You gotta love that the Brehons were even thinking of the crazy cat ladies.
question, and feel free to answer with real info or total bullshit (i like both): why was this an issue of concern for lawmakers? like, were there disputes over cat names? what problem was this seeking to solve?
I’m going off memory and this is going to sound like BS, but it’s not, I went to school for this, lol.
Cat’s were an important part of keeping a house in the medieval era. Rats, mice and roaches were known to be disease carriers and keeping a good hunting cat was believed to be a good ward against those animals and their diseases. (Of course, with the exception of plague, this is true.)
But not all cats are created equal, same as now, some were content to just sit around and mooch off the milk. (Don’t feed your cat cows milk, we know better now.)
Medieval Irish cat law, or
“
Catshlechta
“ Was a means of solving the lazy cat problem. How do you determine what a cat is worth? By it’s merit of course. How do you know what it’s merits are? By it’s name.
So a good hunting cat would be given a name that reflected what its positive traits were regarding it’s job. (Everything was work back then, even for cats.) In example…
“Meone” meant “Mighty roar” and it was considered to be able to scare beasts away (both pests and supernatural creatures.) It was worth 2 cows.
“Cruipne” or “Mighty paw” was a thrice proven mouser, and worth three ounces of coinage. usually assigned to protect areas of wealth like grain stores or cattle housings.
“Breone” or “Fireside cat” was good at both hunting and purring (I.E affection.) and was worth 3 whole cows.
“Baircne” a female cat (Owned by a woman usually) said to be good at protecting ships and women. It was worth whatever you could get a woman’s husband would pay for it.
Cats were usually kept in the same housing as the cows and were looked after by whomever fed said cows, hence the relation to cow costs.
Also, gender mattered. Male cats were noted to be far more lazy, and were worth about half of whatever a female cat was. (Don’t ask me how they sexed the cats, they didn’t leave us that detail.)
There’s also a set of laws for dogs called “Conshlechta”
.
Okay how are those names pronounced though
And what would a lazy, dumb cat be called because I might need to change my cat’s nickname
With the usual caveat that we don’t actually know how medieval languages were pronounced, and that this is a reconstructed pronunciation based on historical linguistics:
Meone: /’meo:ne/ meh-OH-neh, with stress on the meh.
Cruipne /’crubne/ CRUB-neh.
Breone /’breo:ne/ breh-OH-neh, stress on breh.
Baircne /’bar’gne/ BAR-ug-neh, with the ‘ug’ syllable much shorter than the other two syllables.
last night I was denouncing some forgettable shitbag to my girlfriend and said “even the ground wouldn’t want him to rot in it” and was instantly projected into the body of a gnarled old irish woman 200 years ago, spinning thread and spitting on the ground as I bitch and look out to sea.
When you bitch so hard you astral project intobone of your past lives
Le Sommeil [The Sleepers], which depicts two women entwined in a post-coital embrace, caused a stir when it was first shown in the 1870s. The police were called in, and the painting was not shown again until the 1980s. But its brief showing had an influence on a number of contemporary artists, and helped challenge the taboos associated with lesbian relationships. For modern audiences it’s a good reminder that people in the 19th century were not ignorant of lesbian relationships, as we tend to believe. And it’s pretty damn sexy, don’t you think?
They called the police on this lesbian painting.
The best part is, the lesbian embrace isn’t even the biggest thing that made the painting so controversial, it was the art style. People in the artistic community at the time were wholly familiar with sapphic relationships being portrayed in art, but were used to these scenes being portrayed in the ‘academic art’ style, which consisted of smooth, simplistic, idealised versions of the nude female form. This often went hand in hand with the depiction of Roman & Greek allegories to illustrate certain ideals (think Cabanel’s Birth of Venus). Courbet’s journey into realism was met by heavy critique from the academic movement, as the women he painted were, well, more realistic. Leaving in details such as the rolls of fat around the ribs acted as a blunt reminder to the audience that these were not euphoric goddesses caressing in ecstasy, but ordinary women having a nap together after making love. Other realist paintings suffered the same controversy, Manet’s Olympia is a perfect example, where the problem was not that the painting depicted a nude woman in an erotic pose, but the fact that she was just an ordinary courtesan, given an identity & portrayed in a place of power & control. Realism humanized the female form in art, & removed it from its previous role as a representation of the ideal.
So what disgusted people about the painting wasn’t so much that Le Sommeil depicted two women, but rather that it depicted two ‘real’ women.
Iron in the Sand 