Talk:Concealed shoes

Concealed shoes has been listed as one of the Social sciences and society good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
November 10, 2013	Good article nominee	Not listed
October 8, 2014	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on November 3, 2012.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that it was once a common practice to conceal shoes in the structure of a building to ward off evil spirits, or to ensure the fertility of its female occupants?

Current status: Good article

Buying shoes for a match-maker[edit]

I may be able to source what I write here. If I can, it could be worth adding in an appropriate section which links fertily with shoes. In China, if one finds one's future spouse by means of an intermediary (a paid one is called a 媒婆 or "méipó" in pinyin), then when the wedding takes place, it is traditional that one buys this matchmaker a pair of shoes. It might be useful to show how cross-cultural the association of shoes with fertility or marriage goes. I may also be able to search out sourced ideas of concealed shoes in Chinese buildings, which would be directly relevant to this article. Any comments about suitability, anyone? DDStretch (talk) 16:06, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. The article currently hedges its bets about concealed shoes in China, so it would be good to be a bit more definitive about that. George Ponderevo (talk) 23:41, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

possible improvements![edit]

I have added a couple of web based publications and would like to add http://www.academia.edu/553987/Hoosier_Footprints_Concealed_Shoes_in_Indiana. I see that the author is already cited has someone contacted the publisher in reference to their request of no citing without permission!! will access climate controlled case today and take some images of the museum's collection if I can. Edmund Patrick – confer 05:47, 23 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Footnotes[edit]

Didn't think this was controversial, but it's been reverted by User:Eric Corbett - should the two short text footnotes be in the article body, or left as footnotes? The first (about Northampton being a shoemaking area) is fairly trivial, but the second (that concealed shoe sites correspond with "the most intense witch hunts" in both England and New England) seems significant enough that it'd benefit the reader to mention it clearly in "Location of finds", a section which doesn't otherwise mention witchcraft. --McGeddon (talk) 15:59, 17 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say the East Anglia one at least ought to be in the footnotes rather than the body text; as something which needs to be explained for the benefit of readers who want to know the full background, but is neither directly relevant to the article topic nor necessary for comprehension of the article, it's pretty much the textbook use-case for a footnote. The Northampton one, I'm neutral either way—to me it looks a little irrelevant in the body text, but it may be useful to readers (particularly in mobile view where the footnoting isn't as obvious) who are wondering "why Northampton?". ‑ Iridescent 16:32, 17 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Found in Canada[edit]

News article: "Nova Scotia Archeologist digs into the history behind old N.S. houses, one shoe at a time Shoe recently discovered in the walls of a 190-year-old Acadian home by Alex Cooke · CBC News · Posted: Jan 14, 2021"

Another article: "Century-old shoe mystery solved: Footwear in walls meant to ward off evil spirits Author of the article: Calgary Herald Published Mar 30, 2021"

To add to the topic article.

~~Ed~~ 2607:FEA8:4A2:4100:21D2:54F6:19BC:D682 (talk) 08:36, 6 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]