How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend

in Fashion, History | February 4th, 2025

We can all remember seeing images of medieval Europeans wearing pointy shoes, but most of us have paid scant attention to the shoes themselves. That may be for the best, since the more we dwell on one fact of life in the Middle Ages or another, the more we imagine how uncomfortable or even painful it must have been by our standards. Dentistry would be the most vivid example, but even that fashionable, vaguely elfin footwear inflicted suffering, especially at the height of its popularity — not least among flashy young men — in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Called poulaines, a name drawn from the French word for Poland in reference to the footwear’s supposedly Polish origin, these pointy shoes appeared around the time of Richard II’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. “Both men and women wore them, although the aristocratic men’s shoes tended to have the longest toes, sometimes as long as five inches,” writes Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouellette. “The toes were typically stuffed with moss, wool, or horsehair to help them hold their shape.” If you’ve ever watched the first Blackadder series, know that the shoes worn by Rowan Atkinson’s hapless plotting prince may be comic, but they’re not an exaggeration.

Regardless, he was a bit behind the times, given that the show was set in 1485, right when poulaines went out of fashion. But they’d already done their damage, as evidenced by a 2021 study linking their wearing to nasty foot disorders. “Bunions — or hallux valgus — are bulges that appear on the side of the foot as the big toe leans in towards the other toes and the first metatarsal bone points outwards,” writes the Guardian’s Nicola Davis. A team of University of Cambridge researchers found signs of them being more prevalent in the remains of individuals buried in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than those buried from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries.

Yet bunions were hardly the evil against which the poulaine’s contemporary critics inveighed. After the Great Pestilence of 1348, says the London Museum, “clerics claimed the plague was sent by God to punish Londoners for their sins, especially sexual sins.” The shoes’ lascivious associations continued to draw ire: “In 1362, Pope Urban V passed an edict banning them, but it didn’t really stop anybody from wearing them.” Then came sumptuary laws, according to which “commoners were charged to wear shorter poulaines than barons and knights.” The power of the state may be as nothing against that of the fashion cycle, but had there been a law against the bluntly square-toed shoes in vogue when I was in high school, I can’t say I would’ve objected.

Exquisite 2300-Year-Old Scythian Woman’s Boot Preserved in the Frozen Ground of Siberia

The Ancient Romans First Committed the Sartorial Crime of Wearing Socks with Sandals, Archaeological Evidence Suggests

Doc Martens Boots Adorned with Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”

How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Century Armor: A Reenactment

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Centuries: Watch the Very Painstaking Process Get Cinematically Recreated

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Explore a Digitized Edition of the Voynich Manuscript, “the World’s Most Mysterious Book”

in Books, History | January 30th, 2025

A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script no one has ever decoded, filled with cryptic illustrations, its origins remaining to this day a mystery…. It’s not as satisfying a plot, say, of a National Treasure or Dan Brown thriller, certainly not as action-packed as pick-your-Indiana Jones…. The Voynich Manuscript, named for the antiquarian who rediscovered it in 1912, has a much more hermetic nature, somewhat like the work of Henry Darger; it presents us with an inscrutably alien world, pieced together from hybridized motifs drawn from its contemporary surroundings.

The Voynich Manuscript is unique for having made up its own alphabet while also seeming to be in conversation with other familiar works of the period, such that it resembles an uncanny doppelganger of many a medieval text.

A comparatively long book at 234 pages, it roughly divides into seven sections, any of which might be found on the shelves of your average 1400s European reader—a fairly small and rarefied group. “Over time, Voynich enthusiasts have given each section a conventional name” for its dominant imagery: “botanical, astronomical, cosmological, zodiac, biological, pharmaceutical, and recipes.”

Scholars can only speculate about these categories. The manuscript’s origins and intent have baffled cryptologists since at least the 17th century, when, notes Vox, “an alchemist described it as ‘a certain riddle of the Sphinx.’” We can presume, “judging by its illustrations,” writes Reed Johnson at The New Yorker, that Voynich is “a compendium of knowledge related to the natural world.” But its “illustrations range from the fanciful (legions of heavy-headed flowers that bear no relation to any earthly variety) to the bizarre (naked and possibly pregnant women, frolicking in what look like amusement-park waterslides from the fifteenth century).”

The manuscript’s “botanical drawings are no less strange: the plants appear to be chimerical, combining incompatible parts from different species, even different kingdoms.” These drawings led scholar Nicholas Gibbs to compare it to the Trotula, a Medieval compilation that “specializes in the diseases and complaints of women,” as he wrote in a Times Literary Supplement article. It turns out, according to several Medieval manuscript experts who have studied the Voynich, that Gibbs’ proposed decoding may not actually solve the puzzle.

