Behind the Scenes Minis: Age Gaps and Piracy

Tracy and Holly talk about the age gap between Johannes and Elisabetha Hevelius. They also cover the many historical points that came up in the Eustace the Monk episode. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about the Heveliuses. This guy. Yeah.
I found it interesting that not a one of the

(00:24):
write ups I read even had a pause for a
moment of they would mention the age difference, but no
one would be like, yeah, that's a little bit messed up. Yeah,
they would be like they were thirty six years apart
in age, right, And I'm like, mm hmm, are we
going to acknowledge that that's a little that that's a
little weird, especially because she was a teenager. Yeah. I

(00:47):
feel like the last time this really came up on
the show was on the Stacanovite episode. Yeah, and we
had talked about their age difference and how young she was,
and a couple people got real mad about that, like
about that discussion, And it's like, yes, at other points

(01:09):
in history and in other parts of the world still,
including some parts of the United States, it still is
very common for people to get married really young. But
like that doesn't mean that it's normal really, right, Like
I tend to look at like the mean averages of

(01:32):
women's ages at marriage tables when I can, and like
the ones that I looked at when I was putting
this together all put the average marrying age for women
in Poland at that time, like twenty to twenty three. Yeah,
so she was squarely under that average. Sure, right, And

(01:52):
I think sometimes people will look instead at whether it
was legal, like what was the youngest legal age for
a person to legally get married, And a lot of
times that was way younger than the age that people
really did typically get married at, and people still saw
those really really like effectively child marriages as not typical

(02:18):
at best. Here's how it's my thinking on that. If
you have to invoke a law to be like is
this okay, Yeah, you're skirting some some you're right up
against like whether or not you should actually be doing that. Yeah, yeah,
that's just my opinion. Like we can put so much

(02:41):
context into things. The way that we think of childhood
and adolescence in the United States in the year twenty
twenty four is like really different from how societies viewed
childhood and adolescents hundreds of years ago. Yeah, but like
those of debservable power differences were still there even if

(03:03):
people thought of children and adolescents totally differently than how
we do now, even if there wasn't really a concept
of adolescence quite yet. Right, Well, and that definitely is
in play here, right, because we talked about like he
was famous already. Most I don't know if I should
say most, a lot of teenagers in the you know,

(03:24):
modern day, it's completely normal for them to be romantically
fixated in a parasocial way on a famous person. I
absolutely did this myself as a teenage. Almost everyone I
know had a crush on some famous person when they
were younger. Right, that's not unusual at all. But then
it's like if that teenager went and met that famous

(03:45):
person and said, I think you're great. I heard your
wife just died, even if that seems like they are
the pursuer, right, there's the onus at that point is
on the mature adult to go, like the adult, yeah that, yes,
that is true, and I really appreciate it. Maybe we
could reconnect again the years down the road. But like

(04:09):
it's not, it's just a little weird. Like I said,
they seemed like they were very, very happy together, and
I don't want to like erase that or devalue that
in any way, but it is it started in a
very unusual way. Yeah, that you know was definitely like
right at the edge of social acceptability, and even writings
about it are kind of like, oh, this is crazy,

(04:31):
We're doing something crazy. So there's recognition that, like, it
wasn't maybe the most you know, it was not a
standard situation right at all. But I do like that,
you know, their whole story. I love this idea of

(04:51):
an astronomer that is independent enough to just be like,
I got money, I'll build a I'll build the conservatory.
That's cool. I love that part. And also we have
we didn't really get into this sort of pattern that
his life followed with both of his wives, where he
was fortunate enough to marry women who were like, yeah,
I can take on more than the average person. Yeah,

(05:13):
run the businesses. Like his first wife, Katerina was running
their businesses, which was right, not her job. Yeah, that
was not what she married into initially. Yeah, so he
was fortunate in that regard. Yeah, there are a lot
of scientists, like across the scientists for centuries who were

(05:37):
really only able to do their work because of women
in their lives, whether it was a wife or a
sister or a daughter with that person, not just like
keeping the household, doing things that were considered typical for women,
but like also taking the notes, doing the measurements, compiling data,
like all of this stuff, and sometimes those contributions aren't

(06:02):
actually noted anywhere unless you really really really read between
the lines, and sometimes not even then. So the acknowledgement here,
I like that we actually know more about her contributions.
Me too. And I there's one mention of her that
comes up in another write up that was like roughly

(06:24):
one hundred years later that is meant to be really
complimentary but manages to also be misogynist because it's like
she was one of the only women who was up
to the task of working alongside a man who was
an astronomer, and it's like, I know, you meant well here, dude.

