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Life is WIP

@sociallyawkwardencounters

Socially awkward Polish teenager (technically young adult now), staying awake 'till midnight, wondering about meaning of life. Also if (whether?) my English is good enough.

What differs a Bronze Age Monarchy from a Feudal or Modern State Monarchy? For whatever reson I have always been given the impression that Bronze Age Monarchy is the ancient version of either the former or the later, but that does not sound right.

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Yeah, that would be a major misconception.

Bronze Age monarchies:

  • were far more centralized than medieval monarchies, with large, year-round palace complexes that functioned not just as fortresses but also as judicial centers, religious centers, storehouses, state planning apparati, and so on. To operate all these various functions, they employed a large bureaucracy that had, if not a monopoly, something of an oligopoly, on literacy, numeracy, and higher learning.
  • were highly involved in planning the economy, from organizing irrigation and other labor-intensive farming practices to keeping detailed records on production and taxation to coordinating the complex network of international trade that regulated the flow of both key commodities like tin but also luxury goods.
  • had more of a monopoly on military force, especially when it came to elite units like chariots. Training an archer and a driver to work in unison with a team of horses specifically bred to the task and custom chariots was a long and expensive process that only a monarch could provide the necessary surplus food and other resources for.
  • were not Christian. I can't stress enough how important this was as a structural force - Bronze Age monarchs did not have to deal with a large, European-wide, literate bureaucracy, with immense cultural power, that owned more land than they did. This isn't to say that there was no interaction between the temples and the state - I've talked recently about the tendency of Bronze Age monarchs to either be god-kings or priest-kings - but that the terms of interaction between the two much more heavily favored the state.

By contrast, medieval monarchies - and I'm aware that the term is something of a moving target, because what it meant to be a king in CE 600 is very different from what it means in CE 1100 or CE 1600 - were:

  • decentralized. They had small, peripatetic courts, and initially almost no bureaucracy. Governing power was much more broadly distributed down to the regional and local level through feudal contracts, and it was a long and very fraught process for the monarchs to gradually wrestle that power back.
  • much less engaged in the economy. Aside from tariffs and monetary policy, which is important, you don't really see medieval monarchs telling peasants when to plow and which fields (outside of the monarch's own personal fiefs), because that was an interference with the decentralized manorial system. You see fewer and smaller building projects, in no small part because the monarch usually couldn't afford to do them.
  • had less of a monopoly on violence. While the feudal exchange was supposed to give kings military service in exchange for land, in practice feudal levies could be slow to form, quick to disperse, and very fractious about their terms of service. This meant in practice that the nobility could exercise more hard power than their nominal overlords, which is why noble revolts were a common feature. Similarly, it took a long time for the monarchs to establish the necessary fiscal architecture for assembling professional armies and then eventually turning those professional armies into standing armies and then eventually turning those armies against the nobility - and by that point, we're not really talking about the Medieval period any more.
  • were Christian. And while there could certainly be exceptions of Emperors who picked Popes (instead of the other way around) or kings who could weirdly judo-flip their piety into Galician-style control of their national church, over time the pendulum definitely swung in favor of the Church having more power than any one monarch. They were wealthy, their wealth tended to grow over time because they were a corporate institution that invested their profits back into the company, they had huge amounts of cultural power, they had huge amounts of political power, and so on.
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im having feelings about the uffington white horse again

so essentially there’s this cool horse drawn into the hills in england made out of chalk and it’s like 3,000 years old.

people carved trenches 3,000 years ago and filled them with chalk in the shape of a horse but what’s interesting is that if you fail to maintain the horse by adding new chalk regularly, it will disappear. for 3,000 years, we’ve been filling in chalk in this horse so it doesn’t disappear.

we’ll never know what the purpose of the horse was originally. we’ll never know if it had ritual or spiritual significance or if it was just art. but we do know that people maintained it then, and, even though the meaning of the horse has long been lost to time, we continue to maintain it now.

