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Pig-faced Women
Legends featuring pig-faced women originated roughly simultaneously in Holland, England and France in the late 1630s. The stories tell of a wealthy woman whose body is of normal human appearance, but whose face is that of a pig. In the earliest forms of the story, the woman's pig-like appearance is the result of witchcraft. Following her wedding day, the pig-faced woman's new husband is granted the choice of having her appear beautiful to him but pig-like to others, or pig-like to him and beautiful to others. When her husband tells her that the choice is hers, the enchantment is broken and her pig-like appearance vanishes. These stories became particularly popular in England, and later in Ireland. The magical elements gradually vanished from the story, and the existence of pig-faced women began to be treated as fact. The story became particularly widespread in Dublin in the early 19th century, where it became widely believed that reclusive 18th-century philanthropist Griselda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teratology
Teratology is the study of abnormalities of physiological development in organisms during their life span. It is a sub-discipline in medical genetics which focuses on the classification of congenital abnormalities in dysmorphology. The related term developmental toxicity includes all manifestations of abnormal development that are caused by environmental insult. These may include growth retardation, delayed mental development or other congenital disorders without any structural malformations. Teratogens are substances that may cause birth defects via a toxic effect on an embryo or fetus. Known teratogens include: retinol, thalidomide, mercury, alcohol, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin. Etymology The term was borrowed in 1842 from the French , where it was formed in 1830 from the Greek (word stem ), meaning "sign sent by the gods, portent, marvel, monster", and ('' -ology''), used to designate a discourse, treaty, science, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Friar Bacon And Friar Bungay
''Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay'', originally entitled ''The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay'', is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy written by Robert Greene. Widely regarded as Greene's best and most significant play, it has received more critical attention than any other of Greene's dramas. History The date of authorship of ''Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay'' cannot be fixed with certainty on the basis of the available evidence; the play is normally dated to the 1588–92 period. 1589 may be the single most likely year: a line in the play's opening scene, "Next Friday is S. James", fixes St. James's Day (25 July, the feast day of St. James the Great) as a Friday, which was true in 1589. Some critics argue that the magic in Greene's play was inspired by the magic in Marlowe's '' Doctor Faustus,'' (''c.'' 1589–92) which if valid would mean that ''Bacon and Bungay'' must post-date ''Faustus;'' Greene's play also has relationships with several other plays ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Greene (dramatist)
Robert Greene (1558–1592) was an English author popular in his day, and now best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, '' Greene's Groats-Worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance'', widely believed to contain an attack on William Shakespeare. Robert Greene was a popular Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer known for his negative critiques of his colleagues. He is said to have been born in Norwich. He attended Cambridge where he received a BA in 1580, and an M.A. in 1583 before moving to London, where he arguably became the first professional author in England. Greene was prolific and published in many genres including romances, plays and autobiography. Family According to the author Brenda Richardson, the "chief problem" in compiling a biography of Robert Greene was his name. ''Robert'' was one of the most popular given names of the era and ''Greene'' was a common surname. L. H. Newcomb suggests that Robert Greene "was probably the Robert Greene, s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in Western, Central, and Southern Europe that developed during the Early Middle Ages and continued until its dissolution in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. From the accession of Otto I in 962 until the twelfth century, the Empire was the most powerful monarchy in Europe. Andrew Holt characterizes it as "perhaps the most powerful European state of the Middle Ages". The functioning of government depended on the harmonic cooperation (dubbed ''consensual rulership'' by Bernd Schneidmüller) between monarch and vassals but this harmony was disturbed during the Salian period. The empire reached the apex of territorial expansion and power under the House of Hohenstaufen in the mid-thirteenth century, but overextending led to partial collapse. On 25 December 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne as emperor, reviving the title in Western Europe, more than three centuries after the fall of the earlier ancient Weste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chapbook
