Ring-a-ding-ding
An excellent afternoon yesterday at the Getty Center's exhibit on daily life in Paris in the 18th Century. For one thing, the Getty Center is always beautiful. For another, prints - even high-quality prints - never come anywhere CLOSE to actual paintings. There was some truly stunning stuff there, from one of my favorite periods. Portraits of people who didn't make history - minor nobility or officials, but rendered beautiful and very human. My friend Laurie (of apatchofweedsinparadise.wordpress.com and partyknowitalls.wordpress.com) pointed out that not one of the women in the portraits - even a wedding portrait - were wearing wedding-rings. A puzzle, since I remember clearly reading that Marie Antoinette had to pick out a ring that fit properly for her wedding ceremony - and surely the Book of Common Prayer wedding ceremony which includes "with this ring, I thee wed" was written in the reign of Henry VIII, some 200 years before this period. Medieval sources mention wedding rings.
Was this just French? Just French upper-class? (Still doesn't explain Marie Antoinette...) Were wedding-rings something the English did (and their colonists) and not Europeans?
To my great disappointment and vexation, the Getty's main bookstore - the Credit Card Haemhorrage-Zone - was closed, though in one of their little outstation shops I picked up the book from the exhibit, and yet another Holy Grail in my collection of What Things Cost: Daniel Roche's The People of Paris. Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for: pinpoint descriptions, maniacally intensive research from public records (which, in the case of Paris, unfortunately mostly got burned in various revolutions and upheavals) and police-courts. Though the period of the book is the 18th century, it is a vast help in re-creating the Paris of 1827 - just in time for the read-through of the edit of Ran Away , which I'll get back to as soon as I finish grading exams (what I should be doing now, not messing around on-line).
Bet he doesn't mention wedding-rings, though.
Good news on another front: my website, barbarahambly.com, is back up, yay!
My goal this summer is to get two more stories up onto it.
Was this just French? Just French upper-class? (Still doesn't explain Marie Antoinette...) Were wedding-rings something the English did (and their colonists) and not Europeans?
To my great disappointment and vexation, the Getty's main bookstore - the Credit Card Haemhorrage-Zone - was closed, though in one of their little outstation shops I picked up the book from the exhibit, and yet another Holy Grail in my collection of What Things Cost: Daniel Roche's The People of Paris. Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for: pinpoint descriptions, maniacally intensive research from public records (which, in the case of Paris, unfortunately mostly got burned in various revolutions and upheavals) and police-courts. Though the period of the book is the 18th century, it is a vast help in re-creating the Paris of 1827 - just in time for the read-through of the edit of Ran Away , which I'll get back to as soon as I finish grading exams (what I should be doing now, not messing around on-line).
Bet he doesn't mention wedding-rings, though.
Good news on another front: my website, barbarahambly.com, is back up, yay!
My goal this summer is to get two more stories up onto it.
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