movement

[anotheranon]

An interlibrary loan that I've been waiting on since June, A Cultural History of Gesture, finally came through last week and I've been reading it with great interest.

My curiosity about historic movement, manners, body language etc. was sparked at the Medieval Congress by multiple related presentations: one about the effect of clothing on movement (describing an experiment in which the presenter walked up and down stairs in a gothic fitted dress; the paper seemed kind of incomplete but still provocative) and a couple on the difficulties in reenacting historic fencing movements when the manuals are subject to (often modern biased) interpretation.

Given that I'm trying to describe an intangible like movement rather than a physical artifact like clothes it's hard to explain why gesture, posture, etc. is so interesting except to say that it seems another fact of the everyday realities of history, beyond the glamour of famous historical figures, landmark battles, etc. What did the average day feel like - get up, eat breakfast (or do you?), get dressed, go about their day, etc. In all these activities people moved around and I'm finding that people moved differently - the past is even more of a foreign country.

Comments

[seamstrix.livejournal.com]

I have found that wearing full Elizabethans on an extended (8-10 hours at a time) and regular basis give soem excellent insight into all manner of period movement issues. There's a step in the So Ben Michi A Buon Tempo (Italian dance) that the men do one way and the women do a different way and it makes sense if you are wearing the clothes because if the women did the step the way the men do, it would make their skirts swing like a washing machine aggitator- very not pretty. Without the correct clothing there's no understanding of how the clothing interacts with the movement and the difference in steps makes no sense.

Another example of clothing and behavior interacting is the fact that in much of the Renaissance thru the 18th century, boys wore skirts until they were a certain age. I read all sorts specualtion that involved very esoteric reasons for this including one writer who postulated that parents were trying to disguise the fact that they had a boy child because evil spirits would try to kill a boy child because they were more highly valued than girls. Um....yeah....right....Anyone with half a brain (women/mothers) could tell you that the reason a boy would wear skirts is that he's not toilet trained yet and is wearing a diaper and it's much easier to change a diaper under a skirt than fight with period breeches styles. Just coincidently, the traditional age to 'breech' a boy is pretty darn close to when they would have been expected to be completely toilet trained. Nothing esoteric about it!

Living history/experimental archeology is an excellent way to recover very ephemeral aspects of the past such as behavior.

Just my tuppence.

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your tuppence! I so seldom wear my period gear for more than a few hours that a lot of this is eye opening for me as well.

And re: skirts for diapers - I thought that was incredibly obvious, it just makes sense!

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a book I want to read too! ***adds entry to "memories" for future reference***