Some Recent Stamps

Actually I was hoping to be more active on this blog this year, but other tasks prevented me from doing so. If you also follow my other blogs you will have noticed that I am also not very active there. However for this blog I am currently working on the post about World War II that I had promised earlier this year. Also I finally found a good book about European History that I am currently working through (1/4 finished). Nonetheless here are a few history themed stamps that I got in the past few weeks and that I really think deserve this short post. None of these have so far been shown on my main blog.

Let's start with this stamp from Germany. Some of you might remember that back in 2017 I wrote a post series about the Reformation. It was back then when I still had time and leisure for something like that. Although I later merged most of the posts, I still enjoy the theme and I am still happy for every new stamp about it. A stamp called Frauen der Reformation (Women of the Reformation) was thus an issue I was really looking forward to, especially as not many women appeared in my post series. Katharina von Bora, the wife of Martin Luther, was the only one to get an independent post (now part of Proponents of the Lutheran Reformation) and Elisabeth of Brandenburg, Duchess consort of Brunswick-Göttingen-Calenberg, was mentioned in The Reformation in Lower Saxony. I was really looking forward to get to know other strong and powerful women of the time through this stamp issue. Unfortunately however it disappointed me three times. At first there was the value. Personally I think 3,7€ is way too much to really enjoy a stamp. Next came the design. While claiming to celebrate the strong and powerful, the three women look more like alien handmaids from Gilead. Is it just me or do they look like Elisabeth Moss? Finally there was also the treatment of the issue. For the jubilee issue in 2017 and the Zwingli stamp last year there were multiple special postmarks available officially planned and designed. For this stamp there were none. Still I think this is an interesting and important issue and I am happy that not only Katharina von Bora is the focus of the stamp. If you want to know more about this theme there is a complete German website about the Frauen der Reformation with many profiles of many women who used their new possibilities and especially their necessity to read. Three names you could search for for example are Elisabeth von Rochlitz, Argula von Grumbach and Katharina Zell.

2020 I think was going to be the year of Beethoven, but we all know that it came different. Many countries still issued stamps for the jubilee, but it took until October for me to get my second one after the German stamp. It is this one from Austria. While it shows the same potrait shown on so many other stamps, it becomes more interesting due to the silver text. Among the pages above you can find a complete list of Beethoven stamps of this year. 

Next is this interesting stamp from France celebrating the oldest faculty of medicine in the World in Montpellier. The prestigous university was especially famous for its arguments about the Black Death in the 14th century, a theme of real interest during the current time. Famous students include for example Guy de Chauliac and Nostradamus. Shown on the stamp are two other famous students: François Gigot de la Peyronie, first-surgeon to King Louis XV, and Paul Joseph Barthez, an editor and contributor to several entries in the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and d’Alembert. I really like this stamp!

Women's Suffrage is an interesting theme to collect with many new stamps issued at the moment. The latest one comes from the USA. As I am thinking about a whole post about the theme, I do want to show the stamp yet, but here is an interesting postmark I got recently. It honours Harry T. Burn from Tennessee, who is best known for his action taken to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. I will include him if I write a post about women's suffrage, but you should check him out. I think he is quite interesting.

Last but not least is this postmark from Germany about the European Heritage Label. Although I have some stamps and postmarks about the sites, this is the first philatelic souvenir directly mentioning the label.