As to why Demeter was feared the answer is actually ludicrously simple:

Now you might ask 'so why did people fear Demeter' and the simple answer is that She is Goddess of the Harvest, and since famine was far from an atypical experience and She was the literal Goddess of food, you can do the math on that one. Demeter was seen at best as a very fickle and treacherous deity much in the line of Odin and this reflected the mythological and ideological connections with the harsh and often brutal realities of what agriculture could and did mean for the average farmer.

The Goddess whose withholding favor meant starvation was not, in fact, universally loved and both myth and reality and the real-world manifestations of Graeco-Roman praxis testify to that.

Hildegard von Bingen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

she was a nun and a scientist and a musician and poet and invented her own language and alphabet. which i think is pretty neat. this drawing is based on a specific medieval illustration: (link)

Christian Dirce by Henryk Siemiradzki

As someone who has studied the history of Early Modern European witchcraft at university it is funny how many terfs spread theories as indisputable fact that are unaccepted within mainstream historical scholarship.

Yes men could be witches. No it was not a conspiracy against midwives. Yes it was rooted in misogyny and the societal disempowerment of women. No this was not the only relevant factor. Religion, class and social dynamics were also super important. Not to mention the blatant anti semitism.

The European witch hunts are such a fascinating and disturbing historical phenomenon, and I hate how it has been over simplified to support a radfem narrative.

Karelian women,Olonetskiy uyezd of Olonets province (1899)

Photography by Mikhail Krukovskiy (1856-1936)

Mariquita Tennant (born Maria Francesca Eroles i Eroles) was a Catalan woman who protected abused and poor women in Windsor (England).

How did she end up in England?

Mariquita was born in the village Pla de Sant Tirs, in the High Pyrenees of Catalonia. During the war between those who wanted an absolutist monarchy and the liberals, Mariquita's father was involved in the liberal side and between 1821 and 1823 he was the leader the local miquelets (militia). When the King of France sent the army known as the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis to help restore the absolute monarchy, many liberals went on exile to England. Mariquita followed her father, mother and three siblings on exile to London.

They settled in Somers Town, a neighbourhood that had become home to many exiles from Catalonia and the Valencian Country and that had previously also become home to exiled French revolutionaries and American independentists. In February 1833, Mariquita married David Reid, son of a Scottish beer maker who had become wealthy running a pub chain in England. But in November of the same year, David threw himself down a window during an epileptic attack, resulting in his death. Soon after, Mariquita's first and last daughter Mary was born, but she also died soon. Some years later, Mariquita married again. Her new husband was Robert Tennant, but he died a sudden death in 1842.

In 1846, at 38 years old, her first husband's family allowed her to live in one of their properties. She turned this house into a shelter for girls who had been abused by society. There were many girls and women in this situation, so the house was full very soon. Quickly, Mariquita looked for funds and allied with the Anglican church to create a local branch of the House of Mercy. In 50 years, this institution attended and housed 2,500 girls in Windsor, many of which were girls who had been forced into prostitution by poverty and until then had had no way to escape.

The house that Mariquita's first husband's family let her live in, and which she turned into a shelter.

Mariquita suffered bad health for most of her years of service, and in the end died in 1860. She's buried in Saint Andrew's cemetery, overlooking the house she turned into a shelter.

In 2005, the Windsor and Maidenhead city council uncovered a blue plaque to remember her (in England, blue plaques mark the place where a historical event happened or recognise a historical person), though there's a small mistake because it says she was born in 1811 but she was actually born on November 9th 1807.

She's the only Catalan person to have an English blue plaque.

Karl Bryullov (Russian, 1799-1852) Portrait of Singer A. Ya. Petrova, 1841 State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

"[Of the European witch hunts of the late 15th century] A husband's right to order a newborn killed was accepted, and laws forbidding infanticide were directed only at women, women alone, 'masterless'- the majority of those accused of witchcraft."

