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Torture, Execution and everything not so nice
So you’ve been a very, very bad person or at least someone in power thinks you have been a very bad person. Well, you have a not so fun time ahead of you. Torture was an acceptable method to get a person suspected of a crime to confess or obtain additional information about the crime or conspirators. Anything gathered under the influence of torture was admissible at trial and certainly was acted upon by authorities. The Church had condemned the practice as early as 866, but it was still used in practice for hundreds of years after this. However, the Church changed its tune and did use torture in religious…
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Adultery
You have found the partner of your dreams and you settle down to your dream castle and start making your family of 12 children. However, there is a problem. Your true love has been doing you wrong. What to do? Well, your next steps very much depends on if you are the husband or the wife in this equation. As we touched on in our piece on Courtly Love (http://www.historynaked.com/cult-courtly-love-feminist-leap-modern-myth/ ), despite what our friend Andreas Cappellanus said there were serious consequences to being unfaithful. Marriage was a sacrament of the Church and binding vows were taken. To break them had consequences. Plus, extra marital sex could result in illegitimate children.…
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Ash Wednesday and Lent
So you filled up on pancakes and delicious food and cleaned the pantry out of all fats and sugars. Then you went and made sure you confessed your sins to make sure you are properly shriven for Shrove Tuesday. Now you are prepared for the long season of contemplation that is Lent beginning with Ash Wednesday.Lent is the forty days, not counting Sundays, prior to Easter. The word comes from the Anglo Saxon word “lang”, which referred to the lengthening of days with spring. [...]
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Myths about Violence in the Wild, Wild West
There are some certain aspects of life during the wild west in America that make most people think twice about wanting to travel back to that time: bank robbing and gun-slinging. It was a dangerous time in U.S. History, we were taught that as students in the U.S., the textbooks state it, movies depict it, and characters like Butch Cassidy and Wild Bill all confirm that life was bloody and downright unsafe.Except none of it is true, not really.Think about a town from the wild west, it [...]
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The Bathroom
Since the beginning of civilized living, we have made sure our waste is carried away. By moving sources of water and then through a series of pipes. The bathroom developed from just a necessary house to a place of luxuriating as the Romans perfected their bath houses. These became places of gossip and socializing as much as keeping clean. The Baths of Caracalla offered warm and cold pools, body oiling and scraping services, hair shampooing and styling areas, manicures and exercise ar [...]
