Category: History

Helau! – Carnival in Germany

Updated on March 4, 2014 by Sandra Schwab

A big thank you to the Riskies for letting me step in as a temporary contributor to their blog! For my debut, I’m showering you with confetti, for today is the last day of carnival, the “fifth season,” here in Germany. “Carnival in Germany???” some of you might say. “Do Germans have a sense of humor?” If you fall into this group, you have to be very brave now because what I’m going to show you will shock you exceedingly.

There will be a lot of confetti.

And Mr. Johannes Gutenberg wearing a fool’s cap.

Since the Middle Ages the weeks before Ash Wednesday, the start of lent in the Catholic calendar, have been used for celebrations and fool’s days during which the traditional social order was turned upside down. The instutions and rituals of the Church were parodied in “ass masses” and the choosing of a “pseudo-pope”.

In many German areas these carnival customs were lost after the Reformation since the Protestant church got rid of the days of lent before Easter. In Catholic areas, however, carnival continued to be celebrated. In the towns the festivities were organized by the guilds, while the nobility gave masked balls in their palaces and estates. Carnival masks and costumes became more and more intricate and elaborated and were influenced by the Italian commedia dell’ arte.

The modern forms of carnival can be traced back to the years of political restoration in Germany during the early nineteenth century. Modern carnival emerged as a middle-class effort with strong elements of political and military satire. This satirical tradition lives on most strongly in the Rhenish Carnival, which is celebrated particularly in the areas around Mainz, Cologne, and Düsseldorf, the three strongholds of this type of carnival. It is characterised by parades and sessions (“Sitzungen”), which are show events combining song, dance, and comical speeches. The largest of the parades traditionally take place on Rose Monday, the Monday before Ash Wednesday.

In Mainz, the first carnival parade was organised in 1837 by local merchant Nicolaus Krieger, who thought this might be a good way to transform the “vulgar” customs of the common people into something more genteel and something that would attract tourists. (Good thinking, Nick! These days thousands of people not only take part in the Rose Monday parade, but several hundred thousands of people also line the streets.)

In the same year, in 1837, another merchant, Johann Kertell, founded the first of the Mainzer guards, the Ranzengarde (= the Fat-Belly Guards). The guards are the most obvious example of military satire in the Rhenish Carnival, for their costumes are modelled on uniforms of real regiments stationed in the area during the nineteenth century.

In the context of the Rhenish carnival, the guards are responsible for protecting Prince Carnival and for escorting the eleven members of the fool’s committee that oversees the carnival sessions. Just like many real military regiments, the carnival regiments have musical bands, and in Mainz they also have a special carnival march, the Narhalla March, a musical parody of a march composed by Adolphe Adam for his opera Le Brasseur de Preston in 1838. Motifs from that opera were used by one of the founding members of the first carnival club in Mainz, the Mainzer Carneval-Verein (MCV), for a carnival march that was first performed in 1840.

(In this video you can listen to the march at the beginning of the Mainzer TV session of 1985, where it was played when members of all the guards of Mainz escorted the fool’s committee to the session)

I leave you with one last image from the Rose Monday parade – these are the Meenzer Schwellköpp (the swell heads) – and return to my current WIP (also known as Aaaaaaaargh!!!!! or sob), which I need to finish before carnival will be buried tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Posted in Guest, History | Tagged carnival, Sandra Schwab | 14 Replies

The Corcoran

Updated on March 3, 2014 by Diane Gaston

Last week my good friend Victoria Hinshaw (Of Number One London) was in town and together we visited the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

The Corcoran was founded in 1869 by William Wilson Corcoran. In 1897 it moved to its present location, a beautiful building designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Ernest Flagg.

It has these wonderful bronze lions in front. The lions were purchased in 1888 from the estate of Bill Holliday, the founder of the Pony Express. They are copies of originals of Antonio Canova.

The gallery had many noteworthy pieces of American Art, but they also had examples from English artists.

A Gainsborough

A Reynolds

A Raeburn

There was also a beautiful room – The Salon Doré, an 18th century French room that was originally part of the home of the Count d’Orsay and his wife, Princess de Croÿ-Molenbais. The Princess died in childbirth and the Count fled to Germany before the French Revolution and died in poverty.
The room was donated to the Corcoran in 1926.

The Corcoran will no longer exist as a privately endowed museum and art school. Because of financial problems, its art school and building will be taken over by GW University and its art will become part of the National Gallery of Art. I feel like I made my visit just in time!

How’s the weather your way? We’ve got snow AGAIN. In Virginia. In March. Unheard-of.

This Sunday my pal Sally MacKenzie returns for an interview and giveaway of Loving Lord Ash.

Posted in Anything but writing, History, Regency | 5 Replies

Knowing what my characters can’t know yet

Updated on February 20, 2014 by susanna

I have an incomplete manuscript, not yet contracted, with a French hero and a Scottish heroine (we’ll call them Jacques and Isabel, since those are their names) who meet under perilous circumstances during the Napoleonic Wars and are reunited when he seeks her out after the war ends.

