Demi Monde Paris Prostitutes:
"Now then there's a whole series of other classifications of these independent women. There's the femmes galantes. Now those are kept women. These are women who would be like mistresses of someone. They're not technically considered prostitutes. And the police do not have any control or jurisdiction over them. So if you just have, married guy, and he has a mistress on the side, she's not considered a prostitute. She's considered a kept woman. So they actually have a classification here.
Then you have a grisette. Now, a grisette is a woman that's between a prostitute and a kept woman, and only the French would have this okay. In 1835, the definition of a grisette is a flirtatious young female worker of loose morals. And what these people usually are is a working girl, they worked in dress shops and hat shops and other things and they would supplement their income by taking on a paying lover while they're looking for the right husband. Or to move up okay in society, and they're, the little extra money they made on the side, they bought clothes with and went for entertainments, but that's it, that's a grisette. And some of them then continue on up the ladder.
Then you have the lorettes. The lorettes is a little higher up than a grisette. They lived, this name comes from the fact that most of them were found in an area where new homes were being built in Paris, around the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette. Now, these were frequently women who had been divorced from high, from husbands that were of a higher class. On other words, these ladies had married someone of a higher station. Then had gotten divorced and had slipped from that higher social classification down to a lower one. Also a lot of lorettes want to be actresses.
Then we have the femmes à parties. These are women who gave dinners and parties and then hired themselves out as the main attraction. Then we have cocodettes. Now cocodettes are women who were arranged for in advance. These are like adornments. In other words, you have a wealthy personal politician or somebody and they want somebody who's beautiful looking to go to the, to the opera, or to go to this event and you'll even find married women who will be cocodettes. That allows them to keep their highe society status. While they pretend to be playing in that half world, that demi monde world, so they can get get a little thrill out of life. We're continuing to move up.
The next, the next level are the demi-mondaines. Now this is the highest rank of prostitutes or courtesans if you want to. We're getting, we're getting elite here because they're just not taking on all customers here. But there are categories within this upper echelon. One of them is la haute galanterie, the high gallery. Now these are the top kept women. They're also called la haute bicherie. You know, the high bitches if you will.
Then there is the greatest of the great, which is La Garde. And these are the top 12 or so courtesans. These include people like Cora Pearl, La Paiva, Marie Colombier, Hortense Schneider, Blanche d’Antigny, Leonide Leblanc, Anna Deslion and Marguerite Bellanger, who was one of the many lady friends of Napoleon III. And these people, also these ladies also have a, another name, they're also called lionesses, the Queens of Beasts. So even though these people are at the highest level, they still have that little beast designation through there. So when when you're reading about people of the demi monde, of this era, these courtesans… They look like they're just really promiscuous, wealthy people, but some of them have worked their way up from the very lower levels… If you really want to get, I mean, I got a lot of information from a book called the Grandes Horizontales by Rounding"
Courtesans of Venice:
"This quite officially appears in, as an institution, the courtesans as an institution in Renaissance Italy. And just as art and learning spread to the rest of Europe, so did the courtesans spread to the rest of Europe, although it's going to take a while for them to really be wildly popular, from the standpoint that they're not going to get tremendous amount of criticism, obviously, kings and whatever, going to have these mistresses. And I'm going to name some of them famous ones later on. But it's not as not as accepted as when you get into the 1800s and the 1840s, and you have that demi mode [Ed: demi monde] situation that exists in Europe.
And of course, the role of the courtesan is, first of all, obviously, skilled sexual gratification. Actual in many cases, these people, there are a few examples where, the where the women actually helped to teach the wives some little extra things to make them a little more interesting in bed, so perhaps their husbands would enjoy them a little bit more. That's always part of it. But there were, frequently they took the role of a wife at famous social or various social functions. They were supposed to be witty, and they were supposed to be entertaining. And they provided lots of intellectual discussion. So you have to have education.
I think if any of you have seen the movie Dangerous Beauty, that is a very good portrayal of the, the courtesan life... they're frequently very well bred, they frequently come from high class social status. The family may have fallen on hard times, but they're expected to have a higher class social skills and higher class conversational skills. You're just not going to take some woman off the street and bring her to a party in the Doge’s palace and is going to make any sense. So you have to have this sort of a situation. They are also supposed to be intelligent, generally have upper class common sense and know how to be a companion with people. Of course, they have superb physical appearance, there are no such thing as ugly courtesans.
