Hello Starpeople,
this week on our Instagram page @historybyrigel we will tell the story behind some curious flags: Munster’s Anabaptist State did not have one but below you can find its story and also some tips on whiskey you should memorize if you want to show-off at your next date or meeting 🥃
🏛 ANABAPTISM AND THE REVOLT OF MUNSTER
Anabaptists represented one of the most important religious movement among those that arose during the period of the Lutheran Reformation (1500). Their main belief regarded the validity of baptism: Anabaptists believed in fact that baptism on newborns was void since it was imposed and not based on the awareness of the disciple, so every disciple had to be baptized only in adulthood as a result of his choice.
The peak of the Anabaptist movement came with the Munster revolt (1534), during which the Bishop Franz von Waldeck and the city council were expelled. Then, all citizens who did not embrace Anabaptist beliefs were expelled and a regime of terror was established, based first on the communion of goods and then of women.
Following the revolt and the establishment of the New Zion (as it was renamed by the leaders of the movement), the city was besieged by Catholic and Lutheran forces jointly (in particular the bishop and princes) and capitulated after a year-long siege. The leaders of the city were killed and exhibited in iron cages that were hung at the tower of the city's cathedral. Even though the corpses were removed after 50 years, the cages are still visible today on the cathedral’s tower.
🔬 A NEW CURIOUS WAY TO DISCERN WHISKEY’S QUALITY
An analysis of residues from evaporated bourbons reveals that different types of American whiskey leave behind unique weblike patterns. Such signature evaporation marks could help identify counterfeit liquors or test new techniques to speed up whiskey aging.
Researchers at the University of Louisville in Kentucky discovered these ‘whiskey webs’ by evaporating bourbon droplets diluted with different amounts of water and examining the dregs under a microscope. Bourbons with alcohol concentrations of at least 35% left uniform residue films previously seen in experiments on Scotch whisky, while bourbons with alcohol concentrations of about 10 percent left markings similar to coffee rings.
To the researchers’ surprise, almost every American whiskey diluted to around 20 percent alcohol left behind a unique, weblike microstructure. The research team suspect that compounds that leach into the whiskey while it ages in charred oak barrels create these webs.
The researchers could not create similar webs using Canadian or Scotch whiskies, suggesting that whiskey webs are vestiges of flavor compounds specific to American whiskey distillation, where whiskey is aged in new, rather than reused, barrels. That process may allow more web-forming compounds to leach from barrels into the whiskey.
You can find the whole gallery at: https://whiskeywebs.org/
🎨 FRANCISCO GOYA – WITCHES’ SABBATH (1798)
The Witches’ Sabbath belongs to a series of eight paintings that were commissioned by the Dukes of Osuna, who requested to represent scenes of witchcraft, exorcism and satanism: these themes were quite popular among the aristocracy at the time.
The painting shows the devil, in the form of a goat, surrounded by a group of disfigured witches who are offering him children as sacrifice. Coherently with the imagery of witchcraft, many of the symbols used are inverted. The crescent moon is represented in the upper-left corner, while the goat stretches its left hoof, instead of the right one, to grab the child.