Innocence?

I'm currently having a lot of fun with an Instagram photo challenge, initiated by ig14.at - there's a topic for every day as a prompt, and the challenge is to post a living history photo for it.

Some of the topics are really easy, but others I find quite hard. Not because I don't have associations, or haven't had the situation (like "cold"... who hasn't frozen half-solid at some event or other), but because I usually don't have a picture for it, at least not one showing me in that situation.

One of those prompts was "innocence". After a while of thinking, I ended up with this picture:



Why? Well, let me take you around the three corners that brought me here:

Sleeping Beauty is a story, more or less, about innocence lost. (It's actually not a very female-friendly story, as unless you read the cleaned-up version, it's not just kissing that happens when the man finds her. She loses her innocence to him, in some versions without having a say in it, as she's still asleep.)

Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger while spinning, or so the tale says. Well, as I have told a lot of people posing that question on events, that did definitely not happen on a normal handspindle, and also not on a modern treadled spinning wheel. While the early Great Wheel does have a pointy spindle, it does not need to be really sharp. With enough enthusiasm or clumsiness, though, yes, you could hurt yourself on the tip of the spindle rod (mine is about as sharp as the tip of a modern dessert fork). A late medieval version of the tale from France sees Sleeping Beauty ram a wooden splinter left from bad flax processing under her fingernail - which I guess is at least as probable as ramming her hand into the spindle of a wool wheel.

If you'd like to read more about this, I've written a bit about the Sleeping Beauty Question here - and if you are curious about the other things on the challenge that I posted, you can have a look at my Instagram feed here.