February 2010 – Page 4 – The History Blog

Scary historical vibrators

February 13, 2010

Modern(ish)

Gizmodo has a scary and interesting article on the history of the mechanical vibrator. They interviewed Dr. Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm, who provides some background on the development of sex toys.

It turns out there actually were vibrators before electricity, industrialization and Victorian taboo combined to create the precursors to the motorized gadgets we know today. The first identifiable model was a hand-crank device made in 1734, believe it or not.

The notion that women could be relieved of the illness of “hysteria” by genital manipulation to the point of orgasm, pardon me, I mean “paroxysm”, had been current in medical circles since Galen in the 2nd century. It just took a few hundreds of years for motors to be involved.

According to Dr. Maines, all vibrators are just inefficient motors. “All motors vibrate. If you make a motor that’s especially sloppy, it’ll vibrate more. That’s the principle behind the vibrator: a very sloppy motor that’s designed to vibrate.” An efficient motor, such as the one that runs your fridge, would make for a seriously crappy vibrator. But the Manipulator, which was essentially an inefficient steam engine with a dildo attached to it, did the job swimmingly.

One of the first mechanical vibrators was the steam-powered Manipulator … invented by Dr. George Taylor in 1869. This monster machine hid its engine in another room with the apparatus sticking through the wall.

I’m going to put the picture after the jump because it’s basically a dildo attached to a train engine, so fair warning for the more delicate among us.

(more…)

Italian court orders seizure of Getty bronze

February 12, 2010

Ancient, Looting, Museums, Social policy

An appeals court in Pesaro, Italy, has ruled that the Greek bronze known as the Victorious Youth should be confiscated from the Getty Museum in Malibu and returned to Italy. This ruling comes as a surprise and not just to the Getty. Previous rulings on the ownership of the statue have all come down on the side of the Getty due to the nebulous circumstances of the bronze’s discovery and sale.

The life-size statue was fished out of the Adriatic off the coast of Fano in 1964. The fishermen never declared it to customs officials as required by law. Instead they buried it in a cabbage patch before selling it to Italian middlemen that same year for a measly $5,600. They hid it in a priest’s bathtub then smuggled it out of the country into the hands of dealer Elie Borowski in Switzerland, who in turn sold it to the Artemis Consortium. The Getty bought it 13 years later for $3.9 million.

The statue is thought to be from the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., possibly from the workshop of the great Greek sculptor Lyssipos, who was Alexander the Great’s court sculptor and the teacher of Chares of Lindos, the artist who built the Colossus of Rhodes. It is one of very few extant Greek bronzes. Most of what we have are Roman copies.

Italian prosecutors have tried to retrieve it for 40 plus years. In 1966 they prosecuted the Italian middlemen and the priest. They were convicted but their convictions were reversed on appeal in 1970 due to insufficient evidence. The statue itself was still in the shadowy antiquities underground at this point, so the prosecution didn’t even have stolen goods as evidence.

Most recently a case in 2007 prosecuted by Francesco Rutelli (who also prosecuted today’s case) was dismissed by the same Pesaro court who ruled in his favor today. It was a different judge though, and he ruled that the statute of limitations had expired, that since the fishermen were long dead there was no longer anyone to prosecute, and that the Getty had purchased the bronze in good faith.

So what changed, you asked? Some recent news cast serious doubt on the Getty’s good faith. An article in the LA Times last month pointed to a shady series of correspondence over the purchase of the bronse.

“It is clearly understood by us that no commitment is to be made by me on your behalf for the Greek Bronze until certain legal questions are clarified,” wrote Met director Thomas Hoving to Getty in a June 1973 letter. Hoving promised that the Met’s attorneys would talk with Italian officials to clarify the circumstances under which the statue had left Italy and whether the Italians were still pursuing a legal claim, records show.

The Met’s antiquities curator, Dietrich von Bothmer, raised legal concerns of his own, warning Hoving that the 1970 acquittal “does not permit the legal conclusion that the statue was . . . legally exported from Italy.”

In his acquisition proposal to the Met’s board, Von Bothmer wrote, “I recommend that legal opinions be solicited as to the possibility that a foreign government may at a later time, especially after publication of the statue, claim it as ‘artistic patrimony.’ “

The deal fell through for reasons neither the Met nor the Getty will discuss. After John Paul Getty died in 1976, however, the museum bought the statue for more than JP had offered and without the legal assurances from the Italian government that JP had required. Instead they just took the word of the dealers’ lawyers, which, let’s face it, is worth pretty much nothing.

