Histories of the Unexpected

This is the SEVENTH of our special Christmas-themed micro-histories in which we will embrace the task of demonstrating how an unexpected subject not only has a history but is massively important and interesting - in just 15 minutes! We will start with a shared example and then have just five minutes each to make a case for an interesting history on that very unexpected subject. Contributions will be rigorously timed and you - dear listeners - will get to vote on SM on what YOU think was the most interesting fact you heard today.

Today’s topic is OBSCENITY - nothing quite says Christmas like obscenity! Christmas was a time for subversion during the High Middle Ages and Renaissance when snowmen were regularly built as winter effigies. During the cold winter of 1510-11 the citizens of Brussels built around 110 individual snowmen around the city, depicting in snow folklore figures such unicorns and mermaids, religious and political themes, as well extreme sexual and even scatalogical imagery. One of the more sexualised sculptures could be found in Rozendal, the red light district of the city, which depicted a prostitute completely naked, with breasts and genitalia sculpted to attract attention, and a ‘dog...ensconced between her legs’. Of the more scatalogical, was a snow-cow that delivered ‘turds, farts and stinking’; a defecating centaur; a ‘manneken pis’ fountain depicting a small boy urinating into the mouth of a drinker; and finally a drunk drowning in his own excrement. These are a far cry from the ‘jolly happy soul’ that we know from the Frosty the Snowman song of 1950. Who knew! Obscenity is also all about name-calling on the streets in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Devon (especially in Bradninch!) and of course it's also all about puritanical attitudes in nineteenth-century America!

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