NB! · Mores · Pop Culture · Humour
In fashion: fur capes, feathered hats and muffs. Out of fashion: kitchen aprons, threadbare headscarves and mob caps. Mark this well
Mores · Society
The last legal burning of a woman for witchcraft in Europe took place in Switzerland in 1787. A burning of a woman is known to have occurred in Poland in 1793, but that one was already illegal.
Archive · Faith · Mores · Society
In Rus', blasphemers were burnt locked inside a wooden log cabin. In the Law Code (Sobornoye Ulozheniye) of 1649, burning for blasphemy was set down in the following form: “Should any man of another faith, of whatever creed, or even a Russian, utter blasphemy against the Lord God and
NB! · Archive · Mores · Humour
1889: the great cities are lit by electric lamps, the food industry employs pasteurisation, and women are buying CORSETS from mail-order catalogues!!! Well, why not? It is convenient and, above all, progressive!
Books · Moscow · Observations · Mores · Humour
Muscovites love to lock their doors. Thousands of grand front entrances are boarded up from the inside, and hundreds of thousands of citizens creep into their flats by the back stairs. The year 1918 is long past, the very notion of a "raid on a flat" has grown
Archaeology · The East · Observations · Mores · Society
I found in the Middle Assyrian Laws of the 2nd millennium BC several important norms of a city community that would fit the Slutsky affair perfectly. - If a man has raised his hand against a married woman and pawed her (literally "treated her as a child", that is,
NB! · Monarchies · Mores · People
Observations · Mores · Humour
An antiques agent has sent me a carriage; I ask Mother whether she might care to buy it. She replies: and pay tax on the carriage as well? Fair enough, but dispiriting(
NB! · Museums · Mores
NB! · Art · Mores · Humour
Mood: a fat, self-satisfied seventeenth-century child greedily devouring a sponge biscuit, seated in rich garments on a high-backed children's throne. A painting by John Ruskin's great-great-grandfather Farley Ruskin, 1620
Faith · Mores · People · Rome · Humour
Pope Pietro Barbo wished to take the name Formosus II, from formosus, "beautiful, handsome". On the advice of older friends, however, he chose the more neutral Paul II. Long before his papacy Pietro Barbo had earned the nickname Our Lady of Mercy (Maria Pietissima) for weeping when he
Mores · People
The Celebrated Female Pirates of the Eighteenth Century: Mary Read, Known as Mark Read, and Anne Bonny Met at Sea. Mary Read was raised as a boy from birth: her mother concealed the illegitimate daughter from the family of her late husband by passing her off as a son who