(06:47):
But she also, as we said, was an outlier in
that she too was from a wealthy family, and yeah,
probably got more education than the average person. Like there
was definitely some circumstantial privilege and opportunity in her life
that most women would not have had. So it's easy
to say she was great and apparently everyone loved her.

(07:10):
I mean, it's telling that she and Edmund Halley were
buddies and they kept up a correspondence for a long time.
I think that's sweet. I like the idea that, you know,
they became good family friends, and I love all of that.
But I'm also like, oh, you don't want to make
it like she's the only woman that was ever capable
of it, Like we know otherwise, right. We talked about

(07:40):
Eustace the Monk this week. Sure did this is a
name that I stumbled across while doing the thing where
I'm trying to figure out did anything happen on this
day in history that would be good Saturday Classic? And
there was a reference to Eustace the Monk being headed
at the Battle of Sandwich, and I thought that sounds interesting,

(08:04):
and I felt like this was the first time I
had ever heard of Eustace the Monk. That's not true,
because I also heard of Eustace the Monk years and
years ago when writing an episode about who the real
Robin Hood is, which we're going to run as a
Saturday Classic. And then I not only did I forget

(08:24):
having come across the name Eustace the Monk, I forgot
I had written that whole episode happens to me all
the time. Yeah, yeah, I would have really been I
was very confident that it was an episode that predated
our time on the show. I knew it was an
episode that existed. No I wrote it. I wrote it

(08:44):
in something like twenty thirteen. Listen, after a decade, all
bets are off. Yeah, sure, it's not in our brains anymore. So.
A lot of this episode was very fun, and I
chose it because I thought it sounded fun, even though
sometimes pirates can be gruesomely violent. I was like, the

(09:08):
whole story of a monk that left the monastery to
become a pirate sounds like a potential source of a
lot of things that would be fun to talk about,
and it was. But then I also was like, oh, no,
I have to explain all of this dispute between England
and France and a bunch of royal drama, which is

(09:34):
just often not not my favorite, And in this case
it was one of those things where there were just
layers and layers and layers. I would think I had
gotten to the earliest thing that would needed to be explained,
and then I would realize there was some other earlier
or adjacent thing that also needed to be explained, including

(09:58):
how Arthur wound up being fostered at French Court, and
that really was I was like, this is a whole other,
convoluted story. It's not actually related to this episode. If
I try to explain it, it's gonna be a whole
additional digression. So I had gotten through all that part

(10:20):
and I had moved on to the actual piracy stuff,
which was back to being generally more fun. But then
I was like, now wait, now I have to explain
the Magna Carta. It was not expecting to need to
explain the Magna Carta along with all of this English
and French royal disputes and warfare. Even with all that,

(10:43):
it was still fun, though I always crack up anytime
the story of Reynard the Fox is mentioned on the
show Huh, because this is the silliest name of all time.
It is very silly, Fox the Fox, Fox the Yeah,
which actually that would be a great name for a band,

(11:04):
Fox the Fox. I wonder if there is a band
called Fox the Fox. Surely there is. I also, in
thinking about Eustace, he reminds me so much of the
Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Oh sure, sure, especially once it
gets into the magic, where it's like, if you took
all that out, you can be like, yeah, this is
a guy that had a wild life and it's like,

(11:26):
wait he did what now? Yeah? Yeah, So much of
the things they come up in the romance are just
like they're the kinds of things that happen all over
medieval literature, and so you know, there's just like we
talked about and kind of cracked up over in a
part that we had to get our act together and
get back to recording. There's just a lot of coarse humor,

