If you’re reading this…
go write three sentences on your current writing project.
# my favourite part about this post # is that nowhere does it say to reblog this # but we’re all reblogging it # because if we have to suffer # so do other writers
F u c k
Oh damn–
(via @ave-aria) @puppetmaster55 PUPPET STOP REBLOGGING THIS YOU’RE MAKING ME BE PRODUCTIVE.
(via raychleadele)
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has trouble remembering developmental milestones. I put these together, but can’t take credit for any of the photography. Hope someone finds them helpful!
This is very useful to me i have absolutely no gauge for how old children are and what they can typically do at what ages
I’ve been on Tumblr too long I was definitely expecting this to turn into some existentialist meme
(via faireladypenumbra)
Anyway, if you read marriage certificates from church records, a full 85% of first marriages for young women were around 18-19 years old. The rest skewed higher, into the early twenties, with only a few being below that age and only one in a thousand was younger than 16.
The age of puberty has declined over the centuries as girls get better nutrition, as well, so throughout the middle ages the age at which a girl could expect her first period was around 16, where modern girls often get it much younger.
The idea that women in earlier ages were married and mothers in their early teens is a myth. Marriages of children were usually only between noble families, and made for political reasons, or creepy old bastards who wanted a child-wife and could get away with it because they were rich and powerful. They often would point to the fact that the Roman elite did the same thing as justification. The Romans, of course, would point to the Greeks doing the same thing as justification, the Greeks pointed at the Assyrians, and so on back through the ages.
It was considered disgusting by normal people then and still is.
This myth is still brought out and touted by sick fuckers. Know it for what it is; a falsehood.
And EVEN among the nobility marriages at such a young age were a much rarer occasion than those apologists would make you believe.
Let’s look an an egregious example, Henry the bloody VIII:
First marriage:
He was 18, Katharine of Aragon was 23.
Second marriage:
He was 40/41, Anne Boleyn, depending on which theory you believe, was anywhere between 24 to 32.
Third marriage:
He was 44, Jane Seymour was 28.
Fourth marriage:
He was 48, Anne of Cleves was 25
Fifth marriage:
He was 48, Catherine Howard, depending on which source you believe, was between 17-22. And yes, people at the time actually were squicked out by this age difference. And rightly so.
Sixth marriage:
He was 51, Catherine Parr was 31.
Even the most notorious LECHER and WIFE MURDERER in history did not marry teenagers in at least 5 if not 6 out of 6 marriages.
And here’s another Tudor tidbit, both Henry VII and VIII knew how traumatic and damaging it is for women marrying/having children too young. Henry VII’s mother was married at 12 and gave birth to Henry VII at 13. It caused so much damage and trauma that she never had another child after him despite being married three times.
So yes CUT THAT SHIT OUT. Teenage girls are NOT adults and anyone preying on them is pure evil.
YOU
I LIKE YOU
And as for the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville to King Edward IV, she was 27 at the time. He? Was 22.
She had been married before, and did marry young…at the age of sixteen or seventeen, to Sir John Gray, who was about five years her senior.
@systlin This is good information, but do you have a source for the information about how most marriages back in the day were not actually usually from a younger age? I tried Googling it but I can only find things talking about modern day issues.
Well, if you don’t want to spend months crawling through digitized copies of marriage records preserved in church archives from the 12th through 18th centuries from England, Italy, Germany, France, ect (which you can do, and it will show you I’m right) you can go read “ Medieval Households” by David Herlihy, Harvard University Press, 1985. He did the archive crawling for you.
Also Peter Laslett’s book “The World We Have Lost”, where he details over a thousand marriage certificates, and he dug through many more in the writing of the work.
Wait. I am spanish. Do they actually think henry/enrique VII married fucking katherin/catalina de Aragón as a teenager?
You know we see films about this in school and every one is pretty much adult there, both fisically and in the story.
There’s this…really weird trend in a lot of pseudo-European fantasy/ ‘historical’ books to have girls marry like…really young, to vastly older dudes. Like at about 13, getting married off to like 30 year olds. And then say “Well that’s what it was like back then.”
(Sideyes G.R.R.M)
And…no. No it wasn’t. That’s gross. England was creeped TF out when Henry VIII married Catherine Howard when she was between 17 and 22 and he was 48 as stated above, and rightly so.