The degree of doubt should be enough to keep us in suspense, and therein lies the Voynich Manuscript’s enduring appeal—it is a black box, about which we might always ask, as Sarah Zhang does, “What could be so scandalous, so dangerous, or so important to be written in such an uncrackable cipher?” Wilfred Voynich himself asked the same question in 1912, believing the manuscript to be “a work of exceptional importance… the text must be unraveled and the history of the manuscript must be traced.” Though “not an especially glamorous physical object,” Zhang observes, it has nonetheless taken on the aura of a powerful occult charm.

But maybe it’s complete gibberish, a high-concept practical joke concocted by 15th century scribes to troll us in the future, knowing we’d fill in the space of not-knowing with the most fantastically strange speculations. This is a proposition Stephen Bax, another contender for a Voynich solution, finds hardly credible. “Why on earth would anyone waste their time creating a hoax of this kind?,” he asks. Maybe it’s a relic from an insular community of magicians who left no other trace of themselves. Surely in the last 300 years every possible theory has been suggested, discarded, then picked up again.

Should you care to take a crack at sleuthing out the Voynich mystery—or just to browse through it for curiosity’s sake—you can find the manuscript scanned at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses the vellum original. Or flip through the Internet Archive’s digital version above. Another privately-run site contains a history and description of the manuscript and annotations on the illustrations and the script, along with several possible transcriptions of its symbols proposed by scholars. Good luck!

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online

The Writing System of the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript Explained: British Researcher May Have Finally Cracked the Code

An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Mahatma Gandhi’s List of the Seven Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Living the Bad Life

in History, Life, Religion, Uncategorized | January 29th, 2025

Image via Wikimedia Commons

In 590 AD, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the Seven Deadly Sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from straying into the thorny fields of ungodliness. These days, though, for all but the most devout, Pope Gregory’s list seems less like a means to moral behavior than a description of cable TV programming.

So instead, let’s look to one of the saints of the 20th century–Mahatma Gandhi. On October 22, 1925, Gandhi published a list he called the Seven Social Sins in his weekly newspaper Young India.

Politics without principles.
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.

The list sprang from a correspondence that Gandhi had with someone only identified as a “fair friend.” He published the list without commentary save for the following line: “Naturally, the friend does not want the readers to know these things merely through the intellect but to know them through the heart so as to avoid them.”

Unlike the Catholic Church’s list, Gandhi’s list is expressly focused on the conduct of the individual in society. Gandhi preached non-violence and interdependence and every single one of these sins are examples of selfishness winning out over the common good.

It’s also a list that, if fully absorbed, will make the folks over at the US Chamber of Commerce and Ayn Rand Institute itch. After all, “Wealth without work,” is a pretty accurate description of America’s 1%. (Investments ain’t work. Ask Thomas Piketty.) “Commerce without morality” sounds a lot like every single oil company out there and “knowledge without character” describes half the hacks on cable news. “Politics without principles” describes the other half.

In 1947, Gandhi gave his fifth grandson, Arun Gandhi, a slip of paper with this same list on it, saying that it contained “the seven blunders that human society commits, and that cause all the violence.” The next day, Arun returned to his home in South Africa. Three months later, Gandhi was shot to death by a Hindu extremist.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Albert Einstein Expresses His Admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, in Letter and Audio

Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662)

Mahatma Gandhi Talks (in First Recorded Video)

When Mahatma Gandhi Met Charlie Chaplin (1931)

Hear Gandhi’s Famous Speech on the Existence of God (1931)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications,

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Introduction

in Architecture, History | January 29th, 2025

Frank Lloyd Wright is unlikely to be displaced as the archetype of the genius architect anytime soon, at least in America, but even he had to start somewhere. At nine years old, as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his mother, who hoped that “her son would grow up to become a great architect, and she thought the creativity unlocked and practiced with these blocks could kick-start his journey.” Evidently, she wasn’t wrong: “by the time Wright attempted to design his first building years later, he spent countless hours arranging the blocks,” familiar as he was with “proportion, symmetry, balance, and other principles of design well before he ever picked up a pencil.”

Of course, most of us played with blocks in childhood, and few of us now bear much comparison to the man who designed Fallingwater and the Guggenheim. But his mother’s toy selection was just one of many factors that influenced the architectural development that continued throughout Wright’s long life.

In fifteen minutes, Hicks explains as many of them as possible: his early opportunity to work on “shingle-style” homes, whose cruciform layout he would adapt into his own designs; his arrival in a Chicago that was still rebuilding after its great fire of 1871, when there were vast skyscraper interiors to be created; the new Midwestern manufacturing money prepared to commission homes from him; and his inspiring encounters with Japanese aesthetics, both at home and in Japan itself.