the people who made this horse are long dead, but they live through us still, don’t you think?

couldn’t agree more we’re best friends now

Given how people generally seemed to like my previous female armor post (save for one comment that argued that criticizing the depiction of warrior women wearing these and stating that in real life warrior women wouldn’t wear anything like that and that these are highly sexualized is slut-shaming of fictional characters), I’m happy to present part two. Originally it was going to be about torso armor, but several people asked for butts. Now, I hadn’t given thought to butts as much, because unlike boobs, that are depicted as existing almost separately from the entire body, butts are more often incorporated into the rest of the outfit.

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I can actually think of an alternative explanation: small print press. He’d put out orders for various rare books with the traveling merchants who’d come through town, and every so often they’d turn up with one and he’d set about printing a hundred copies or so, then sell the fresh new copies to merchants heading towards various university towns like Avignon, Grenoble, Toulouse, etc. He’d likely keep a couple copies of each book for himself, generating a library, and might wind up with all sorts of books he couldn’t profitably make copies of to sell to the universities, like fairy tales.

If that’s his business model, then Belle might be the closest thing he’d have to an apprentice, since we can see he’s getting on in age and might have nobody else to even consider passing the business along to when he slips the mortal coil. As one final thought, her dad is an inventor, and might be the bookseller’s only actual local customer, which might also explain the relationship. Her dad would occasionally want certain types of books on natural philosophy, and the bookseller would be the one with contacts who could procure them. Just look how dangerous it was for him to go traveling all alone! Far better to leave that sort of business to professional traveling merchants.

If you combine these ideas, then you wind up with a bookseller who was training Belle as an apprentice for both small press publishing and money laundering, only to watch his very promising student be swept away by some rich guy the whole town was trying to kill twenty minutes ago. He admires her hustle, but it leaves a gaping hole in his succession plan.

Fortunately there are two newcomers in town, one with an eye for mechanics and meticulous attention to detail and one with a love of risks and charm to spare, and that's how the neurotic clock and slutty candlestick take over the legitimate and criminal wings of his enterprise respectively.

If we’re talking criminal bookselling in mid-18th century France, there’s an alternative explanation that hasn’t been covered: the bookseller might be using his provincial setup as a cover for smuggling banned books into Paris and other major cities

See, as Robert Darnton writes in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, the ancien regime had a pretty hardcore system of press censorship. Because people are very curious and attracted to anything with the air of the forbidden, this created a lively and profitable trade in selling banned books that stretched from more liberal Switzerland where the actual presses were located, to a system of itinerant book-peddlers who would make the journey from Switzerland to France and hope to dodge the customs inspectors, to the actual bookstore owners who would place orders with the presses based on their perceptions of demand for particular illicit books and then arrange sales through coded messages to their customers. Topics of banned books ranged from Enlightenment philosophy to subversive anti-monarchical propaganda to hardcore pornography - sometimes combining all three! 

As you might imagine, the flipside of this trade being quite profitable is that it was also quite dangerous, since the gendarmes were actively looking to arrest anyone violating the press censorship system. So it might not be a bad idea to set up shop in a tiny, boring village that the royal bureaucracy might overlook and smuggle your contraband into the cities from a distance. 

This gives me the hilarious image of the bookseller sweating bullets as Belle picks through the shelves, hoping that she doesn’t accidentally grab something spicy and blow his cover instead of just another volume of fairytales. 

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I am so excited!! I just placed an order!! I cant wait to receive it!

Reporter: Tell us Bruce, why have you recently decided to work out more? To you just want to compete with our Clark? Or is it-

Bruce: My kids.

Reporter: I’m sorry what?

Bruce: I work out so I can still lift them.

Reporter: …

Bruce: if you have nothing else to ask I’m going to leave now. Let’s go Jaylad.

Bruce just picks up Jason and leaves.

Jason looks like a large dog that clearly isn’t used to being in the air.

Like this.