all of them," and this will end up just being a long recap of all my various projects over the years, but a) fuck it, this is my blog, I can talk about my own stuff if I want to, and b) there have indeed been Many, both fic and original. I usually pick settings for historical/historical fantasy AUs that I already know and want to write about, so:

The Lightbearers (Once Upon a Time) and Starlight & Strange Magic (Timeless) are both 19th-century Victorian England/Europe/steampunk, one in the 1850s and the other in the 1880s, with lots of magic and misadventure and so forth. You can tell that I was really into steampunk around 10 years ago (it was Formative, okay) and there were plenty of opportunities to do fun things with the historical setting and real-life personalities (the scene of Flynn breaking into Buckingham Palace to spy on Queen Victoria and William Gladstone remains a favorite). There is also my massive The Swan and Crossbones series (OUAT/Black Sails, two fics, 800k words), which is set in the 18th-century Caribbean, Golden Age of Piracy, and pre-Revolutionary America and is a retelling of Treasure Island + family saga + multi-generational/multi-character/multi-source material historical fiction, wherein I both wrote 800k words and did a shitton of extra research in the middle of getting a PhD. Don't ask me why I did this either, but I still re-read them, especially The Rose and Thorn (the second installment in the series) for my own pleasure.

My All Souls Timeless trilogy, following the source material, involved general historian/academia shenanigans and time travel to Elizabethan England, which was lots of fun to research and write about, even if I otherwise tend to think that the Tudors are often overdone. One of my most popular fics and best shorter-form (only 65k words...) historical/period pieces is deo volente (lux aeterna) for The Old Guard, which takes the crusades as its general starting point and thematic thread to explore religion, faith, immortality, power, war, violence, love, queerness, and other such things. Another popular fic of mine that spanned 600 years of history (starting in the 14th century) and explored various periods in detail is my Sandman fic and in the waking world we wait and want, with a particular emphasis on queer history. (You will find that crops up often in my stuff, regardless of the setting.) We also have why draw me to that promised land (Shadow and Bone), set in the 1980s Soviet Union (my boast for the accuracy of this fic, based on my previous studies in Russian/Soviet history, is that someone told me they learned more from this fic than an entire semester of a university class, which is not entirely good because I then had many questions about their professor, but there you have it).

When it comes to original novels, I started off also 10+ years ago with medieval England, with the The Lion and the Rose series and others. I am fond of this one because it was what got me into medieval history in the first place and because even now, it still sells fairly steadily and gives me a couple bucks in royalties every month. My newest book, The Empire of Bones, is based (loosely) on my fic The Key of Solomon and basically has everything I possibly wanted to cram into a fantasy historical setting, from anywhere and any time at all. Thus we have the Christian-era Roman Empire, an Islamic Carthage, the Byzantines, Imperial China, Russian Jews and Ukrainian Cossacks, the Mali Empire, Celtic Britain, so forth and etcetera, etcetera. So as noted, if it looks interesting, I will find a way to throw it and the kitchen sink in somewhere, and I have the issue that whenever I read a book about a new place or period, I go "hmm, I should figure out how to write something gay about this." Alas.

[sunflour39]

Why don’t men wear dressing gowns anymore?

[salazariesalome]

I'm reading Gone with the Wind, I'm only halfway through, and I have one question for anyone who knows: Is it true that some slaves stayed with their owners? and those who did looked down on the free ones?

I guess it must be fake, propaganda by a racist southerner, but I guess you never know, specially considering how little the reconstruction actually did for the freed slaves.

[tudorblogger]

‘The Rest is History: History’s Most Curious Questions Answered’ by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction – History Published: 2023 Format: Paperback Rating: ★★★★ I really enjoyed this romp through history. As usual with me, however, some of the jokes went over my head and I had to look a couple up which was a little annoying for me reading. But it was a great read, not too meaty on topics which were new to me which was good. There was a lot of really interesting…

[ladyroyalkiwi]

‘No other movement of religious protest…has been so widespread or lasting in its effects’ (Dr Euan Cameron)

Hi tumblers,

This is a quote from Dr Euan Cameron's book, 'The European Reformation' (2012) which argues that the reformation of the Christian religion demonstrated how necessary it was for change to take place within the Catholic Church. Too many people were withdrawn from the Catholic religion and they needed a new branch of Christianity to be preached. The ‘Lutheran Reformation’ was the beginning of the Protestant movement throughout Europe which made Luther's preaching extremely important to the history of the Christian religion. This Protestant movement can be compared with Zwingli and Calvin's own protestant preaching thus demonstrating the Lutheran branch as being more effective to society with its growing popularity over Catholicism. I think that the Lutheran movement was a very important step to the development of Protestantism however, I believe Luther, Zwingli and Calvin all took different approaches to sharing their message therefore, they are all important figures to Protestantism spreading in Europe. Luther began the preaching outside of Catholicism in 1517 which created the path for Protestantism however, he did not create the true meaning of being a Protestant believer on his own. What do you think?

from

LRK

[buscaserebuscas]