After returning from a 1905 Japan trip, Wright got to work on Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. He had it built with the relatively new material of reinforced concrete, thus getting “in on the ground floor of a technology that could completely transform what buildings could do,” making possible “soaring cantilevers, graceful curves,” and other elements that would become part of his architectural signature. A few decades later, the United States’ suburb-building boom made Wright’s rural-urban “Usonian” homes and “Broadacre City” plan look prescient; indeed, “almost every single house inside of a postwar suburb bears his trace.” His willingness to appear in print and on film, radio, and television kept him in the American public consciousness, and he made sure to instill his principles into generations of students. Frank Lloyd Wright may be long gone, but he made sure that his vision of America would live on.

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusual Windows Tell Us About His Architectural Genius

A Virtual Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japanese Masterpiece, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo

What It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Office Building

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Creativity, Nature and Religion in Rare 1957 Audio

Frank Lloyd Wright Creates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspiring Artist Needs

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invented Lincoln Logs, “America’s National Toy” (1916)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

When Neapolitans Used to Eat Pasta with Their Bare Hands: Watch Footage from 1903

in Food & Drink, History | January 28th, 2025

Even if you don’t speak Italian, you can make a decent guess at the meaning of the word mangiamaccheroni. The tricky bit is that maccheroni refers not to the pasta English-speakers today call macaroni, tubular and cut into small curved sections, but to pasta in general. Or at least it did around the turn of the twentieth century, when i mangiamaccheroni still had currency as a nickname for the inhabitants of the pasta-production center that was Naples. That identity had already been long established even then: Atlas Obscura’s Adee Braun quotes Goethe’s observation, on a trip there in 1787, that pasta “can be bought everywhere and in all the shops for very little money.”

Some especially hard-up Neapolitans could even eat it for free, or indeed get paid to eat it, provided they were prepared to do so at great speed, in full public view — and, as was the custom at the time, with their bare hands. “Many tourists took it upon themselves to organize such spectacles,” Braun writes. “Simply tossing a coin or two to the lazzaroni, the street beggars, would elicit a mad dash to consume the macaroni in their characteristic way, much to the amusement of their onlooking benefactors.” As you can see in the Edison film above, shot on the streets of Naples in 1903, their maccheroni came in long strands, more like what we know as spaghetti. (Fortunately, if that’s the word, tomato sauce had yet to catch on.)

“On my first visit there, in 1929, I acquired a distaste for macaroni, at least in Naples, for its insalubrious courtyards were jungles of it,” writes Waverley Root in The Food of Italy. “Limp strands hung over clotheslines to dry, dirt swirled through the air, flies settled to rest on the exposed pasta, pigeons bombed it from overhead,” and so on. By that time, what had been an aristocratic dish centuries earlier had long since become a staple even for the poor, owing to the proto-industrialization of its production (which Mussolini would relocate and greatly increase in scale). Nowadays, it goes without saying that Italy’s pasta is of the highest quality. And though Italians may not have invented the stuff, which was originally brought over from the Middle East, perhaps they did invent the mukbang.

A Free Course from MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once

Julia Child Shows Fred Rogers How to Make a Quick & Delicious Pasta Dish (1974)

Quarantine Cooking: 13 Professional Chefs Cook Pasta at Home with the Most Basic Ingredients Available

Pasta for War: The Award-Winning Animation That Satirizes 1930s Propaganda Films & Features Marching Rigatoni

Historical Italian Cooking: How to Make Ancient Roman & Medieval Italian Dishes

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music

in History, Music | January 27th, 2025

Imagine how many times someone born in the eighteen-sixties could ever expect to hear music. The number would vary, of course, depending on the individual’s class and family inclinations. Suffice it to say that each chance would have been more precious than those of us in the twenty-first century can easily understand. Our ability to hear practically any song we could possibly desire on command has changed our relationship to the art itself. Most of us now relate to it not as we would a special, even momentous event, but as we do to the water and electricity that come out of our walls — or, to put it in mid-nineteenth-century terms, as we do to our furniture.

Despite having been born in 1866 himself, Erik Satie understood humanity’s need to listen to music without really listening to it. The Inside the Score video above tells the story of how he developed musique d’ameublement, or “furniture music.” The artist Fernand Léger, a friend of Satie’s, recalled that after the two of them had been subjected to “unbearable vulgar music” in a restaurant, Satie spoke of the need for “music which would be part of the ambience, which would take account of it. I imagine it being melodic in nature: it would soften the noise of knives and forks without dominating them, without imposing itself.” The result was five deliberately ignorable compositions, each tailored to an ordinary space, which he wrote between 1917 and 1923.

