medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Chris Laning <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Supposedly the nuns who were teachers in elementary schools would tell the
girls that they shouldn't wear patent leather shoes because they were shiny
and would reflect images of the girls' underwear (assuming the girls were
wearing skirts, of course).
i figgered it was something like that.
would that it were true, alas.
(btw, it also assumes that they were wearing underwear, which counter- thought
would have been *really* exciting.)
> Of course, this story circulated at an age when boys' seeing girls'
underwear was supposed to be a Big Thrill :)
i barely remember, just barely.
a hard space to get one's Aging Head into, here at the beginning of the Third
Millennium.
> >surely most of it comes straight --or more or less straight--out of the
16thc. ?
> I actually suspect not, which is why I asked. My experience of the mid-20th
century Catholic Church (I was brought up Protestant in a heavily Catholic
area), and what I hear about the 100 years or so before that, leads me to
suspect that Catholics in the US in that era -- feeling, with some
justification, that they were widely mistrusted and discriminated against --
tended to be much more defensive, clannish, closed-minded, prudish, and
paranoid than Catholics today. I would not be at all surprised to discover
that many of the "urban legends" on both sides had their source at that time.
growing up in predominately Protestant Houston in the '50s (*way* before the
vast flood of Hispanics --though there were certainly some "mexicans", all
Catholic of course, but with their own, "racially" segregated churches), i'm
sure that your ideas about defensiveness are true.
but the attitudes of us Protestenterants WASPS towards them was driven
by.....
i can't recall, eggsactly.
there was certainly more than a bit of prejudice --though infintely less than
there was towards "mexicans" [comme mexicans] or Jews, much less that
manifested towards the "Negras" (who actually did sit at the back of the bus,
behind a little sign which could slide more or less to the front, depending
upon what neighborhoods the bus was going through).
but surely, though the anti-catholic prejudice i saw had its near roots in the
19th american, primarily anti-immigrant (Irish, then Italian) tradition there
was a continium of tradition against the Latin MumboJumbo, the funky plaster
saints, the *super*prudish attitude toward S*x (even for a *super*prudish
time), that really weird, positively "abnormal" bidness about Priestly
Chastity..... all that goes straight back to Luther.
which is not to say, of course, that your average Houston WASP on the street
(or even in the elementary school) had much in the way of a sense of
history...
> Anyone else remember the "cardinal" quarters when Kennedy was running for
President?
not i.
however, i might could dredge up a few Kennedy (and Jacqueline) jokes i heard
from my barber at the time --but listmommie George Spoilsport would probably
want me to plug them in to some middlevil context and clean them up for a
Family List.
i could certainly do the former, but the latter might render them somewhat
less humorous than they originally were.
my memory of the opposition to Kennedy in '60 was that it wasn't so much a
matter of his being a Catholic prevert, as of the simple and obvious Fact that
he was a Danged **GODLESS COMM'NIST** who was going to ram Brown v Board of
Education down the throats of good white southern christians everywhere.
c
"What about the older ones [Indians] ?"
"Well, we can't seem to cure them of the idea that our Everyday Life is only
an Illusion, behind which is the Reality of Dreams"
--Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo"
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0083946
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