-p.123 of 'From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume II: the Masculine Mystique' (French, Marilyn)

Vanitas Bust of a Lady

Catharina Ykens II, ca. 1688

Regular reminder that if you don't live in the Global North, nothing they have to say applies to the rest of us. Actually most things they say have little value anyway since the Global South and Eastern folks are afterthoughts to them, much less center us in their social justice.

- The USAmerican cultural hegemony has fuck all to do with us. Be aware of what they're trying to peddle you, but they have more power to harm and radicalise you than you have ever could to harm them. This applies to both the Western left and right wing. They are both equally racist, colonial and imperialist.

- Global North issues around capitalism, exploitation and piracy have nothing to do with us. Consumer activism might work to some extent over there idk, but if anyone brings it up over in the lands of the Black and brown people, you can laugh them out of the country.

- Their queer history is not ours. Congrats to Stonewall and all but that's just some shit that happened in the US. We need to dig past 18 different strata of cultural genocide and colonial garbage to mine our queer histories back into the light, and designing microlabel flags and fighting over colonizer language acronyms have fuck all to do with that either.

- Always pirate everything within reach. Save up and buy from authors and creators you really like (that's what I do – esp when it's a BIPOC creator), but people who can't afford to buy shit in the first place ain't stealing food out of anybody's mouths. Pirating is praxis and always has been since the days of the East India Company.

- Don't buy into the USAmerican theories of race. They aren't universal. "BIPOC" especially is a USAmerican specific term, it is not used in the UK or other settler colonies. Constructs of race and the tribal Other far predated European colonization; race as a colour system that exists today is simply one variation of it. The global apartheid against the mellanated takes many forms, histories and terminology. There are especially no "people of colour" in Asia, Africa, Caribbean and Polynesia. There are only people who live there, and "people of white".

Race is a fake, made-up conceptualization imposed by whoever has power within each region. It's ethnic, cultural and casteist, with no biological basis whatsoever. There is no uniformity, no universalism, no rhyme nor reason to any of it; the only people who know exactly who doesn't belong are the oppressors. I'm seeing concepts like "unambiguously black" floating around the terminally online Western left; any dark-skinned person of the Global South should split their sides laughing at it. Whites have no ambiguity on who the darkies are.

- Read, watch, listen to, play whatever the hell you want, just have the sense to pirate it, and to be very conscious about the narratives they try to smuggle.

- When the US and UK speak, listen with compassionate interest, offer what solidarity you can spare for their downtrodden, and then go back to reading and following your own fucking news. Focus on our own women's and reproductive rights, trans rights, queer histories, rise of fascism, militarisation, anti-blackness, class warfare, nationalist violence, imperialism etc. That is decolonization, that is emancipation from the Western cultural hegemony. Everything else is the bread and circuses of empire, in which both the left and right wing of the West are complicit.

We owe the Global North nothing more than we can each individually afford to extend to them on grounds of common human decency and compassion. Which is a lot more than they will ever reciprocate.

As for Courtly Love itself, it is one of those examples of how the actual medieval world differs somewhat from its cultural presentation:

Courtly Love, in an age that nominally esteemed celibacy as the true ideal (except in all the ways it wasn't), offered a very real challenge and a good example of how the culture that produced Eleanor of Aquitaine differed heavily from the world of Spain, which will be covered in its last days and the start of the medieval era with La Beltranjea and Isabella the Catholic, and that of the Languedoil.

What's now Southern France evolved a rather more hedonistic and openly sexual culture that defied the cultural trends of its age, and because sex always sells even the full distaste of the high tide of the medieval papacy only served to advertise it more, not to suppress it. It was also a part of how the medieval world reimagined the lives of women in the change into the high medieval era, which is a shift that starts around the time of the First Crusade.

Portrait de Femme, Giovanni Francesco Caroto, vers 1505-1510, Collections du Louvre, Paris, France

New archeological find confirms and supports historical theory!

Battle Scene by Lionel Royer

Vintage photo of Petrizzi, Calabria, Italy

20th century - photo by Calabria ieri

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Karelian women from village Vidlitsa,Russia (1927)

Photography by Aleksandr Belikov (1883-1940)