The funny thing is this class of quarters on was more in demand because of their personality, and their wit than anything else. Beauty was considered to be in much more abundance than a good mind or a good wit… There are some courtesans who are actually married. And what happens here is you have a woman of relatively high status, but she married a lower status husband. And what she does is she is using her activities or courtesan activities to try and get advancement for her husband. And he usually knows what's going on. And frequently, once the husband has been advanced socially through the right level, then she stops being a courtesan.
Now, the second type is called the lower class courtesan, cortigiana di lume. This is much lower. It's much lower than an honest courtesan. But it certainly is above the common prostitute. These courtesans were just like the higher group, they're expected to provide, quote, charming companionship with anyone who could pay for as long or as short a time as her customers wanted. The lower group, however, is more dependent on their lovers. And frequently they are passed from one customer to the other. Once out of favor, out of the favor of the main circle, she would have to take, lower her standards, and began taking lesser people and eventually ended up down at that lower level, the common, the common prostitute...
Now, the upper class courtesans were treated almost as equals, especially if they were doing it strictly to advance either themselves socially, or their husband socially, or their husbands politically. And in some area courtesans would also get jealous of one another because obviously, there's a competition. The more you're, the more in demand you are, the more money you make. And if you've been at the top and the new lady comes on the scene, and now suddenly, you know, ooh, it's a new girl, let's go see what she's like, that's going to cost you money. So sometimes, you know, if you're trying to climb socially and politically that leaves you open to rumors and gossip. And so some of these people might try to to ruin you, you know, particularly if you try to move in on a king"
Brief History of Names and Naming:
"Earlier Jewish surnames arose during the Middle Ages when German Kings and Dukes forced Jews to adopt Germanic names and pay highly for them. Silverberg, mountain of silver. Morgenstern, star of the morning, were among the most costly names. Fisher, fishermen, Kaufman, merchant, and Schneider, Tailor were moderately priced. Since the practice was a system of taxation to fatten royal purses, authorities penalized Jewish peasants who could not afford a fancy name. They were forced to purchase inexpensive names that were blatant insults such as schmutz, dirt, Eselkopf, ass head, names that have been dropped from use but still appear in old German records."
Birthday History and Traditions:
"With the rise of Christianity, the tradition of celebrating birthdays ceased altogether. To the early followers of Jesus, who were oppressed, persecuted and martyred by the Jews and the pagans, and who believed their infants entered the world with the original sin of Adam condemning their soul, the world was a harsh and cruel place. There was no reason to celebrate one's birth, but since death was the true deliverance, the passage to eternal paradise, every person's death day merited prayerful observance. Contrary to popular belief, it was the death days and not the birthdays of saints that were celebrated and became their feast days. Church historians interpret many early Christian references to birthdays as passages or birth into the afterlife. The birthday of a saint clarified the early church apologist Peter Chrysologus, is not that in which they are born in the flesh, but that they are born from Earth in the heaven from labor to rest.
There was a further reason why early church fathers preached against celebrating birthdays. They considered festivities borrowed from the Egyptians and the Greeks as relics of pagan practice. In 245 AD when a group of early Christian historians attempted to pinpoint the exact date of Christ's birth, the Catholic Church ruled the undertaking sacriligeous and proclaimed it would be sinful to observe the birthday of Christ as though he were a king or Pharaoh. In the fourth century, the church began to alter its attitude towards birthday celebrations and also commenced serious discussions to settle the date of Christ's birth. The result of course, marked the beginning of the tradition of celebrating Christmas"
History of Marriage Customs Part 2:
"We’ve got to go back to ancient Rome for our wedding cake. The wedding cake is not always eaten by the bride. It was originally thrown at her. It developed is one of the many fertility symbols integral in the marriage ceremony"
History of Marriage Customs Part 3:
"In England and France, the practice of wearing white at weddings was first commented on by writers in the 16th century. White was a visual statement of the bride's virginity so obvious in a public statement that did not please everyone. Clergyman, for instance, felt that virginity, a marriage prerequisite, should not be blatantly advertised. For the next 150 years, British newspapers and magazines carried the running controversy fired by white wedding ensembles. By the late 18th century, white had become the standard wedding color. Fashion historians claim this was due mainly to the fact that most of the gowns at the time were white, that white was the color of formal fashion."