All of this is excellent, and there is one thing I would add:
When you DID have these super-young marriages between nobility, it was more or less the same thing we do today when we scream “DIBS!” over who gets the TV remote. You might have a 13-year-old lord marrying a 14-year-old girl, but they weren’t expected to actually act as husband and wife, not yet. He had schooling to finish, she had to learn how to run a household. The union was purely political and not to be consummated until later–you know, at a point when they were 18 or 19 and she could carry a child without dying of it and he could actually support a wife.
I think one of the major causes of many misconceptions like this is because people have been basing their preceptions on life in the past off of works of FICTION written in the past. When I was studying Early Modern literature in undergrad, this topic was brought up regarding the presence of sexual abuse. There were many plays and what not that implied things such as this, however the scene in the play WAS CONSIDERED SHOCKING to people back then too. It would be like someone 500 years from now watching some grimdark noire mopey antihero cop drama in a city of sin, and then thinking that it demonstrates what the everyday life of today’s world is. No one in this thread is saying things like that NEVER happened back then, it was just… not as common as historical fiction and fiction written 500 years ago might have you believe. As OP mentioned, historical documents from the time have far fewer child marriages and sexual abuse than literary works from the time do.
Rebloging for A+ history.
I think the best metaphor for this sort of lazy, ahistorical bullshit I’ve ever heard (that I sadly can’t find the source for) is “Imagine if someone dug up records of Donald Trump and Woody Allen and decided they were the norm for society from 1700-2100″.
in which tumblr heckin learns itself a hajnal line
Definitely a lot of treating the past of western Europe like it’s the only past that exists.
Well, I was specifically talking about the modern fantasy genre, most of which is set in a ‘pseudo medieval Europe’ kind of world. So, yes, this post is focusing on western Europe, because that’s the location and time period most often drawn on by writers responsible for the sorta bullshit I’m talking about in this post.
I was going to bring up the “young marriages were basically on paper” thing and then saw I’d already done it.
I have no memory of this place.
How old is this post?!
Old. I definitely reblogged it on my old account at least once.
(via geekhyena)
people talk all the time about “primal instincts” and it’s usually about violence or sexual temptations or something, but your humanity comes with a lot of different stuff that we do without really thinking about, that we do without being told to or prompted to
your average human comes pre-installed with instincts to:
- Befriend
- Tell story
- Make Thing
- Investigate
- Share knowledge
- Laugh
- Sing
- Dance
- Empathize with
- Create
we are chalk full of survival instincts that revolve around connecting to others (dog-shaped others, robot-shaped, sometimes even plant-shaped) and making things with our hands
your primal instincts are not bathed in blood- they are layered in people telling stories to each other around a fire over and over and putting devices together through trial and error over and over and reaching for someone and something every moment of the way
(via toobertpoondert)
(Source: agarthanguide, via writrs)
🔪 BITE BACK 🔪
The election results are in and they say we live in Hell but we’re still fighting
(via interstellarvagabond)
Can’t reblog this enough.
Not the way I figured it would turn out, but I learned something here.
This is called Trophic Cascade in ecology.
(Source: babyanimalgifs, via carry-on-my-wayward-wuffles)
beauty and the beast but reverse, i kiss the love of my life and she turns into a sick fucking monster and it’s awesome
shrek
No, fuck you, post un-cancelled
This is good shit.
A girl is born to loving parents. A king and queen, a noble and his wife, an inventor and his spouse… same story, different versions, and all. are. true. Tragedy strikes the mother– though god, why always the mother? Let it be the father this time. He dies; we need not explain how. The stories never grant their dead women such courtesy.
Her husband dead, the woman remarries. She marries as a clever political maneuver, to keep her throne secure; she marries for new love and the promise that her daughter will have another parent to be loved by; she marries out of desperation for security in a world that grants her little without a ring on her finger.
She is betrayed. The new husband, the step-father, does little to deserve his new titles. He is cruel, he is neglectful, he is absent. Perhaps his wife does not survive, or if she does, she is reduced to a shadow of her old self. This, too, is an old story with many versions.
Then the witch. The woman uncontrolled, the woman powerful, the woman terrible. She comes and she brings fear and magic. The magic is change.
“I give you a gift,” she says, or else, “I curse you.” Perhaps she says, “I curse you,” to the step-father, but to the daughter this is a gift. Words can mean more than one thing; that is their very great power.
“I curse you, girl,” she says. “When you receive true love’s first kiss, you will become a monster. You will be huge and terrible, a threat to all. You will have terror in your face and death in your hands.”
And the girl, she is afraid. But this is not new. She has been afraid for years.
