Frightfully enough, when a friend of mine looked it up in a dictionary she got three definitions.
1)to be thrown out of a window. 2)to die by being thrown out of a window 3)to die by being thrown out of a window in Venice
Yes, Venice. I know, I know, that's the place people usually go to commit suicide but that is only a post 1940s(?, exact date unknown to me) thing.
Then I took a class in History in Art: Vision and Visionary Culture in 15th Century Italy and we were looking at some portraiture one day. All of the women were portrayed by a window. Hmmm,.....
Then we learn from a French account of a visit to Venice that Italian women, in his opinion at least, were practically cloistered and seem to be always by the window to see what is going on since they are so rarely allowed out.
Then we find tax and census information that has a very unusual amount of women being noted as injured or dead from falling out of windows.
Creepy, eh?
Almost as good a set of connections as my catching the association between a comment made by a French commander in James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans regarding his opinion of British and English culture as in regards to their treatment of women,... with the decline of the political power of women in the 12th century after the lineage crisis in France which lead in part to rise of the notion of "Courtly Love" and its succeeding music, literature and artistic contributions to the world. (It also helped that I knew what a "distaff" was.)
Ugh. I must go to bed.
Ekatarina, to whom that made some sense. She hopes it made some sense to you, too.
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branchandroot
Well, well, well,...
Date: 2003-08-26 11:48 pm (UTC)Katja, an admirer of good defenestration-isms.
Re: Well, well, well,...
Date: 2003-08-27 12:05 am (UTC)Re: Well, well, well,...
Date: 2003-08-27 12:53 am (UTC)1)to be thrown out of a window.
2)to die by being thrown out of a window
3)to die by being thrown out of a window in Venice
Yes, Venice. I know, I know, that's the place people usually go to commit suicide but that is only a post 1940s(?, exact date unknown to me) thing.
Then I took a class in History in Art: Vision and Visionary Culture in 15th Century Italy and we were looking at some portraiture one day. All of the women were portrayed by a window. Hmmm,.....
Then we learn from a French account of a visit to Venice that Italian women, in his opinion at least, were practically cloistered and seem to be always by the window to see what is going on since they are so rarely allowed out.
Then we find tax and census information that has a very unusual amount of women being noted as injured or dead from falling out of windows.
Creepy, eh?
Almost as good a set of connections as my catching the association between a comment made by a French commander in James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans regarding his opinion of British and English culture as in regards to their treatment of women,... with the decline of the political power of women in the 12th century after the lineage crisis in France which lead in part to rise of the notion of "Courtly Love" and its succeeding music, literature and artistic contributions to the world. (It also helped that I knew what a "distaff" was.)
Ugh. I must go to bed.
Ekatarina, to whom that made some sense. She hopes it made some sense to you, too.