May 15, 2023 History The Dress Diary of Mrs. Anne Sykes By Kate Strasdin “Anna. Three dresses when in mourning for her mother. 1845.” Photograph by Kate Strasdin. In January 2016 I was given an extraordinary gift. Underneath brown paper that had softened with age and molded to the shape of the object within, I discovered a treasure almost two centuries old that revealed the life of one woman and her broader network of family and friends. It was a book, a ledger of sorts, covered in a bright magenta silk that was frayed along the edge so that a glimpse of its marbled cover was just visible. The shape of the book had distorted—it was narrow at the spine but expanded at the right edge to accommodate the contents, reminding me of my mum’s old recipe book, which had swelled over the years as newspaper cuttings and handwritten notes were added. This book, measuring some twelve and a half inches long by eight and a half inches across, contained pale blue pages, which were unlined and unmarked. As I carefully opened the front cover and looked at the first page, my breath caught: this was indeed a marvel. Carefully pasted in place were four pieces of fabric, three of them framed in decorative waxed borders—these were scraps of silk important enough to have been memorialized. Accompanying each piece of cloth was a small handwritten note inked in neat copperplate, including a name and a date: 1838. Read More
August 22, 2022 History Chateaubriand on Writing Memoir between Two Societies By François-René de Chateaubriand Charles Etienne Pierre Motte, The Surroundings of Dieppe, 1833, licensed under CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons. François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was born in Saint-Malo, on the northern coast of Brittany, the youngest son of an aristocratic family. After an isolated adolescence spent largely in his father’s castle, he moved to Paris not long before the revolution began. In 1791, he sailed for America but quickly returned to his home country, where he was wounded as a counterrevolutionary soldier, and then emigrated to England. The novellas Atala and René, published shortly after his return to France in 1800, made him a literary celebrity. Long recognized as one of the first French Romantics, Chateaubriand was also a historian, a diplomat, and a staunch defender of the freedom of the press. Today he is best remembered for his posthumously published Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. Sojourn in Dieppe—Two Societies Dieppe, 1836; revised in December 1846. You know that I have moved from place to place many times while writing these memoirs, that I have often described these places, spoken of the feelings they inspired in me, and retraced my memories, mingling the stories of my restless thoughts and sojourns with the story of my life. Read More
March 16, 2022 History A Memorial for Those Accused of Witchcraft By Olga Ravn Colors extracted, using a traditional recipe, from maritime sunburst lichen the author collected from the wildlife corridor along Ellebækstien in Køge. Fabrics from left to right, top to bottom: handwoven tussah and mulberry silk, wool, silk charmeuse, silk-rayon velvet, cotton, and linen. Photograph by Johan Rosenmunthe. A LOGBOOK TO REMEMBER 16 WOMEN OF WHOM 13 WERE BURNED ALIVE, TWO COMMITTED SUICIDE, AND ONE MANAGED TO ESCAPE, 1612–1615 AND 2021, REWRITTEN, GATHERED, DREAMED BY A WOMAN, AGE 34, THAT’S TO SAY ME, A STAR AMONG ALL THESE RESPIRING STARS WE CALL PEOPLE Johanne Tommesis, burned, August 24, 1612 Kirstine Lauridsdatter, burned, September 11, 1612 Mette Banghors, burned, December 7, 1612 Volborg Bødkers, escaped and convicted in absentia, June 7, 1613 Annike Christoffersdatter, burned, June 14, 1613 Anne Olufs, burned, June 26, 1613 Karen Eriks, suicide in prison, August 30, 1613 Maren Muremester, burned, 1613 Maren of Ringsbjerg, burned, 1613 Maren Bysvende, suicide in her well after receiving a summons to appear in court, 1613 Kirsten Væverkvinde, burned, 1613 Birgitte Rokkemager, burned, September 18, 1615 Else Holtug, burned, November 6, 1615 Mette Navns, burned, 1615 Johanne Muremester, burned, 1615 Magdalene, Søren Skrædder’s wife, burned, 1615 WHERE: Køge, Denmark Read More
December 21, 2021 History Fairy Fatale By Chantel Tattoli An illustration by the painter Natalie Frank for The Island of Happiness. One of Frank’s favorite tales is “The Green Serpent,” in which the prince is a snake, though only literally. “I love the image where you have to get into bed with this creature but you can’t look at him, and of course you look at him.” Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was born into a rich family in the fall of 1652. At thirteen, she was wed by her mother to the middle-aged Baron d’Aulnoy, who had purchased his title. Three months pregnant that same year, in the summer of 1666, she inked a jinx in the margins of a fifteenth-century religious play from their library: It has been almost 200 years since this book was made, and whoever will have this Book should know that it was mine and that it belongs to our house. Written in Normandie near Honfleur. Adieu, Reader, if you have my book and I don’t know you and you don’t appreciate what’s inside, I wish you ringworm, scabies, fever, the plague, measles, and a broken neck. May God assist you against my maledictions. Read More
November 29, 2021 History White Gods By Anna Della Subin Jose Chávez Morado mosaic mural El Retorno de Quetzalcóatl, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico of Mexico City. Photo by Eva Leticia Ortiz. “We were superior to the god who had created us,” Adam recalled not long before he died, age seven hundred. According to The Apocalypse of Adam, a Coptic text from the late first century CE, discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945, Adam told his son Seth that he and Eve had moved as a single magnificent being: “I went about with her in glory.” The fall was a plunge from unity into human difference. “God angrily divided us,” Adam recounted. “And after that we grew dim in our minds…” Paradise was a lost sense of self, and it was also a place that would appear on maps, wistfully imagined by generations of Adam’s descendants. In the fifteenth century, European charts located Eden to the east, where the sun rises—an island ringed by a wall of fire. With the coordinates in their minds, Europe’s explorers could envisage a return to wholeness, to transcendence, to the godhood that had once belonged to man. Read More
August 18, 2021 History What Is Drag, Anyway? By Martin Padgett Martin Padgett’s first book, A Night at the Sweet Gum Head, tells the story of Atlanta’s queer liberation movement through the alternating biographies of two gay men, runaway–turned–drag queen John Greenwell and activist Bill Smith. In the excerpt below, an underage Greenwell sneaks into a bar and discovers drag. Another Believer, Eagle Portland interior, 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Huntsville, Alabama January 1971 John Greenwell could stay in Huntsville and be the town queer, or he could run away and be free, so he ran. He threw a couple of days’ worth of clothes in a cheap gray briefcase he’d had since high school, counted eleven dollars in his wallet, each bill worn down like him, and flew out of the house that he had never called home. He had been born in Kentucky, the son of a mother he loved and an abusive, alcoholic father he grew to hate. The family moved whenever the military shipped them to another place: Tennessee, Texas, California, Germany, Alabama. By the time he finished high school in Huntsville, John Greenwell had already lived many lives. He had been a good student, a Boy Scout, a member of the French club, an actor in a school film about poverty. A graduate. A heterosexual. When he braved the cold and walked to the bus station on the edge of Huntsville and put his dollar on the counter and found a seat on a bus headed east, he put that John Greenwell to death. He dreamed of becoming a hippie, of growing out his short brown hair, of life with people like him. He wanted to see the world through psychedelic eyes. He wanted to touch the bodies of gods. The bus rumbled to life. Its air brake hissed as it pulled away. Huntsville dimmed behind it as John’s eyelids flickered. He fell asleep to the urban lullaby he’d learned in eighth grade, Petula Clark’s escape fantasy, “Downtown.” The bus crossed an imaginary line in the dark and Alabama faded into Georgia. John woke for a moment, decided he would never go back, then drifted off into the comfort of his dreams. Read More