Early Modern Whale

It is always stimulating to come across an early modern text that feels (as we say) transgressive . In the mid-seventeenth century, pre...

Two interiors by David Teniers the Younger (1610-90), one a kitchen scene, the other, witches preparing for a sabbath. What amuses me is, wh...

This is me all over: because I once supervised a postgraduate working on cosmetics in English Renaissance Drama, and because I can do anyb...

Scholar! Are you desperate to find an unrecognised significance in an early modern text? New Age Practitioner! Do you want some suggestions ...

I read a lot of scholarship about the witch scares of early modern Europe ; I also read lots of the source texts. What bemuses me is the dis...

I’ve been reading Cosmeticks, or the beautifying Part of Physick (1660), which claims to have been written by John Jeams Wecker, with its t...

I was trying to knot my shoelaces yesterday without getting Lupin the rabbit's whiskers caught in the bow: she was, as ever, right up th...

For reasons obscure even to myself, I have started to collect old postcards of people with their bicycles. There are hundreds and thousands ...

I have become interested in early advertising materials. I have posted about some early single sheet ‘bills’, including some by doctors. As ...

Ho-hum: reading again: this time, a posthumous biography of a man who did nothing, but whose culture could find abundant terms in whic...

My last two posts made me think of this rather sprightly broadsheet ballad from 1620, with its woodcut of a small dog in pursuit of a vast a...

I have been looking at early modern adverts. 'My griefs cry lowder then aduertisement', says Leonato, angry about the 'death...

One of Lupin the rabbit's more spectacular moults, for all the world as if she was trying to send a signal spelled out in fur. She is ab...

I have been reading the Memoirs of Lord Hervey… but there, another book. I do have other things in my life, I allege. Why nobody has dram...

Maybe I qualify myself (as a fossil in literature, that is). My friend Simon accuses me (well, not in so many words) of having outed myself ...

Well, there's a title to get the readers flooding in! But I use this blog as a small act of expiation: when I was a teenager, I would cy...

Adventurous life in two interpretations: on the left, my son Tim hauled up onto the Thames riverbank amidst a strew of sandwich boxes and to...

It’s life as we know it, Tim! A review of One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers: