This was supposed to be another quick one that took me a literal month of work, on and off, and over 20 hours of audiobook listened while doing it. There's something to be said about how nowadays I'm more comfortable with working on pieces for longer and just chipping away at work rather than staying up until 4 am to finish something on a rush but like. Anyway, Sansa's POV! Cersei's revenge dress! Murdered husband! Misogyny will come for us all in the end!

bonus: pycelle's dumb face

Queen of Crete overrules her husband and raises their new son normally, prince turns out real okay actually.

Turns out you can solve the whole Minotaur problem by not locking a child in a baffling maze and feeding them nothing but terrified human sacrifices

No thoughts but Viggo Mortensen chilling with these horses 🐴

Stealing an heiress, and marrying her against her will, was declared felony by Henry VII

Context: under common medieval English law, rape could be classified as ‘raptus’ (involving sexual violation of the victim) and ‘abductio’/’ravishment’ (forcible removal of the victim) which were separate offences. Abduction was considered a trespass, that is, punishable only by a money penalty, whilst full-scale rape was considered a felony liable to sentence of death. Abduction remained technically a separate law from rape until 1487, not least because it was an offence that applied to male as well as female victims. The change came about in the wake of some cases of female abduction that were heard in the courts that year. 

Of course, the law wasn’t simply changed because Henry VII decided to do it: women, as well as men, regularly petitioned in Parliament on the subject of rape and the number of petitions might have been even higher than the records allow. In practice, however, murderers and rapists were periodically granted general pardons offered by the Crown on special occasions such as deaths and anniversaries. Sometimes the king would fail to take action against an abductor if said abductor was a prominent member of his court; at other times the cases were so complicated, involving canon law and church jurisdiction, the Crown would be equally hesitant to intervene.

The first thing Henry VII did was to exclude the offences of murder and rape, along with the abduction of women against their will, from general pardons issued in and after 1485. The legal change was done in his second Parliament. Henry VII’s 1487 legislation on abduction encompassed all maidens, widows and wives and described the crime as ‘to the great displeasure of God and contrary to the king’s laws and [to the] disparagement of women and utter heaviness and discomfort of their friends and to the evil example of all other’. As Mark Ormrod once remarked, the use of heightened emotional language suggests that violence against women was not normalised at that time, nor was it simply regarded as a crime against property or chattel. It was understood as a crime against God’s will that created distress for the victims and their families.

#tl;dr: it was an important change for all women#that came about after decades of popular pressure#although you can see henry’s personal choice#particularly when he chose to nominally exclude#rapists from his general pardons#as soon as he ascended the throne

Medieval kittens, from a 13th century English manuscript, (Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 533, fol. 13r) 

Mufasa from Madagascar

Little fucking guy alert!!

[ID: two photos of a porcelain triceratops from different angles. The triceratops is very small and has blue floral designs on its crown and body. Its three horns are painted with gold luster.]

Jyn & Cassian in Rogue One | 2016

On the 24th of March 1603, King James VI of Scotland of the Stuart Dynasty succeeded his cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England. He was crowned King of England and Ireland on the 25th of July of that year. He reigned England and Ireland for 22 years. He was succeeded by his second son, the ill-fated Charles I. The picture you see here is the Stuart Family Tree portrait (c.1603), depicting his Tudor and Stuart ancestry, and thus from the former, his claim to the English throne that stemmed from Margaret Tudor, eldest daughter of Henry VII. To honor his Tudor predecessor, he transferred the bodies of Elizabeth and Mary into one tomb and had one big effigy commemorating the former. The only mention that pointed to Mary being buried there was a plaque that hoped that the two would be reunited in the afterlife and in the resurrection.

Sadly, James VI of Scotland and I of England and Ireland didn’t turn out to be a popular King (in the long run). He sponsored the arts, like William Shakespeare (as Elizabeth I had done), but his flamboyance annoyed many people and before you know it, people began looking to the past, feeling nostalgic about the ‘good old days’ when Queen Elizabeth I was their monarch.

Image: James I’s Family Tree portrait (c.1603), emphasizing his Tudor and Stuart lineage.

POOR THINGS (2024)

POOR THINGS (2023) dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

Some of the beautiful illustrations by S.D. Schindler from Brother Hugo and the Bear by Katy Beebe.

The book is based on two real medieval figures: Hugo, a scribe who added a self-portrait (pictured above) to the end of his copy of Jerome's Commentaries on Isaiah, and a bear who appears in a letter from the abbot of Cluny Abbey to a neighboring abbot asking to borrow a copy of The Letters of St. Augustine, "for a large part of ours has been accidentally eaten by a bear."

Indian Ocean An agate stone that looks like a window to the ocean

’The Defeat Of The Sardaukar,’ by John Schoenherr, for Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’