Saturday, November 19, 2016

On Being Over-Fond of Pets

From Dance's Historical Miscellany:
I was recently rather amused by a chapter in an 18th-century advice manual for women, entitled ‘On being over-fond of animals’. This anti-pet diatribe comes from a 1756 publication called The Wife, which also features charmingly-named chapters such as ‘The danger of living in the same house with any Relation of the Husband’s’, ‘Sleeping in different Beds’, and ‘The great indiscretion of taking too much notice of the unmeaning, or transient gallantries of a Husband’. (Read more.)
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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Amusing indeed. Another anti-puritanical venue you may enjoy, in defence of so-called "bad taste" of the bon vivant 18thC France: "Carl Magnusson (lecturer at the University of Lausanne) Too Pretty and Exotic to be Neo-Classical?" I stumbled upon recently at the Courtauld Institute here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72cxgeZiu8Q
Recall Pope Benedict professed to prefer the whimsical-humanist Baroque over perceived 'absolutist' excesses of classicism, a wisdom developed within the bosom of 'feminine' receptivity of Mother Church, methinks?