Category: Albee Sarah

Renaissance Road Trips

11/9/2018

Sarah Albee
Celebrating the History of Science
and the Science behind History

Catherine de Medici. She didn't travel light.

During the Renaissance, French kings and queens built many palaces, in an area known as the Loire Valley. The royal family would travel from palace to palace to get away from Paris, the way you might head to a lake house. The Loire Valley is not very close to Paris. It’s about 110 miles from Paris to the palace of Chambord, for instance. I wondered how long it took sixteenth century travelers to make this journey—and why there were so many palaces.

First, the distance. Under the best of conditions (good roads, decent weather, level ground), humans can walk four miles per hour over long distances. Horses can’t do much better–maybe five mph—but a lot less if they’re pulling something or if roads are in awful condition. A horse can canter at 20 mph, but it can only do that for six to eight miles at a time, after which it will slow down and walk, or stop completely. So it would have taken a long time to get from place to place. Under the best conditions, a journey from Paris to Chambord would have taken three weeks.

But in fact, it took a lot longer than that. Because in the sixteenth century, the royal court didn’t just hop on a horse and head to their country home. They took everything and everyone with them, loading all the stuff onto the backs of horses and mules.

When Catherine de Medici was queen of France, she traveled with her ladies and gentlemen, foreign ambassadors, pet bears, servants, retainers, attendants, apothecaries, astrologists, tutors, musicians, cooking pots, food, clothing, portable triumphal arches, wall hangings, and furniture.

And the reason there were so many palaces is simply that the court in Renaissance times –thousands of people–had to move around from estate to estate so as to find new hunting grounds. Once they’d exhausted the food supply in the area, they moved on to the next estate. Also, the sanitation was dreadful. After thousands of people had taken up residence in and around a great estate for a few weeks, filth piled up, and with it, stench and disease.

The royal procession could be miles long. When Catherine de Medici’s court packed up and left for a new palace, the beginning of the royal caravan sometimes entered a town before those traveling at the back of it had left the last one.

Ball in 1573, in the court of the French queen, Catherine de Medici. She is the one dressed in black.

A massive hunting party on the grounds of a sixteenth-century French chateau.

Just a little get-together for the 16th-century French court.

Sara Albee's recent book is Why'd They Wear That?, published by National Geographic in 2015. Get ready to chuckle your way through centuries of fashion dos and don'ts! In this humorous and approachable narrative, you will learn about outrageous, politically-perilous, funky, disgusting, regrettable, and life-threatening creations people have worn throughout the course of human history, all the way up to the present day. For more information, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Albee, Sarah. "Renaissance Road Trips." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/renaissance-road-trips.

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Renaissance Bad Boy

1/5/2018

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Sarah Albee

Celebrating the History of Science
and the Science behind History

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) came from humble origins, the son of a stonecutter. He moved from Milan to Rome while in his twenties, looking for painting commissions in the newly built churches and palazzi that were springing up there.

    Caravaggio became known as a master of realism—populating his paintings with contemporary, ordinary people—many of them rogues and ruffians from the mean streets of Rome. People were shocked by his realistic paintings. They were used to looking at devotional paintings showing choirs of angels and golden shafts of light beaming down from heaven.

    A big part of Caravaggio’s problem is that he felt (correctly) that he was underappreciated as a painter. He was hot-headed and quick to pick a fight, and kept getting into trouble. In 1594 he was arrested for hurling a plate of artichokes at a waiter, and he was forever getting involved in Roman street brawls.

    In 1606 he really messed up. While he was playing an early version of tennis, palla a corda, with a close friend, a wealthy acquaintance named Ranuccio Tomassoni walked by with a couple of his relatives and challenged Caravaggio to a game. They played. Each thought he’d won. They drew swords. They chased each other around, hacking away. Caravaggio was slashed twice, but then buried his blade in his enemy’s stomach. Ranuccio died shortly thereafter, and Caravaggio’s friends dragged Caravaggio away to a nearby house to bandage him up.

    The police came after him, and Caravaggio fled for the hills outside of Rome. He became a fugitive from the law. He was convicted of murder in absentia, and sentenced to death.

    For the next few years, he continued to paint while on the run. His reputation as an artist was growing. Still pursued by the law, he fled to Malta in 1607, got in trouble there, and fled to Sicily. By 1609, he was widely known as a master painter, and he traveled to Naples to await word from the Pope that his petition to be pardoned might be approved. While there, he was ambushed by four assassins, who stabbed him around the face and neck. He managed to survive the attack, but was left disfigured.

When his papal pardon finally arrived, in 1610, he set sail for Rome but fell ill on the way with a fever—probably malaria. He died in 1610.

An early self-portrait by Caravaggio, called “Sick Bacchus,” about 1593. His yellowish skin tone and eyes indicate he may have been suffering from a liver illness, or just a bad bout of malaria. Wikimedia

Death of the Virgin 1604-6. Caravaggio’s painting of the dead Virgin Mary shocked people. She is depicted in a not very holy-looking pose, with dirty, swollen feet. He also used a prostitute as a model. Wikimedia

Sara Albee's latest book is Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions, and Murderous Medicines. , Vicki Cobb reviewed this fascinating book-- poisons are in more places than you can ever imagine. Get A Dose Of This!

MLA 8 Citation
Albee, Sarah. "Renaissance Bad Boy." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 5 Jan. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/Renaissance-Bad-Boy.

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The King's Butt

9/19/2017

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Sarah Albee

Celebrating the History of Science and the Science behind History

King Louis XIV (1638 –1715) was a famous king of France. In the year 1685, when he was at the height of his reign, his butt started to hurt. A lot. His royal physicians tried all kinds of treatments, trying to shrink the swelling, but finally, after months of suffering on everyone’s part, they called for a surgeon. This was a big deal.

    Surgeons at the time were not considered respectable. They ranked many notches below physicians, on the level of barbers (in fact, most were barbers). The Church forbade doctors to cut into a living body. But the king and his physicians were desperate.

    His butt problem was diagnosed as something called an anal fistula. If you think it sounds bad, you’re right. It’s a condition where a new channel opens up leading from the bowel to the outside of the body, but that is not the anus—the channel through which waste is supposed to leave the body. We won’t speculate as to how the king developed his fistula, although we do know that the king ate enormous quantities of food, and his diet was probably not what we would consider healthy today. Also, his hygiene was not good. He often ordered windows to be opened when he entered a room, so that his courtiers would not be overcome by his smell.

    The surgeon, Charles Francois Félix de Tassy, requested to wait six months before operating. He practiced on a bunch of peasants, none of whom actually had anal fistulae. Some of them even died.

    The king’s fistula operation was performed on November 18th 1686. Sources reported that the king was calm. The surgeon was not. Félix had designed a “royally curved” scalpel especially for that purpose, inserting it into the fistula with the help of a retractor.

    The operation was a success. The king was sitting up in bed within a month. It became fashionable for courtiers to admit they had a fistula, too, in hopes of being able to walk around Versailles with their butts swaddled like the king’s.

    Why is this story important? By operating successfully on the king, Félix raised the profession of surgery to a more prestigious level. Félix was knighted and given money and land. But he was said to be so traumatized that he never again touched a scalpel.

(c) Sarah Albee 2014

Here’s the king, back in the saddle

Sarah Albee's latest book is Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions and Murderous Medicines. You can read a review that gives you a dose of what's in this book.

MLA 8 Citation
Albee, Sarah. "The King's Butt." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 19 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/the-kings-butt.

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