Category: Privacy

Posted on February 23, 2020 - closet, Francesco de’Medici, Palazzo Vecchio, Privacy, Private room, Secrecy, studiolo

Francesco – you-can’t-get-much-more-private-than-a-coffin – de’Medici

All hail Francesco de’Medici, the richest, most powerful man in Renaissance Italy. He lived in a stonking great palace and put the fear of God into everyone. You’d think he’d have been able to lay his hands on a bit of peace and quiet, wouldn’t you?

Well, you’d be wrong.

Apart from being the Grand Duke’s princely pad, the Palazzo Vecchio doubled up as the headquarters of the Florentine government. In the Salone dei Cinquecento – at 1,145 square feet, probably the largest room in Europe – the 500-strong membership of the People’s Assembly would gather. What a noisy, raucous place it must have been. Crowds of colourfully-dressed politicians doing deals. Their dogs running around marking their territory. Servants milling around moaning about their paltry pay. Everyone overlooked by the military heroes depicted in Giorgio Vasari’s murals plastered over the 59-foot-high walls. Commissioned to commemorate the city’s martial prowess,

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Posted on January 28, 2020 - Beds, Privacy, second sleep, Sex, Sleep

Sleep: Who Needs Eight Hours?

In Robert Harris’s thrilling new mystery The Second Sleep, the author transports us to a time when humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. A fact that remains a surprise to many of us, in pre-industrial Europe, households retired to bed after dusk for a ‘first’ sleep. A few hours later, they rose for one or two hours’ nocturnal activity, then returned to bed for a ‘second’ sleep until dawn.

What on earth were they doing in that hiatus between the first and second sleep? A whole range of things is the answer. Moonlit pursuits ranged from sewing, smoking, praying, chopping wood, imbibing ‘a hott drinke’, reading, visiting neighbours and, of course, sex: indeed, a doctor’s manual published in sixteenth-century France recommended indulging in a spot of procreation ‘after the first sleep’ for the simple reason that then people derive more ‘enjoyment’ from it and thus ‘do it better.’

According to the world’s expert on this subject,

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Posted on October 17, 2019 - Cicero, Privacy, Samuel Pepys, Sleep Council, Trollope

A Hundred Things to do in Bed

As comic genius Groucho Marx once remarked, ‘Anything that can’t be done in a bed isn’t worth doing at all’. Turns out, there’s a hell of a lot you can do in your bed – much of it downright whacky.

Fancy yourself a twenty-first-century Picasso? No need for an easel – just hop into bed. You wouldn’t be the first: when the elderly Matisse became confined to bed, he took to sculpting there. Meanwhile, his contemporary, Fantin-Labour, sketched in bed. Insulated from the cold with an overcoat, scarf, gloves and top hat (he couldn’t afford a fire), he’d draw for hours. Thanks to bed-side visits paid by his friend Whistler, we have a record on canvas. Bed-ridden Mexican artist Frida Khalo also painted in bed. An easel was fixed to her four-poster, and a mirror to the inside of the canopy so she could paint self-portraits.

Famous composers – including Puccini – penned some of their best works from a horizontal position.

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Posted on July 12, 2019 - Beds, Bride, Privacy, Private room, Sex, tea

Girl Power (Eighteenth-century-style): Strong Tea, Scandal…and Your Own Private Space

Millie’s no milksop. Her wedding’s just round the corner and she’s drawn up a pre-nup with the following demand: Mike – her husband-to-be – can’t enter her study unless he knocks first, and if she wants to, she can shut him out. Not that unreasonable, you might think, in this day and age. After all, if Mike wants to spend time alone in his man-cave (AKA his shed), no one would bat an eyelid. Except that Millie (her real name’s Millimant) is not alive in 2019; she’s a character in a play written in 1700 when women were still their husband’s property, and demanding your own closet, in some men’s eyes, was tantamount to treason.*

But things were beginning to change for middle-class women entering the 1700s. Not only did they feel entitled to their own ‘snugitude’, they could become quite indignant if it was not forthcoming upon marriage.

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Posted on May 1, 2019 - Beds, Privacy, Sex, Technology

Sleeping with Technology

The marriage between technology and beds has a long pedigree. Necessity is said to be the mother of invention and the necessity to make beds help us sleep better, protect our backs and save space have incentivised scientists and engineers to push the boundaries. So has the need to come up with beds to improve our sex lives. In the 1780s, Scottish quack James Graham, the world’s first sex therapist, lured London’s glitterati to his fancy clinic in Pall Mall. Here, he assured the likes of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire that sleeping in his electrically-charged Celestial Bed – at the modest fee of £50 (about £3,000 in today’s money) – would cure impotency and infertility. 12-feet long, 9-feet wide and fitted with 15 cwt of magnets, when a couple were about to climax, the bed tilted on its axis, allegedly helping the woman to conceive.

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Posted on April 1, 2019 - Beds, Bride, garter, Privacy, stocking, wedding

Bedding The Bride

Whatever you think about getting spliced – and April’s a popular month for it – thank your lucky stars you’re not living in the past with the prospect of a ’bedding-the-bride’ party on the horizon. Originating in the Middle Ages, and providing an opportunity for guests to behave like peeping-Toms, nobody then would have regarded these events as voyeuristic: little was considered private and out of bounds.

Imagine you’re the helpless bride. After the marriage service, the priest leads you and the groom, your families and friends, to the bridal suite. While you get undressed by your female friends and led to the marital bed, your husband’s attendants disrobe him, then take him to join you. A priest stands by, swinging a censor and sprinkling holy water over the bed. While he blesses you both and wishes you many healthy children, the guests look on, impatient to get the party started.

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