WOT ...? ("Congressional Balcony"?)

[Joel S. Berson]

At 1/29/2014 08:09 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> > P.S. Wikipedia cites an "accidental autodefenestration", in Acts ch.
> > 20 verses 6--12.  Something to ponder every time one looks out of an
> > open window.
>
>Not as much fun as accidental autoasphyxiation (gasp gasp), I'm sure.

Does one achieve sexual satisfaction from an *accidental* autoasphyxiation?

>As for defenestrations, there were (at least)
>two famous ones in Prague, but definitely
>neither auto- nor accidental.  My favorite is
>the second one, during the Thirty Years War at
>the Hradčany Castle on May 23, 1618, when an
>assembly of Bohemian Protestants put two local
>governors of the Holy Roman Empire on trial in
>the Bohemian Chancellery for violating the
>Freedom of Religion edict granted nine years
>early by Emperor Rudolf II. The regents were
>convicted, and along with their scribe Philip
>Fabricius, were immediately flung out of the
>hundred-foot-high windows of the Hradčany. They
>landed on a large pile of horse manure in a dry
>moat and survived. The emperor later ennobled
>Fabricius as Baron von Hohenfall ("of Highfall").

This -- plus of course defenestrating enemies
into a pile of horse manure -- goes to show that
they had senses of humor in the early modern
era.  Both Protestants and Catholics.

Joel

>Imperial officials attributed the survival of
>the defenestratees to the intercession of angels
>on behalf of the Catholic cause; for the
>Protestants, their preservation resulted not
>from heavenly dispensation but the softness of their landing site.

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