IF THE SHOE FITS…

15th C fashion could be quite dramatic…and sometimes, to our modern eyes, a bit ridiculous. Nothing more so than the infamous Poulaine shoes, with their excessively long pointed toes that looked as if they were dangerous to walk in (the nearest we had to them in modern times were the Winklepicker shoes worn by Teddy…

MISIDENTIFIED HISTORICAL PORTRAITS INCLUDING TUDOR QUEENS…

Reblogged from MISIDENTIFIED HISTORICAL PORTRAITS INCLUDING TUDOR QUEENS… Does anyone else like me get irritated by misidentified portraits of historical characters?  Is it that difficult to get correct? It’s quite sloppy to be honest as just a quick glance at them tells you something ain’t quite right here!  It’s particularly common around  16th century portraiture when…

Edward IV – A King of Bling – His Wardrobe Accounts

Reblogged from Edward IV – A King of Bling’s Wardrobe Accounts   The Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York and The Wardrobe Accounts of Edward the Fourth Edited by Nicolas Harris Nicolas Esq As demonstrated by my earlier posts on the subject I enjoy nothing more than a delve around privy purse/wardrobe expenses.  This…

Chaucer was a “hot” young man in tighter than tight tights….?

  As the author of this Guardian review points out, when we think of Chaucer, we visualise a rather chubby, light-hearted, witty, somewhat cheeky middle-aged man as portrayed in the few portaits we have of him, such as the one above. Well, it would seem that as a younger man he was indeed cheeky! And…

THE PRIVY PURSE ACCOUNTS OF HENRY VII 1491 to 1505

UPDATED POST AT sparkypus.com A Medieval Potpourri https://sparkypus.com/2020/05/14/the-privy-purse-accounts-of-henry-vii-1491-to-1505-2/ Is there anyone else like me who enjoys a good nosy around someone’s privy purse accounts.  They can tell us so much about that person.  For example, Henry VII’s Privy Purse Accounts.  From them we can glean, for example,  how did Henry spend his time relaxing ,…

Keeping it in the family

You will have seen him if you have been to Richard III’s final resting place. There are eight small statues on the main entrance (the Vaughan Porch, left) of St. Martin’s Cathedral but only one of them is wearing a doublet and hose, showing him to have lived a century later than the others. This is…

The Black Prince’s jupon recreated….

The BBC is renowned for its amazing documentaries, and one of the latest series is titled A Stitch in Time, in which fashionable clothes from the past are recreated by modern crafts. The episode that really interested me was the one about the Black Prince’s jupon, i.e. the tight-fitting, brightly-coloured tunic he wore over his…

Richard in Flares????

Someone posted a link to a teachers’ resource where Shakespeare’s Richard III is depicted as a storyboard that the students can interact with. Obviously, it’s Shakespeare so Richard isn’t going to be shown in a good light, but have a look at the main characters! Really, why is Clarence dressed as a sailor? And Edward…

This is not Anne Boleyn

(re-blogged from Lissa Bryan’s guest post on The History Geeks, in response to this article) This “new portrait of Anne Boleyn” has been making the rounds in social media, and now is being publicized in several news articles. It is not Anne Boleyn. The sketch that is circulating is a third-hand copy of a painting…

Richard and two Sun(ne)s in Splendour….

Here is a link to double reviews of books that are both entitled Sun(ne) in Splendour – Jean Plaidy’s and Sharon Kay Penman’s. http://www.encorepub.com/carpe-librum-richard-iii-takes-center-stage-again/ Both works are too well known to Ricardians for any explanation to be needed, so I will confine myself to bewailing Plaidy’s abominable cover. How could any publisher impose such a…