Of course, the war in question didn’t have a tidy, straightforward end. And because of that I haven’t made up my mind whether to set the reunion part of the story in 1814, after Napoleon’s original abdication, or in 1815 after Waterloo. Since Jacques in 1814 is deeply in love with Isabel and has no way of knowing Napoleon will be back next spring, the most natural thing for him to do would be to take ship for Scotland while the ink is still drying on the peace treaty. But then I’d have to deal with the Waterloo elephant in the room, since every one of my readers will know what’s coming.

Photo by Brandon Daniel, used under Creative Commons license

But as elephants in the room go, at least this one is relatively small and cute. Once Waterloo is over, Britain and France will remain at peace (or, eventually, allied with each other in war) for 198 years and counting. Jacques and Isabel can live out a happy lifetime with no insurmountable conflicts between their private and public loyalties, make the occasional trip back to Scotland to see her family, and so on. (Yes, they choose to live in France. I love Scotland as much as the next woman of partial Highland descent, but his family has a vineyard and winery along the Dordogne River. To me that’s a no-brainer.)

Other future elephants in the room present greater challenges. I can never read Rilla of Ingleside, when they’re all happy at the end that the Great War is over at last, without the melancholy thought that Rilla will get to go through this all over again with her own children once WWII comes around. If she and Ken marry in 1919 or 1920 and have a son shortly thereafter, he’ll be just old enough to enlist in 1939 or ’40! And while I’ve long forgotten the title, I once read a medieval romance that ended in something like 1345. I had trouble totally buying into the Happily Ever After because I knew the Black Death was right around the corner.

Is this just me, or do other readers and writers weigh characters’ happy endings against what history holds for them?

Posted in History, Writing | Tagged Reading and Writing, Susanna Fraser, Waterloo | 9 Replies

The Pride & Prejudice Ball

Updated on February 6, 2014 by Janet Mullany

I have to rush off to do various strange things today so here’s a fabulous documentary that I believe has aired on some PBS stations (but not on mine yet). It’s a recreation of the Netherfield Ball at Chawton House and explains what Austen’s readers would have understood about birth, wealth and social standing at such an event. A team of experts, led by Amanda Vickery, reproduce the clothes, food and setting.

Pour yourself a nice cup of … something or other and enjoy. What surprised you about the conclusions the historians reached?

Posted in History, Jane Austen | Tagged Amanda Vickery, Chawton House, Netherfield | Leave a reply

Dining at the Palace

Updated on January 31, 2014 by Myretta

I have a fun book from Royal Collection Publications called For the Royal Table, Dining at the Palace. I wouldn’t actually classify this as a research book, as it skims through the history of entertaining by England’s monarchs with a focus on Elizabeth II. No index to speak of, but lots of great pictures and some fun tidbits from dinners held by past monarchs.

For example, in discussing glassware, it mentions that

Glassware ordered by George IV – 1808

In 1802 Frederick, Duke of York (second son of George III) ordered a complete glass service for a dessert course from the chandelier manufacturers Hancock, Shepherd & Rixon. This was intended for a banquet to entertain Tsar Alexander I of Russia. It was not only a service of drinking glasses; it included elaborate candelabra, known as lustres, and dessert stands for displaying fruit. Glass was considered an elegant alternative to porcelain for showing off the dessert course.

Carême in the kitchen – Brighton Pavilion

Antonin Carême, the only French chef to work for the royal family, is well represented. Although Carême remained in England only six months, he was busy.

He invented dishes such as Pike à la Régence – a pike stuffed with quenelles of smelt and crayfish butter, and dressed with truffles, crayfish tails, sole fillets and bacon and garnished with truffles, slices of eel, mushrooms, crayfish tails, oysters, smelts, carp roes and tongues and 10 garnished skewers of sole, crayfish and truffles. Just a light lunch for Prinny.

Banqueting Table – George IV Coronation

Carême was also big on food as decoration. He decorated the table with structures resembling architectural follies and ruins, using any material available – from icing sugar and confectioner’s paste to cardboard, wood, glass, silk, sugar, powdered marble, way and coloured butter. Not something you’d want for dessert.

He was around long enough to produce an over-the-top banqueting table for George IV’s coronation.

The accounts for the decoration of the banqueting table… include a detailed carpenters bill for a large ornamental temple for the table with eight reeded columns and four circular pedestals for figures at the angles, with four entablatures over to support a dome. The wooden structure would have been decorated with sugar and marzipan and further edible items. Indeed, after the King had left the banqueting table, the guests destroyed all the edible parts of the decoration in their desire to keep a souvenir of the event.

And speaking of desserts, they weren’t too puny before Carême arrive. Newspapers described the the dessert course of a banquet held for George III at Windsor thus:

The ornamental parts of the confectionery were numerous and splendid. There were temples four feet high, in with the different stories were sweetmeats. The various orders of architecture were also done with inimitable taste… the dessert comprehended all the hothouse was competent to afford — and, indeed, more than it was thought art could produce at this time of year. There were a profusion of pine[apples], strawberries of every denomination, peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries of each kind, from the Kentish to the Morella, plus and raspberries with the best and richest preserved fruits, as well as those that are in syrup.

Voila! Dessert! Sort of makes your strawberry shortcake look pretty paltry, doesn’t it?

This is a fun book with interesting tidbits, but not something you absolutely need in your reference library. Heaven knows why I have it.

What would you recommend for food references for our period?

Posted in History, Regency, Research, Risky Regencies | 1 Reply