The space, last frontier? No matter, the last frontier is to know more about ourselves, which is why in recent years a production of history books has taken hold with a very different approach to the classic one, because yes, we can know everything about kings and great battles, empires and trade, but do we really know everything? It is already curious that so many books have been written about Joan of Arc and none have stopped at how she managed during her menstruation, for example. Knowing more about the past offers us a lot of information about the present, and knowing little leads us to the fact that it is mainly the cinema and now the series that fill those gaps. These books put things in their place.
CHASTITY BELTS? NANAY
Katherine Harvey amends Hollywood and Netflix by getting into the bed, excuse me, of some men and women who were not as wild in sexual matters as they have made us see. In The Fires of Lust. A history of sex in the Middle Ages (Attic of books) clarifies that there is no proof of the existence of chastity belts, the conjugal debt was also applied to them and yes, some doctors believed that virginity could be diagnosed examining the urine, angelic. Sexual relations were regulated, but the explanations that were given to, for example, establish what the admitted sexual positions were, are most imaginative, like a woman who lay on her side next to her husband and gave birth to a son “with the curved spine and lame on one foot.”
Pearls abound like this text from Liber poenitentiales, a guide for confessors (there were already templates): “Priest: Have you committed unnatural lust? Penitent: Quite a bit. Priest: Even with a man? Penitent: Quite a bit. Priest: With a cleric or a layman? Penitent: With both. Priest: With married or single lay people? Penitent: With both. (…) Priest: How long did you sin with them? Penitent: Seven years”. Fornication was not a crime in Scandinavia if the woman did it “to protest that her family had not found her a husband.”
PUTIN’S GRANDFATHER COOK
The Polish journalist Witold Szablowski has toured the former Soviet republics, has spoken with people who still remember the great famine executed by Stalin and has shared vodka and stew with different ethnic groups from the extinct USSR to build this culinary story, but above all political and social , from imperial Russia to the Ukrainian war. Russia from the kitchen. Knife, saucepan and fork to raise an empire (Oberon) tells from the menu at the table of Nicholas II, whose excesses already anticipated what was going to happen, to the biography of the cook Spiridón, Putin’s grandfather, who did not work as chef of Lenin and Stalin as the hagiographies claim, hopefully it served them in some dacha. It also explains how army cooks managed in Afghanistan or Chernobyl, and an unforgettable character, the legendary chef Viktor Belyaev, who was director of all the Kremlin kitchens and suffered a heart attack that forced him to resign when he arrived. Putin to power. Each chapter concludes with related recipes.
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE THAMES DOESN’T STAY ON THE THAMES
Lara Maiklem has spent years looking for all kinds of objects in the mud left by the tides in the Thames rivers, but as she considers herself a collector rather than a treasure hunter, she prefers those that tell a story, although in reality they all do, from a humble button (which could be from the 17th century) to a coin that could date back to the Romans. Because of reading Mudlarking. History and objects lost in the River Thames (Captain Swing), an attractive hybrid between a travel book and walks, a story and an essay, it follows that at all times people have disposed of what they were not interested in by throwing it into the river, without counting on him to return it, the object and the story that accompanies it.
What moves a person to throw a wedding band into the water? How can a castration device from Roman times end up in the mud? Finding a material that was not Europe’s own will tell us about trade with other continents, while old shoes work, according to the author, as “a fascinating medium for social exploration”: what were they made with? What lives did their owners have? like the well-preserved little shoe with the tip worn out by the use six hundred years ago of a child of about five and long forgotten.
AND WHAT HAPPENS IN THE BRIDGERTONS DOESN’T REALLY HAPPEN
No, not only were there no colored nobles in Regency England, but it took at least three generations for a person who was fortunate in economic or military terms but not from birth to aspire (in their grandchildren) to enter the elite. Catherine Curzon pits the true story against the demands of the script in The Real World of the Bridgertons. True Stories of Regency High Society (Main of the Books). Very interesting, the detailed explanations about what a lady could (and even more so what she couldn’t) do, what happened in the bedrooms and what happened when it shouldn’t have happened… Netflix won’t tell you how women dealt with their periods back then, but the book does: suppositories, among others, were used, some ancestors of modern tampons consisting of a little piece of wood a few centimeters long that was wrapped in linen and on which a hanging rope was sewn. Nor was it that pregnant women, as the delivery date approached, were forced to fast so that the baby would not grow too large (or to vomit what they had eaten).
A ‘SAVE ME’ FOR THE ROMANS
“There the others say what they say about you, well they have to speak”. Cicero already warned it in the 1st century BC, people talk, and they did it also in Roman times, of which we are only pale descendants. In Crónica rosa rosae: scandals in classical Rome (Larousse) Paco Álvarez makes a documented and very entertaining review of the rumors that circulated about Julius Caesar, Cleopatra or Claudius and that in many cases have come down to us as history, no matter how Most of them have not been able to be verified, such as that Julius Caesar, who was then nineteen years old, had to make certain concessions, to put it finely, to King Nicomedes to provide him with a fleet, or that Caesar was actually a womanizer, as Suetonius was releasing, according to which in a parade after the Gallic War the soldiers were singing “Citizens, watch your women: we bring the bald adulterer”.
LOOK CAREFULLY AT THAT EURO COIN
It is curious that the great cathedrals, Gothic or Romanesque, are now visited well lit, if we really want to get closer to art, we have to do it in another way, back to the basics. This is what Alberto Garín proposes in his Irreverent History of Art (The sphere of books). Rethinking art by looking at the stories that the artists wanted to tell with their works, visiting the cathedrals without those electric lights, to get into the skin of medieval man, “and only then can we understand the story they told through those temples : the lower space, that of men, sinners, is dark. Also look at the coins with different eyes, because “since Antiquity it is the closest way we have to understand how the State wants us to see it aesthetically”.
ARE YOU RUNNING BECAUSE THEY ARE CHASING YOU?
The subtitle reads The fascinating story behind our daily routines, and so it is. Miguel A. Delgado part in The custom deafens. The fascinating story behind our daily routines (Ariel) of a day in our daily life to look back and see how we got here. For example, the alarm clock rings and we look back not only at clocks, but at the same organization of time in Antiquity. The very act of running would be incomprehensible to our ancestors if it wasn’t about running away from something or going to look for it. A good way to examine history starting from what we take for granted.
THE BLACK OF THE AUSTRIAS IS TOO EXPENSIVE
Everything ends up referring to power and money, which amounts to the same thing. Dressing in clothes of a certain color was not (and is not) available to anyone, and not only the blues derived from lapis lazuli, even a color as supposedly easy as black has made a difference, such as the so-called Habsburg black. Felipe II and his followers wore it at court and in portraits, but not because they were ashen (which was also true), but because their hue was so deep, that it also did not turn gray over time, as was the case with other blacks, It responded to materials and techniques available only to them. Victoria Finlay has literally traveled the world to get closer to the manufacturers of colors, their use and meaning in Color. History of the chromatic palette (Captain Swing). We strongly recommend it.
