Category: Uncategorized

i’m sad thinking about where emily lacey left off in the finale and trying to make myself feel better by imagining her in a college au:

  • showing up to every lecture fifteen minutes late with a large, iced 7/11 coffee
  • and always bringing something unhealthy like a donut or muffin and eating it really fast while she takes notes,
  • in a wrinkled flannel and high-waisted jeans and like, somewhat unlaced doc martens, wearing limousine-window-tint-grade sunglasses
  • one-night standing rich frat bros, stealing their various designer apparel while they’re sleeping and selling it on craigslist

autrenecherche:

I’ve talked about this one before, but it’s one of my favorite among the documentaries I’ve watched recently! 

“For Music and Monarchy was an object lesson in premium documentary television. Firstly and most importantly, it was not dumbed down. Secondly, despite the familiarity of the period, a fresh and fascinating truffle of information was unearthed with each one of Starkey’s pokes. Thirdly, the pacing of his presentation, the order of his material, and the time spent on each segment, was unfailingly elegant. Finally, there were lots and lots of sublime performances of the most delicious early music.

In the first of a four-part series, Starkey explored the stories of the composer kings, Henry V and Henry VIII, and charted the development of the uniquely elaborate and luscious English choral style of the 16th century. Whereas Henry V took a full choir, along with their vestments and sacred banners, along with him to Agincourt (to beseech God for His intervention during the battle), Henry VIII tended to compose praises of wine, women and song. Later, as the Protestant reformers threatened to annihilate English music and replace it with dour plainness, it was Elizabeth I who rescued our musical heritage, preserved it in her Chapels Royal, and heralded a musical golden age.

As Starkey put it, “because of the way music operates, I think it bursts out of time”. This may seem hyperbolic, but it was nothing short of breathtaking to hear music composed by monarchs, played precisely as they had intended, in the places they had intended it to be played.”

(Source: https://autrenecherche.tumblr.com/)

autrenecherche:

“[Henry VIII] had over 2,000 pieces of tapestry, the largest collection ever
recorded. Only one or two per cent remain in the royal palaces. His books have
fared better. His library at Whitehall was made up of books catalogued in two
numerical series, one going up to 910, the other to 1,450. Several of these
remain in the Old Royal Library, which is now in the British Library. The
losses from the library at Greenwich, which numbered 329 volumes, were more
severe and only twenty-seven have been identified, all in the library of
Trinity College, Oxford.

In
fact only his munitions remain occasionally intact. The string of castles and
forts he built along the south coast still stand, whereas his palaces have
vanished; his armour and weapons, lodged now as then in the Tower, survive in
prodigious quantities; even his loss of his warship, the Mary Rose, has been
our gain.

Otherwise
the losses have done incalculable harm, both to the king’s reputation and to
our understanding of him. For, by an irony of time, what Henry destroyed has
survived better than what he built. The palaces have vanished, but the ruins of
the monasteries, whose confiscated wealth built those same palaces, stand as a
mute indictment of Henry’s policies. The achievement of Henry’s victims, More
and Fisher, as it was other-worldly, survives; the king’s own glory, as it was
this-worldly, has gone.

The
result is a gross imbalance. We judge Henry simply on the negative side of the
account. This is large, and I am not pretending otherwise. But so is the credit
side: if Henry destroyed and dispersed more than any other king of England, he
also built and accumulated more.” 

–David Starkey | Published in History Today, Volume 41: Issue 6, June 1991