(11:49):
including lots of farting. Some of it reminded me of
things like the Canterbury Tales and how like some of
the Canterbury Tales are pretty lude and that is the
case of some of the Eustace the Monk stuff. This,
I don't know, it reminded me of so many different
things that we've talked about on the show before, or

(12:10):
that you know, I'd studied in college literature classes that
are still kind of hilarious and silly and maybe a
little juvenile in terms of the level of humor. Yeah,
I also have an association that is very silly. I

(12:31):
don't know that it would also ping with you. But
anytime we discuss the Battle of Sandwich, I think about
the Futurama episode where Fry gets worms from eating a
truck stop sandwich, right, and those worms make him very

(12:52):
smart and strong, and then through technological shrinking he's able
to go into his own and have a thing. But
the best part is the worm king, who says, you
think you can get rid of me, My family came
over on the sandwich. And that's what I think of
anytime there's any sandwich related battle mention. That is probably

(13:16):
the first time, the first thing I think of anytime
anyone mentions that entire show. Really not not Jurassic Bark,
which is one of the most painful things of all time.
That's like the runner up. Who is one or the
other of those two things? What an incredibly smart writer's room. Yeah,

(13:38):
and now there's new Futurama in case anybody didn't know,
I have not seen it on Hulus has a new
season of it. I'm always here for more Futurama all day,
every day. That entire voice. There are things that tres
McNeil does in her various characters that she does that
even now, watching the show years and years later from

(14:01):
when it first came out will just strike me in
a new way and tickle me to death, and I
will fall into fits of giggles, like I am a
seven year old and I love it. I love it. Yeah,
it's all for Futurama. My family came over on the sandwich.
That's all I got. This episode also reminded me of

(14:21):
how many years ago we talked about how it would
be cool if there was a website that you could
just put in a year and it would tell you
if England was at war with France. And then two
different listeners of the podcast each made websites to do
that very thing. I don't know if either of them
is still active, because I did not check before coming

(14:42):
in here. And this was many, many, many many years
ago at this point. But yeah, yeah, the many, many
centuries of warfare between England and France. Things that you
could explain forever in an episode about a pirate. Yeah,

(15:02):
that's you know, full of stuff that isn't one hundred
percent substantiatable. Yeah, which is a new word I maybe
just made up, But I think it's fine. I always
kind of love these because even if those things can't
be substantiated, what that document, that story does is tell
us a lot about the writer and perceived audience of

(15:26):
that work. Oh sure, And so that becomes historically significant
in its own way, where he's like, you know, you
know what I got to do to really make people
pay attention to this black magic? And then he talked
with the devil. Yeah, months in an underground chamber, talking
directly to the devil. Yeah. So he was incredibly infamous

(15:50):
during his lifetime and for a bit afterward. And I
don't know when he became less of a well known figure,
but I found a couple of things that had been
written in the nineteenth century that were like, Yeah, this
guy's really obscure now. He used to be so famous.
I don't know how long he had been really obscure

(16:11):
now by that point, though, Those instances of people who
were once famous and are now obscure are also to
me just a good mental leveler of anxiety, because it
just reminds me that no matter what thing is going
on in my life or the world that I'm getting
very worked up over, people are going to forget it.

(16:34):
It's not that important. Yeah, yeah, I mean obviously we
want to fight Injustice still, but you know, like various
other little bickery things, it doesn't matter. It's all fine.
People will forget. I think he is a character in
a mobile version of an Assassin's Creed game that I

(16:56):
never played because it existed before I had been really
introduced to that whole franchise and is no longer something
that you can get or play anymore, because you know,
it was made to run on obsolete iPhones and is
no longer in the app store. Right, It's possible somebody
has made an emulator of it or something somewhere. I

(17:16):
didn't look that hard, but there was an Assassin's Creed
Pirates that Eustace the Monk is in. Yeah. Anyway, whatever's
happening on your weekend, there's video games involving pirates or
maybe actual pirates, hopefully only in a fun way, or

(17:37):
you know, if you got to work. I hope everybody's
great to you. We will be back with a Saturday
Classic tomorrow, which I think is going to be that
episode on who the Real Robin Hood was that I
forgot I wrote, and then we'll be back with a
brand new episode on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History

(17:57):
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.