Category: Georgian Era

More Early Modern Women Adventurers (… and others)

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You read my post about Mary Ambree and Dianne Dugaw’s scholarship on women warriors in popular 16th-18th century English culture, and now you want more, you say? You’re in luck: the excellent Stuff you Missed in History Class podcast (which I listen to a lot these days, while driving) has made a few pertinent episodes recently. Here they are: Catalina de Erauso, “the Lieutenant Nun.” Not English, in this case—she was what ended up being called Basque—but a fascinating figure all the same, she was a runaway from a convent (and not actually a nun) as well as a cross-dressing …

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How to Play Hazard (The Dice Game)

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Here’s something I came across researching the book project I’m working on right now, set in early Georgian London: hazard, a dice game with crazy rules, though it’s the ancestor of the simplified dice game craps, which I’m pretty sure is familiar to anyone reading this. Kristen Koster has a reasonably good summary of the game here, but I figured I’d try write it up as well, and see if I couldn’t make the rules a little simpler to follow. I figured some notes about cheating would also be appropriate, since that was widespread in dice games historically. Whether you’re …

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Mary Ambree and Female Warriors

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Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of writers of fantasy talk about historical female warriors—the historicity of women marching into battle alongside men—and there’s obviously value in looking at history, because there are plenty of dumbasses out there who will be quick to say something stupid like, “But women didn’t march into battle! That’s dumb!” There will be nitwits who will say it’s feminist claptrap, or unbelievable, or implausible, or whatever. (I mean, I suppose we should spend time correcting such ignorance and stupidity when we encounter it, at least occasionally, right? So: yes, it is plausible. There definitely were societies where women …

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Street Mobs and Cyber-Mobs

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A discussion of the parallels between cybermob behaviours and the original mobs of Georgian London. The parallels are pretty profound, and maybe there’s some lessons to be learned from how all of this was dealt with the first time around.

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