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As far as women and literacy goes, I took a course where the instructor mentioned that women were often taught to read, but not taught to write, since reading and writing were taught as separate skills. She was talking about 15th and 16th century England, but said this may have been the case earlier.
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Jan 31, 2013 07:29
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As a side note, since someone mentioned Braveheart upthread, this: http://medievalscotland.org/scotbiblio/bravehearterrors.shtml is a completely brilliant takedown of it. The author discusses the historical errors in the first two and a half minutes of the movie. There are eighteen.
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Apr 17, 2013 06:55
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For whatever its worth, I've dyed wool using woad, and didn't notice any weird psychological effects, even when I deliberately smeared some of the sludge on me for the sake of SCIENCE!, although it did turn me blue until it wore off. I've spoken to several other people who have a lot of direct skin contact with woad, and all of them had the same experience-woad makes your skin blue, it doesn't give you an overwhelming urge to charge a shield wall. Its entirely possible that berserkers put something into the woad mixture that did mess with them, or that the ritual of painting themselves with woad helped them get into the zone, but the woad itself is unlikely to have done anything, unless they were using some kind of magic Scandanavian woad that is lost to history.
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Apr 21, 2013 23:03
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