Perhaps she finally flees to the forest, terrified of both her step-father and now herself. She swears off the company of men. Lost and hungry, she thinks she will die, but she is rescued by a company of women with untamed hair and pickaxes in iron-palmed hands. Seven become eight. She finds a home amidst these women. She shares a bed until her own bunk can be built, but by the time the new bed is framed, it isn’t necessary. It’s dangerous for the cursed girl to feel so tenderly towards another person, but this is not a man she is beginning to love, so… surely that’s safe, isn’t it? Surely true love’s kiss exists only between a man and wife; after all, that’s what the stories always said. So one day, she lets herself fall, and they kiss.
Or– perhaps, after the curse, she remains in her home. Cruel as this home and family is, it’s not so simple to just leave. People who say this have never experienced it. She continues to live in the shadows of her own house, flinching at shouts and obeying orders. She scrubs, she cooks, she launders– but in the small private moments, she is gentle still. She feeds the mice and scatters cornmeal for the birds. She coaxes a whipped stray dog to the kitchen doorstep, day by day, giving it food and water and all the time it needs to believe that her hand will not strike it. Slowly, it comes to trust her. The broken tail starts to wag; the sad eyes brighten. And one day, as it lies curled up in her lap in an ash-streaked hearth, the dog lifts its head and timidly licks her cheek.
The curse breaks. The curse breaks. The curse breaks. It always does. It always will. Change is inevitable: that’s the story’s promise.
All this time, the girl has been afraid of becoming a monster. She does not want to hurt others like she has been hurt. But she has been cursed, and now kissed. She grows. She becomes huge, and therefore terrible (isn’t that always the case with women?). She can no longer hide in corners, or be hidden away in locked rooms. She is twice as tall as her step-father, and five times as strong.
She is powerful.
“My, what big hands you have,” the woodswoman whispers, marvelling, her pickaxe-callused fingers wrapped around the girl’s. “What strong arms you have. What long legs you have. I’ve never seen a gem as wonderful and unique as you.”
“Kill the beast!” shouts the step-father, who tripped over the stray dog in the courtyard– and his daughter roars “NO,” rising over the garden wall from where she has been sitting all afternoon feeding her birds and mice. She was afraid of her strength with their fragile bodies in her hands, but now in her rage all she feels is brave.
As the witch said, it is true that her face brings terror to those who look on it. At least, to those who look on it when she is enraged. An angry giant is terrifying to most, but especially to those who have earned her wrath. The only sad thing about this is that the girl had to be made dangerous before her tormentors finally learned respect for her rage and fear.
She stays in the forest, or she goes to the forest. One way or another, the cursed girl ends up there, in the wild, outside of society. Forests are places of power, of un-making and re-making, of disruption and interruption, where rules change and queer things are common. All the stories say this. Forests are for witches, and giant women, and all other monsters.
“She steals babies,” people whisper in town. (But the truth is that it’s not stealing if desperate mothers leave their babies in the forest loam, swaddled against the cold as well as they can be, with notes begging for their protection. Please, I cannot care for this child. Please, he’ll kill her. Please, nobody can know. Please, she’s my firstborn. Please take her like you took the whipped dog, the half-drowned cats, the beaten horse.)
“She kills huntsmen!” people cry in town. (But the truth is that these men were hunting women, runaways and lost girls, or the woodswomen of the mine. Eight have become ten, fourteen, twenty-five. The cursed girl has learned to swing both a pickaxe and a club the size of a tree. She will not let harm come to the new family she has found.)
“She is a beast!” people howl in town. “She has hard, rough skin like scales! She has hair all over! She has a hooked nose! She is dusky, brown, black as night! She is lustful, she is angry, she is unrepentant!” (The truth is, these are not things that make someone a monster.)
The girl knows now that the curse is a gift. Words can mean more than one thing; that is their very great power. Words are magic, and magic is change, and change– thank goodness– is inevitable.
(via dragonsatmidnight)
D&D character sheets for players with dyslexia
Originated by @axellenobody in this reddit thread - “I have a few players in my games that have various degrees of Dyslexia, and one of them - u/Axelle123 - worked with me to make a Character Sheet that’s helped several of my players read and comprehend what’s going on on the character sheets…”
Personally I think that these sheets look exciting and fun to play even if you don’t have dyslexia, everyone should use ‘em!
(Also, check out the use of Comic Sans, a notably dyslexia-friendly font, in action!)
(via sapphireswimming)