curt

"being trans goes against nature"

my brother in christ, they used to say that about a woman being on top, be serious.

you know, as someone who has spent a whole year looking into medieval sexuality, it is wild to me that people use "natural law" to "prove" trans people are bad.

am i using the hour long break i have in oxford on my way to leamington spa to go and walk past oriel college cos edward founded it? of course i am.

never been to oxford before, and don't have long enough to do much, but, you know. edward.

"two men sitting alone drinking wine, bit suspect innit?"

i will never stop laughing that chaplais' argument is that a brotherhood covenant makes it less likely that edward and piers were lovers when the practice fell out of favour precisely because it became known that men who were having sex with each other entered them.

i am so proud of caerphilly. this win is so important for so many reasons, genuinely overwhelmed by it.

i might be going to kenilworth in november.

it will change me.

like, i have no proof that jones is homophobic, but he sure as shit has unaddressed biases pertaining to men having sex with each other in the medieval period. i also would not be surprised is jones was homophobic. his work has that energy.

and richard i fucked dudes, come on. not saying he did so exclusively or even fell in love with guys, but he had sexual contact with men.

like, i've never really thought there was anything between richard ii and oxford except some inter-war all boys public school type dynamics, but i might start insisting they fucked to spite people like jones.

i am talking about dan jones. except he's not a historian, he's an author, but you know. but he does is twice (arguably three times, but it's hard to do with my boy edward) in his plantagenet book.

i'm telling you, some straight historians will only acknowledge historical queerness so they can reject specific examples.

which is funny cos the notebook itself is a "shakespeare insults" one i got when i went to the rsc production of edward ii earlier this year, and now it's full of quotes about and from my main man hugh.

i was working on my commonplace book today, which i think of as my medieval one it's a place where, originally, i'd put any notes of concepts i wasn't familiar with when reading about edward ii, but it's basically filled now and it has become a hugh despenser commonplace book.

he is the point where my autism and my gender converge and, honestly, i am never happier then when i'm doing anything related to him.

insta is showing me, and i can only assume it's a trend on tiktok or smthg, trans masc gender euphoria reels damn near constantly, and, like, mine is hugh despenser the younger. straight up. edward ii too, but especially hugh.

or maybe i'm just immediately bitter cos jones is going with the 'worst king ever' narrative with edward ii.

as someone who approaches all history from a post-modernist, post-foucauldian, and largely marxist position, but actually only cares about queer history, pop medieval history is so lacking in actual interest and challenge it's staggering that anyone bothers.

angus wilson wrote a whole ass comedic novel about it nearly seventy years ago and nothing has changed.

honestly, all history outside academia is captured by this stupid right-wing traditionalist nonsense that makes it fucking *boring* to everyone except war mongering gammons, but medieval history is the most caught up in it.

reading dan jones' plantagenets cos historiography blah blah blah, but, like, this man only has an undergrad degree and is a columnist for a bunch of right leaning publications...i know the answer to this, but at the same time, why is this the man to helm popular medieval history????

do people just not know how to hold a pen properly or something.

i don't go out of my way to use fast drying ink either, and my favourite pens are gel pens in 0.7 or fine nib fountain pens. i prefer writing with really wet, free flowing ink, so how anyone is smearing oil based ink idefk.

i'm left handed, i also wrote by hand pretty much every day. i never, ever have a problem with smearing ink despite not once ever having used a "left-handed" pen, and, frankly, i don't understand what other left handed people are doing if ink smudging is a problem for them.

that stage of hyper-fixation where seeing someone else talk about edward ii makes me tear up with how much i love him.

i also went to caerphilly castle again today, for the 5th time this year, so my fixation is in no way diminishing.

idk if it was my edition or what, but right at the end of follies of the king, *henry* of lancaster started being referred to as thomas and, like...did no one notice. it's pretty much for the whole extent that Henry is even in the book. it was weird.

hugh despenser the younger may genuinely have one of the strangest historiographies of anyone in britain, it needs to be studied.

the description of hugh in plaidy's follies of the king is...fascinating.

the book is trash, boring as fuck, but also just straight up fascinating.

i mean, i understand his historiography well enough to get why, but i hate it viscerally.