History of Table Manner Etiquette Part 1:
"For at least 100 years the fork remained a shocking novelty. An Italian historian recorded a dinner at which a Venetian noblewoman ate with a fork of her own design, and incurred the rebuke of several clerics present for her excessive sign of refinement. The woman died days after the meal supposedly from the plague, but the clergyman preached that her death was divine punishment, warning to others contemplating the use of a fork... Even in Italy, the country of the forks origin to implement could still be a source of ridicule as late as the 17th century, especially for a man who was labeled finicky and effeminate if he used a fork. Now women fared only slightly better. A Venetian publication in 1626 recounts that the wife of the Doge, instead of eating properly with knife and fingers, ordered a servant to cut her food into little pieces, which she ate by means of a two pronged fork, an affection the author writes, beyond belief"
History of Nursery Stories Part 3:
"Snow White, Princess and the Pea and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves comes from our good friends Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. They were staying in the German town of Castle in order to collect oral tradition fairy tales, resulting in more than one marriage. Whereas Wilhelm married the girl who told him Hansel and Gretel, his sister Lada married into the Hasenpflug family who had told the Grimms Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Now the Brother Grimm were the first to artfully combine the elements of blossoming youth, fading beauty and female rivalry into an enduring fairy tale. But theirs was not the first published version of such a story... In Eleanor Mure’s version. The unwelcome intruder to the bears home is also an angry old woman, but the bowls and the parlor contain not Southey’s porridge but milk turned sour. In Southey’s version, when the homeless old woman is discovered in the bed by the bears she jumps out the window never to be seen again. But in Mure’s tale the incensed bears resort to several cruel tactics to rid themselves of the old hag. Quote, on the fire they throw her but burn her they couldn't. In the water they put her butt drowned there she wouldn't end of quote. Worse arrives. In desperation the bears impale the old woman on the steeple of St. Paul's Church"
History of Nursery Rhymes Part 1:
"In America in the next [19th] century, Mother Goose rhymes would win out as a generic name for all children's verse, regardless of authorship. There have been many attempts to censure the sadistic phrases found in several popular rhymes For example, she cut off their tails with a carving knife, and many groups have claimed that certain rhymes replete with with adult shenanigans are entirely unfit for children. The fact is, most nursery rhymes were never intended for children. That is why the adjective nursery was not used for centuries. It first appeared in the year 1824 in an article for a British magazine titled On nursery rhymes in general. If the rhymes originally were not for the nursery, then what was their function? Some functions were stanzas taken from bawdy folk ballads. Others began verses based on popular street games, proverbs or prayers, and many originated as tavern limericks, spoofs of religious practices, social satire and the lyrics of romantic songs. They don't read precisely that way today, because in the early 1800s, many Nursery Rhymes were sanitized to satisfy the newly emerging Victorian morality. In their definitive work, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Iona and Peter Opie, write quote, we can say almost without hesitation, that of those pieces which date before 1800, the only true rhymes composed especially for the nursery, are the rhyming alphabets, the infant amusements and lullabies.
The overwhelming majority of nursery rhymes were not in the first place composed for children end of quote. However, rhymes in their bawdy versions were often recited to children because children were treated as miniature adults. Then in the early 1800s, many rhymes were cleaned up, subsumed under the rubric nursery and ascribed to a pseudo-anonymous Mother Goose. Well, who was this woman? Or for that matter, man. According to an early New England legend, the original Mother Goose was a Boston widow, Elizabeth Goose born in 1665. On marrying Issac Goose at the age of 27, she immediately became the stepmother of 10 children, and then had six of her own. The Association of Mistress Goose with the name Mother Goose stems from an alleged volume of rhymes published in 1719 by one of her sons in law and titled Mother Goose’s melodies for children. Widespread as this legend was, the people involved were real. No copy of the book has ever been found. More cogent evidence suggests that the original Mother Goose was actually a man and that's our friend from the last series on, on nurseries. That's Charles Perrault. Perrault’s seminal book 1697 contained eight popular stories and bore the title, Tales of my Mother Goose. That is the first time the term appeared in print. Whether Perrault concocted the name or adapted it from Frau Goosen, a woman in German folklore is unknown, but most folklorists believe is the same man who immortalize the fairy tale such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, also popularized a fictitious mother of rhymes became known to children throughout the world."
Nursery Rhymes Part 3:
"Little Miss Muffet. 16th century England. Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Then came the spider and sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away. Of all nursery rhymes this appears more frequently in children's books. Was written in the 16th century by appropriately an entomologist with a special interest in spiders, Dr. Thomas Muffet, the author of the scholarly work, the Silkworms and their Flies. As Longfellow had composed, there was a little girl for his daughter Edith, Doctor Muffet wrote Little Miss Muffet for his young daughter Patience. At that time, a tuffet was a three legged stool and curds and whey was milk custard [Ed: Wikipedia says "It is sometimes claimed – without evidence – that the original Miss Muffet was Patience, daughter of Dr Thomas Muffet (d.1604), an English physician and entomologist, but the Opies are sceptical given the two-hundred year gap between his death and the rhyme's appearance"]"
