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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Borgia vs The Borgias

In a real historical piece, if they tried to make everything slavishly right any show would be unwatchable, because there would be too much that the audience couldn’t understand. The audience would be constantly distracted by details like un-filmably dark building interiors, ugly missing teeth, infants being given broken-winged songbirds as disposable toys to play with, crush, and throw away, and Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles. Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.

...

Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time. I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: “Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?” Which do you want, to communicate with the audience, or to be accurate? I choose A.

(The article then goes on to suggest "historicity" vs "historical accuracy": aka just pick your battles and try to maintain a history-like vibe)

It's pretty funny that the most pilloried Word of God from JK Rowling (well, maybe barring the declaration that Dumbledore is gay) is probably a result of her knowing the above fact about Versailles and just adding it to her world.

If the audience doesn't reward you for this and it actively harms their SOD, why do it?

Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.

I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.

Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles

So far as I can tell, it was mostly propagandists later on who said that, or it was a metaphor.

I ran it through ChatGPT and /r/askhistorians for a source and apparently it isn't a pure invention. The rumors about a person peeing on themselves weren't about Marie Antoinette either (though the below book's assertion that it was cheerfully accepted is weird since the original source is unflattering). Tony Spaworth's book on it does mostly complain about the smell leaking from nearby latrines so maybe the regularity of that was conflated with people in the public galleries "pissing in all corners" as Princess Charlotte apparently complained being standard practice.

Sanitation, or lack of it, did something to level these differences in living conditions. Although French people of the time saw Louis XIV’s Versailles as a gold standard of refinement, older habits died hard. Versailles “cheerfully accepted” the princesse d’Harcourt, whose obnoxious behavior—she sometimes relieved herself in her skirts, nonchalantly leaving a foul trail behind her for the servants to clean up—was like a throwback to a less polite age, when aristocrats had bothered themselves less with self-restraint.

Even members of the royal family—women as well as men, the king included—thought nothing of giving audiences or chatting to intimates while installed on the closestool. In 1723 the high-living Regent received Saint-Simon in this way at Versailles the morning after one of his late-night suppers, horrifying his friend by his befuddled manner and thick voice. Within a month the Regent was dead.

The privies of Louis XIV’s Versailles have so far escaped close study. In the eighteenth century there were public latrines placed in the corridors and stairwells of the palace, the Grand Commons, and the other annexes: these latrines consisted of a room with a wooden seat, or lunette, closed by a cover in a vain attempt to shut in the odors, and connected by a waste pipe to a cesspit. Some were kept locked and the key distributed to nearby residents.

Versailles was no different from Paris in the squalor of this type of latrine. For instance, in 1785 we find seven lodgers in the attics of the Grand Commons, among them one of the king’s dressers and one of the queen’s chaplains, petitioning for the closing down of a fourth-floor privy because “the smell penetrates the lodgings … and infects furnishing, clothes and linen,” as well as “serving certain riff-raff who use it as a meeting place.”

Noble courtiers fared no better. In 1766 the king’s daughter, Madame Adélaïde, demanded new rooms for a lady-in-waiting lodged above the queen’s apartment, “far too near the privy.” Two years earlier the comtesse du Châtelet, who lived in the attics of the south wing, complained of the smell from the nearby privy and also—a glimpse of the cheek-by-jowl living at Versailles—of the fact that she could be seen in her cabinet from its window.

To the smell was added the risk of leaks, whether through the floor of latrines to lodgings beneath them, from which not even the rooms of the royal children were safe, or from iron or lead pipes prone to blockage and corrosion, like the ones that let their contents “leak and poison everything” in Marie-Antoinette’s kitchen.

If people found the latrines closed, they would relieve themselves in the public corridor, as happened in 1741 after a privy in the attics of the north wing was converted into a lodging. People did the same in the first-floor gallery of the south wing. When the newly married dauphin and dauphine were lodged here in 1745, iron barriers were placed in front of the arcades opposite their rooms “to prevent indecency and dirtiness.” In 1762 the comte de Compans complained about the passersby and kitchen boys who “attended to their needs” in an inner courtyard in the same wing, “often breaking his windows,” presumably because he remonstrated with them. Bombelles, an admirer of Versailles under Louis XVI, wrote in his journal that more effort could be made to address the “dirtiness” of the public galleries.

I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.

Not being able to argue for the status quo, the powers that be set out to slander our past. Almost every widely held negative belief that I heard about it, turned out to be inaccurate in the way you described.

Pink was for boys and blue was for girls as recently as the victorians.

It's fairly easy to find references in Google Books both ways in the first half of the 20th century, though the only non-fictional contemporary one with an opinion I find asserts that blue is for boys and pink is for girls. This is post-Victorian (and American, besides).

I find nothing from the Victorian era, the only thing I find before the 20th century is this 1833 work, which also asserts that "pink is for girls".

I am reminded of fanfiction. You can write an alternate universe where things happen that didn't happen in the source material. You can also make a mistake and write fanon--things that people think are true about the work, but really aren't.

Every so often someone writes a common piece of fanon, gets called on it, and claims that that's okay because they are writing an alternate universe. Or even admits the fanon and says "well, I choose to make an alternate universe where this fanon is true".

I reckon that most people having rotten/missing teeth was mostly a 19th Century and 20th Century phenomenon, driven by the new availability of cheap sugar. Medieval people consumed little to no sugar, so their teeth were generally healthy.

Little sugar but much bread, and likely the bread was filled with substantial grit from threshing and milling.

They could grind them down or chip them. I somehow managed with a much more forgiving diet.

Yes, interesting little factoid (if it is a fact) I learned recently: Elizabeth I had bad teeth precisely because sugar was now the luxury, available, new, sweetening and cooking ingredient. Of course cooks went mad showing off what they could do with sugar, and of course everyone who could afford it loved to use it.

I get the point about clown pants, but going to the other extreme and having all your characters in black (fake) leather is equally bad. And that just exacerbates the problem, because if every show and movie has "communicating with the audience, dress them according to our values and tastes" costuming, that shapes the expectations of viewers, so you'll never get "in fact, bright colours and dyes meant high status" correct costumes.

There was this romantic potboiler/disaster movie from 2014 called Pompeii. Overall deeply mediocre. But one small detail that I really liked was that they made the soldiers uniforms a half-step between accurate Roman armor and modern black tactical body armor that you would see a SWAT team or special forces wearing. Not particularly period appropriate but it made the solders unusually imposing for a period piece, because your brain is subconsciously reading them like a modern military unit.

In my opinion, the old dramas from the 1950s and 60s did the best job of balancing historically accurate settings with modern expectations.

Yes, it's a coordination problem.

But the issue is that there's no benefit to solving said problem. Why would Ridley Scott make his movie slightly worse to correct the impression that the Vikings dressed like goths?

Especially since the misconception may last precisely because it is of no great importance to anyone. People can find counterarguments to all sorts of sacred truths today...when they care.

Why would Ridley Scott make his movie slightly worse to correct the impression that the Vikings dressed like goths?

Because that leads to Christopher Nolan dressing Bronze Age Greeks like they're the Batman.

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