Anyway, nasty horsetrading shenanigans aside, the legal questions surrounding the find remain thorny and the precedent of several failed cases is on the Getty’s side. The Getty said in a statement that they would pursue the case to Italy’s highest court. Given the glacial pace of the Italian legal system, the Victorious Youth won’t be leaving the Getty Villa in Malibu any time soon.

The origins of 10 Winter Olympic sports

February 11, 2010

Modern(ish)

Just in time for Friday’s Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, here’s a neat rundown of the history of 10 of the featured sports.

Did you know that Curling originated in Scotland? I assumed Canada because that’s where it’s a national obsession second only to hockey.

My favorite anecdote is the origin of the bobsled and luge events.

In the late 1860s, Swiss hotelier Caspar Badrutt had a problem: no one wanted to spend the winter at his chilly resort in St. Moritz. Rather than spend the winter with an empty hotel, Badrutt convinced some of his regulars that it would be fun to spend some time at a “winter resort,” and English guests started flocking to St. Moritz during the cold months.

The guests found a particularly exciting way to pass their time when they started modifying delivery boys’ sleds and zipping down the town’s streets. (If you lashed two of these sleds together, you had the precursor to the modern bobsled.) All of this sledding was great fun, but Badrutt soon had a new problem on his hands: since the only place to run the sleds was on the city’s streets, sledders kept careening into pedestrians.

To combat this dangerous problem, Badrutt built an icy halfpipe track to keep the sleds off of the streets. Within a decade, the sledding events had grown into competitive sports, and bobsled was on the program for the first Winter Olympics in 1924.

Badrutt didn’t just convince five of his wealthy regulars to give it a try, he actually made a bet: if they didn’t have fun at the Palace Hotel over a long winter stay, the vacation would be free. If they did have a good time, they had to spread the word among their spendy society circles for the whole next year.

So we owe the entire concept of winter Alpine sports to Caspar Badrutt’s willingness to take financial risks and rich Englishmen’s willingness to risk boredom (not to mention their willingness to haul ass down icy streets at top speed).

The sledding track Badrutt built was also world’s first halfpipe, so really you can say that Badrutt was the father of competitive skateboarding as well.

Bald Stone Age Siberians settled in Greenland

February 10, 2010

Ancient, Modern(ish)

DNA testing performed on a 4000-year-old tuft of hair and bone chips embedded in the Greenland permafrost has overturned conventional wisdom on how the Arctic regions were settled and by whom.

The hair and bone are the only human remains ever found of the Saqqaq culture who lived on the coast of Greenland from around 2,500 B.C. until they petered out around 800 B.C.

University of Copenhagen researcher Eske Willerslev led a team that exhaustively analysed the precious Qeqertasussuk find.

They teased out nearly 80 percent of the genetic code and identified 353,151 single variations in DNA that are telltale signs of body characteristics.

“What we can see from the genomic data is a number of traits,” Willerslev told journalists in a teleconference.

“For example, we can see the guy had most likely brown eyes, brown skin, he had shovel-form front teeth and he had dry earwax, which increased the chance of getting infection in the ear,” said Willerslev.

“We can also see that he had a tendency to baldness and because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy we presume he actually died quite young, and we can see he was genetically adapted to cold temperatures, living in the Arctic.”

Previously anthropologists thought Greenland was settled by people whose ancestors had crossed the Bering Strait via the Beringia land bridge 15,000 years ago then moved south, eventually reaching as far as the tip of South America, or from the second New World migration 6,000 to 8,000 years ago by the ancestors of western Native Americans in the Na-Dene language group.

But in fact Inuk’s DNA sequence indicates that Greenland — the Neolithic Saqqaq part of it anyway — seems to have been settled by direct descendants of Siberians who crossed the Bering Strait either by kayak or by walking over winter ice and then kept going east. This is solid evidence of a third New World migration, something that linguistic analysis has only hinted at before.

The technique used to extract DNA from Inuk’s fallen tufts was actually pioneered on mammoth hairs. It’s unlikely that a clean sample of DNA can be extracted from even relatively well-preserved tissues like bone or mummified skin because they’re highly susceptible to fungal and bacterial contamination.

Now that we know enough about the human genome that we can pinpoint things like ancient people’s ear wax problems, there’s a whole new world of historical discoveries to be found in preserved hair.

