The book linked to is a really interesting slice of 1680s culture.
Kathy: "But they can't hide it [having sex] from God, who sees and knows all things"
Frank: "God who sees and knows all things will say nothing; besides, I cannot think leachery a sin, I am sure if Women govern'd the world and the Church as men do, you would soon find they would account fucking so lawful, as it should not be accounted a Misdemeanor."
Kathy: "I wonder men should be so rigorous against a thing they love so well."
Frank: "Only for fear of giving to much liberty to the Women, who else would challenge the same liberty with them, but in fine, we wink at one anothers faults, and do not think swiving a hainous sin, and were it not for fear of great Bellys, if it were possible swiving would be much more used then now it is."
"Last month, I came across a recently digitized book from 1680 with the innocuous-sounding title The School of Venus."
Funny. I read that title and assumed it was erotica.
Venus is the goddess of love. The title is also rather similar to one of the most famous pieces of erotic literature of all time, Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus.
As part of my History major I did a subject on Witchcraft in Europe, which involved a lot of primary texts from the early modern period. You certainly get faster the more you read, but I always did a double take when the text discussed the familiars (think black cats) "sucking their mistresses".
To go OT, the "witch's teat" was a superfluous nipple for feeding their satanic familiars, and was even used as evidence to convict some witches.
It gets even more fun if you go back to the medieval grimoires, like the Munich Manual. Medieval Latin is tricky in both orthography and its linguistic departures from classical Latin.
I've always read it as F. How can you rule out the possibility that, before certain advances in dental technology [1], most people spoke with a lisp, so what you read is what would have actually been said? It's not like there are recordings or standardized international phonetic alphabets to record the sounds represented by the letters.
[1] I seem to remember George Washington's dentures a technological marvel of his day, or something.
That small slip annoyed me too. Long s does not appear at the end of words or in capital letters (at least not that I can currently recall), which is why it would not appear in the title (the capital letter of "School" or the word-end form in "Venus"), but I believe it is the standard form at the start of words.
I have been suffering from a bad handwriting my entire life.
In school and uni I would always be afraid, that answers could not be decoded by the person grading the test.
I also thought that the resulting text looked ugly.
Recently I have started to consciously improve my handwriting with great results. The simplest most effective step was to treat every letter as a single entity (in contrast of slurring all letters together into one word).
Of course this takes a little more time, but I now can actually read the results, and I also think that it looks good from an aesthetic point of view. Now I am not afraid of writing christmas or birthday cards anymore (I even bought a fountain pen for this purpose).
Kathy: "But they can't hide it [having sex] from God, who sees and knows all things"
Frank: "God who sees and knows all things will say nothing; besides, I cannot think leachery a sin, I am sure if Women govern'd the world and the Church as men do, you would soon find they would account fucking so lawful, as it should not be accounted a Misdemeanor."
Kathy: "I wonder men should be so rigorous against a thing they love so well."
Frank: "Only for fear of giving to much liberty to the Women, who else would challenge the same liberty with them, but in fine, we wink at one anothers faults, and do not think swiving a hainous sin, and were it not for fear of great Bellys, if it were possible swiving would be much more used then now it is."