Regarded in his lifetime less as a respectable composer than an unserious eccentric, he only managed to get one of those pieces played — and even when he did, everyone ignored his instructions to chat instead of listening. It was well after his death (in 1925) that such also-unconventional musical figures as John Cage and Brian Eno became famous for works similarly premised on a re-imagination of the relationship between music and listener. Eno, in particular, is now credited with the development of “ambient music” thanks to his albums like Music for Airports. Their popularity surely wouldn’t have surprised Satie; whether he could have foreseen ten-hour mixes of “chill lo-fi beats to study to” is another question entirely.

Watch Animated Scores of Erik Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymnopedie No. 1” and “Gnossienne No. 1”

Watch the 1917 Ballet “Parade”: Created by Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso & Jean Cocteau, It Provoked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Surrealism”

The Velvet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vexations on I’ve Got a Secret (1963)

When Erik Satie Took a Picture of Debussy & Stravinsky (June 1910)

Brian Eno Explains the Origins of Ambient Music

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Oldest Beer Receipt (Circa 2050 BC)

in Food & Drink, History | January 23rd, 2025

Above, we have the Alulu Beer Receipt. Written in cuneiform on an old clay tablet, the 4,000-year-old receipt documents a transaction. A brewer, named Alulu, delivered “the best” beer to a recipient named Ur-Amma, who apparently also served as the scribe. The Mesopotamians drank beer daily. And while they considered it a staple of everyday life, they also regarded it as a divine gift—something that contributed to human happiness and well-being.

In our archive, you can find the recipe for Sumerian beer and also watch it get made. That’s all free. No receipts will be issued.

How to Make Ancient Mesopotamian Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brewing Method Put to the Test

5,000-Year-Old Chinese Beer Recipe Gets Recreated by Stanford Students

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires

in Current Affairs, History | January 16th, 2025

“This is fire season in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, relating how every year “the Santa Ana winds start blowing down through the passes, and the relative humidity drops to figures like seven or six or three per cent, and the bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway, and people start watching the horizon for smoke and tuning in to another of those extreme local possibilities — in this instance, that of imminent devastation.” The New Yorker published this piece in 1989, when Los Angeles’ fire season was “a particularly early and bad one,” but it’s one of many writings on the same phenomenon now circulating again, with the highly destructive Palisades Fire still burning away.

Back in 1989, longtime Angelenos would have cited the Bel Air Fire of 1961 as a particularly vivid example of what misfortune the Santa Ana winds could bring. Widely recognized as a byword for affluence (not unlike the now virtually obliterated Pacific Palisades), Bel Air was home to the likes of Dennis Hopper, Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Aldous Huxley — all of whose houses counted among the 484 destroyed in the conflagration (in which, miraculously, no lives were lost). You can see the Bel Air Fire and its aftermath in “Design for Disaster,” a short documentary produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department and narrated by William Conrad (whose voice would still have been instantly recognizable as that of Marshal Matt Dillon from the golden-age radio drama Gunsmoke).

Los Angeles’ repeated affliction by these blazes is perhaps overdetermined. The factors include not just the dreaded Santa Anas, but also the geography of its canyons, the dryness of the vegetation in its chaparral (not, pace Didion, desert) ecology, and the inability of its water-delivery system to meet such a sudden and enormous need (which also proved fateful in the Palisades Fire). It didn’t help that the typical house at the time was built with “a combustible roof; wide, low eaves to catch sparks and fire; and a big picture window to let the fire inside,” nor that such dwellings were “closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads.” The Bel Air Fire brought about a wood-shingle roof ban and a more intensive brush-clearance policy, but the six decades of fire seasons since do make one wonder what kind of measures, if any, could ever subdue these particular forces of nature.

via Boing Boing

Related content:

NASA Captures the World on Fire

When Steve Buscemi Was a Firefighter — and Took It Up Again After 9/11

Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Mansion That Has Appeared in Blade Runner, Twin Peaks & Countless Hollywood Films

Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films

Behold 19th-Century Japanese Firemen’s Coats, Richly Decorated with Mythical Heroes & Symbols

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend

Explore a Digitized Edition of the Voynich Manuscript, “the World’s Most Mysterious Book”

Mahatma Gandhi’s List of the Seven Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Living the Bad Life

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Introduction

When Neapolitans Used to Eat Pasta with Their Bare Hands: Watch Footage from 1903

How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music

The Oldest Beer Receipt (Circa 2050 BC)

Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search