A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. In early modern Europe a chapbook was a type of printed street literature. Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered booklets, usually printed on a single sheet folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages. They were often illustrated with crude woodcuts, which sometimes bore no relation to the text (much like today's stock photos), and were often read aloud to an audience. When illustrations were included in chapbooks, they were considered popular prints. The tradition of chapbooks arose in the 16th century, as soon as printed books became affordable, and rose to its height during the 17th and 18th centuries. Many different kinds of ephemera and popular or folk literature were published as chapbooks, such as almanacs, children's literature, folk tales, ballads, nursery rhymes, pamphlets, poetry, and political and religious tracts. The term "chapbook" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys (; 23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English diarist and naval administrator. He served as administrator of the Royal Navy and Member of Parliament and is most famous for the diary he kept for a decade. Pepys had no maritime experience, but he rose to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both King Charles II and King James II through patronage, diligence, and his talent for administration. His influence and reforms at the Admiralty were important in the early professionalisation of the Royal Navy. The detailed private diary that Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London. Early life Pepys was born in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, London, on 23 Febru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Marriage Of Sir Gawain
"The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is an English Arthurian ballad, collected as Child Ballad 31. Found in the Percy Folio, it is a fragmented account of the story of Sir Gawain and the loathly lady, which has been preserved in fuller form in the medieval poem '' The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle''. The loathly lady episode itself dates at least back to Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" from '' The Canterbury Tales''. Unlike most of the Child Ballads, but like the Arthurian " King Arthur and King Cornwall" and " The Boy and the Mantle", "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is not a folk ballad but a song for professional minstrels. Synopsis One Christmas, at Tarn Wadling near Carlisle, King Arthur is challenged by a menacing 'baron.' To avoid a fight, Arthur agrees to return the following New Year, on pain of forfeit of his land and liberty, and tell the baron 'what thing it is / That a woman most desire.' Arthur returns to Carlisle. The following New Year, still without an a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Wife Of Bath's Tale
"The Wife of Bath's Tale" ( enm, The Tale of the Wyf of Bathe) is among the best-known of Geoffrey Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tales''. It provides insight into the role of women in the Late Middle Ages and was probably of interest to Chaucer himself, for the character is one of his most developed ones, with her Prologue twice as long as her Tale. He also goes so far as to describe two sets of clothing for her in his General Prologue. She holds her own among the bickering pilgrims, and evidence in the manuscripts suggests that although she was first assigned a different, plainer tale—perhaps the one told by the Shipman—she received her present tale as her significance increased. She calls herself both Alyson and Alys in the prologue, but to confuse matters these are also the names of her 'gossib' (a close friend or gossip), whom she mentions several times, as well as many female characters throughout ''The Canterbury Tales''. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the "Prologue of the Wife of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Loathly Lady
The loathly lady ( cy, dynes gas, Motif D732 in Stith Thompson's motif index), is a tale type commonly used in medieval literature, most famously in Geoffrey Chaucer's '' The Wife of Bath's Tale''. The motif is that of a woman who appears unattractive (ugly, ''loathly'') but undergoes a transformation upon being approached by a man in spite of her unattractiveness, becoming extremely desirable. It is then revealed that her ugliness was the result of a curse which was broken by the hero's action. Irish legend The loathly lady can be found in ''The Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid Mugmedon'', in which Niall of the Nine Hostages proves himself the rightful High King of Ireland by embracing her, because she turns out to personify the sovereignty of the territory (and is therefore sometimes referred in scholarship as a 'sovereignty goddess'). The motif can also be found in stories of the earlier high kings Lugaid Loígde and Conn of the Hundred Battles. Diarmuid In the Fenian C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Monstrous Shape, Or A Shapelesse Monster
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English grammar, " a", and its variant " an", are indefinite articles. History The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stillbirth
Stillbirth is typically defined as fetal death at or after 20 or 28 weeks of pregnancy, depending on the source. It results in a baby born without signs of life. A stillbirth can result in the feeling of guilt or grief in the mother. The term is in contrast to miscarriage, which is an early pregnancy loss, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, where the baby dies a short time after being born alive. Often the cause is unknown. Causes may include pregnancy complications such as pre-eclampsia and birth complications, problems with the placenta or umbilical cord, birth defects, infections such as malaria and syphilis, and poor health in the mother. Risk factors include a mother's age over 35, smoking, drug use, use of assisted reproductive technology, and first pregnancy. Stillbirth may be suspected when no fetal movement is felt. Confirmation is by ultrasound. Worldwide prevention of most stillbirths is possible with improved health systems. Around half of stillbirths occur d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
