Perhaps this is fitting for Halloween... but I just had to mention my new obsession...witches.

Strangely enough when you study Early Modern England and you have a knack of finding stuff about Puritans and fanatical religious groups... witches appear and I love reading about them, studying the process of finding them and how they prosecuted them.


I have effectively gone down the rabbit hole at this point and found a new obsession.

Suffolk, England apparently, in the 1500s was a hotbed for witches and so I am currently reading all I can about this.

Happy Halloween! 

Violence

You know, there are moments when I read something and I feel the immediate need to share. This just occurred as I read some of Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen. 

 

Take note of the dates associated with the text as I explain this awesome story. So, apparently French villages liked other French villages about as much as hipster coffee dude likes Starbucks ( I like both btw). To often settle inter-village conflict by actually going into physical battle... Described as a struggle with massive injury using staves, stones, cudgels, gouging, and biting. Yep, if Jean in one village thought Louis in another gave him the stink eye... Each village would basically assault each other until they got worn out. This was the 19th century btw, not the Middle Ages lol. Gotta love history.

Research

The persistent bother with having some sort of ongoing blog and having a very busy life...resides in the fact that there are huge swaths of time where I completely forget that I had a blog in the first place. It is not personal or intentional, I just have so much going on that I forget.

I have now survived my first full month of a PhD program without falling completely apart and dying on the inside. I am enjoying my European and Pedagogy courses and I feel like I am on the right path.

On the educational/research side... I have read some pretty cool things.



There was a village in  what is now Germany that is fantastic because they secretly (I say secretly because most of them tried to deny it at first) ritually buried a live bull at a crossroad to stop an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease in the village...yea you heard me right.

Check the book out here:

Can you imagine this conversation in the beginning... 
Hey guys we have to stop this disease, it could kill all our cows.

Oh man yea, but what are we going to do?

Well I heard that in a few villages over they had a pig that was sick and they did this and well, it worked I think.

What did they do

Well... You see... they took a male pig to the crossroads at twilight and buried him alive.

Uhhh...that sounds crazy and kind of pagan.

Yea, but it worked.

LETS DO IT!

Sad Cow does not like this idea.