Medieval penitential sex flowchart

February 9, 2010

Books, Medieval

Penitentials were handbooks listing many sins a confessor could be expected to encounter during private confession and the appropriate penances he should assign for each act (or the appropriate moneys the penitent should pay to commute a penance).

They were first compiled by Irish monks in the 6th century when the practice of private confession began to supersede the public confessions of sins and imposition of penances of early Christianity and spread to the continent, continuing to be published through the 12th century even though they were officially condemned by the Catholic Church during the Council of Paris in 829.

The penances tended to be things like fasts, repetitions of psalms on your knees or standing, giving alms, and the sins were everything from fornication to murder. But it’s the fornication that took up the lion’s share of these handbooks, and every conceivable act was detailed along with the (heavy) price it exacted in penance.

Here’s an example from Corpus Christi College’s Corpus 190 of the Canons of Theodore:

Whoever fornicates with an effeminate male or with another man or with an animal must fast for 10 years.
Elsewhere it says that whoever fornicates with an animal must fast 15 years and sodomites must fast for 7 years.
If the effeminate male (bædling) fornicates with another effeminate male (bædling), (he is to) do penance for 10 years.
Whoever does this unintentionally (unwærlice) once must fast for 4 years; if it is habitual, as Basil says, for 15 years if he is not in orders and also one year (less?) so as a woman does. If it is a boy, for the first time, 2 years; if he does it again, 4 years.
If he is a boy, for the first time, 2 years; if he does it again, 4 years.
If he fornicates interfemorally (between the limbs), he must fast for 1 year or the 3 40-day periods.
If he defiles himself (masturbates), he is to abstain from meat for four days.
He who desires to fornicate (with) himself (i.e., to masturbate) and is not able to do so, he must fast for 40 days or 20 days.
If he is a boy and does it often, either he is to fast 20 days or one is to whip him.
If a woman fornicates [with another woman?] she must do penance for 3 years.
If she touches herself in the same way, i.e., in emulation of fornication, she must repent for 1 year.
One penance applies to a widow and a virgin; more (penance) is earned by her who has a husband if she fornicates.
Whoever ejaculates seed into the mouth, that is the worst evil. From someone it was judged that they repent this up to the end of their lives.

And it goes on and on like that. Marriage is no cure either, because there are endless strictures against marital sex as well. If it’s not procreative, it’s fornication. If it’s done on a holy day, it’s fornication. You see above what happens if it’s oral: you get a life sentence of penance.

The penitential writers saw marital sex as a concession, not as a right or even a gift from God. The pleasure it brought was inherently sinful, a gateway to lust, so sex within marriage should be carefully contained and scheduled to ensure the most possible procreation and the least possible pleasure. Married couples had to abstain regularly or the very state of their marriage would degenerate into an illegitimate and sinful union. Even the children born of sex during a period where the couple should have abstained — mainly based on the Church’s liturgical calendar and on the wife’s reproductive cycle — were to be considered bastards.

Which brings us to the inspiration of today’s little historical sermon. Many years ago in college I read a fascinating book called Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe by University of Kansas history professor emeritus James A. Brundage. It’s a remarkable analysis of Medieval authorities’ legal proscriptions about sex, starting with ancient Roman and Greek law codes, then moving on to Medieval strictures as seen in the penitentials, canon law, Germanic legal statutes, and ever so much more.

I regularly think of the chapter on the penitentials in particular, mainly because of one truly awesome flowchart. Unfortunately my copy of the book is squirreled away in my parents’ attic along with many of its college tome brethren, so yesterday when it popped into my head that I really need to blog about this greatest of historical graphs, I thought “Hey! There’s an interweb now! I bet I can find it online.” And so by Thor’s hammer I did.

It seems the chart has made a strong impression on many other people as well, and since Brundage’s book is standard in Medieval history and in history of sexuality studies, I am far from alone in wishing to pay it homage.

What it is is a flowchart Brundage compiled from many penitentials which helps the pious man figure out if he can have lawful intercourse. (Click for the large version.)

Genius, is it not? I bet you’ll find yourself thinking “STOP! SIN!” at random/randy times now too. :giggle:

That’s not to say that Medieval folks actually lived according to the flowchart rules, of course. There’s always a huge gap between proscription and reality. People did it then like we do it now: whenever they could. But it is a fascinating glimpse into the both prurient and ascetic world of Medieval confessor literature, and what kind of standards Medieval people might have measured themselves against.