When he wasn’t hunting them, torturing them, or having them captured for his large zoo, he had them sing for him. In 1450, having grown tired of dressing up his pigs in clothing and wigs and sticking them with pins, he ordered the Abbot of Baigne to create a new musical instrument that incorporated pigs into its design. The abbot did as he was told, and before you knew it, there it was: a piano-type instrument that, when you played a key, stabbed a pig with a spike, making it cry. The pigs were arranged by the pitch in which they screamed, and by all accounts, the songs played were recognizable and the king and his attendants enjoyed the show immensely.
SIDE NOTE: When Louis XI was feeling especially cruel, he ordered a game of manhunt in which prisoners were covered with deerskin and then chased and torn apart by the king’s hounds.
ANOTHER SIDE NOTE: The inventor Athanasius Kircher designed a similar device in 1650—except he used cats. Here’s a description in the inventor’s own words (from his
Musurgia Universalis):
“In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.”
Dangerous Fashion Statements
As I write, today’s most popular fashion statement is skinny jeans. And as with any fad, it must soon be followed by the medical condition it causes. Skinny jeans are said to cause
meraligia paresthetica,
which is also known as tingling thigh syndrome.
The New England Journal of Medicine
also warns of
jeans folliculitus,
which is a skin rash. Well, fashion throughout the course of history has been dangerous, as well as deadly. But remember, before you laugh at our ancestors, remember those skinny jeans.
Shoe fashion throughout history seemed more about danger than anything else. In Europe during the 1300s, the aristocracy began wearing shoes with long, pointed tips. (The best were shaped to look like male genitals and stuffed with fabric.) As the nobility were always seeking to outdo one another, the shoes got longer and longer until everyone at court was tripping all over the place. Instead of coming to their senses, however, they took care of the problem by tying the tips of their shoes to their legs with rope.
High heels have been around for quite some time. In sixteenth-century Europe, women’s heels reached the incredible height of two to three feet! These shoes, called
chopines,
proved useful since they kept women’s dress hems clean when walking along the poop-filled streets. (Where do you think the maids emptied the chamber pots, anyway?) The Catholic Church also approved, since if you can barely walk, surely you can’t dance … and if you can’t dance, well … This fashion statement fell out of favor eventually as women needed something to hold on to (a maid or a long cane) at all times, and they kept falling over and severely hurting themselves.
Louis XIV reigned France from 1643–1715. At the height of his powers in the early 1700s, the diminutive Louis wore high heels to make himself appear taller. Soon, it was all the rage, and all the aristocracy was wearing them. Louis’s heels were often up to five inches high, and as the royal court made theirs bigger, so did he. Soon everyone was tottering around until Louis decreed that no one else’s heels could be bigger than his.
Foot binding was utilized in China for around a thousand years to emulate fashionable tiny feet. It involved breaking the arch and then wrapping the foot, resulting in an approximately three-inch foot from toe to heal, as well as a
SIDE NOTE: When Louis XI was feeling especially cruel, he ordered a game of manhunt in which prisoners were covered with deerskin and then chased and torn apart by the king’s hounds.
ANOTHER SIDE NOTE: The inventor Athanasius Kircher designed a similar device in 1650—except he used cats. Here’s a description in the inventor’s own words (from his
Musurgia Universalis):
“In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.”
Dangerous Fashion Statements
As I write, today’s most popular fashion statement is skinny jeans. And as with any fad, it must soon be followed by the medical condition it causes. Skinny jeans are said to cause
meraligia paresthetica,
which is also known as tingling thigh syndrome.
The New England Journal of Medicine
also warns of
jeans folliculitus,
which is a skin rash. Well, fashion throughout the course of history has been dangerous, as well as deadly. But remember, before you laugh at our ancestors, remember those skinny jeans.
Shoe fashion throughout history seemed more about danger than anything else. In Europe during the 1300s, the aristocracy began wearing shoes with long, pointed tips. (The best were shaped to look like male genitals and stuffed with fabric.) As the nobility were always seeking to outdo one another, the shoes got longer and longer until everyone at court was tripping all over the place. Instead of coming to their senses, however, they took care of the problem by tying the tips of their shoes to their legs with rope.
High heels have been around for quite some time. In sixteenth-century Europe, women’s heels reached the incredible height of two to three feet! These shoes, called
chopines,
proved useful since they kept women’s dress hems clean when walking along the poop-filled streets. (Where do you think the maids emptied the chamber pots, anyway?) The Catholic Church also approved, since if you can barely walk, surely you can’t dance … and if you can’t dance, well … This fashion statement fell out of favor eventually as women needed something to hold on to (a maid or a long cane) at all times, and they kept falling over and severely hurting themselves.
Louis XIV reigned France from 1643–1715. At the height of his powers in the early 1700s, the diminutive Louis wore high heels to make himself appear taller. Soon, it was all the rage, and all the aristocracy was wearing them. Louis’s heels were often up to five inches high, and as the royal court made theirs bigger, so did he. Soon everyone was tottering around until Louis decreed that no one else’s heels could be bigger than his.
Foot binding was utilized in China for around a thousand years to emulate fashionable tiny feet. It involved breaking the arch and then wrapping the foot, resulting in an approximately three-inch foot from toe to heal, as well as a
Similar Books
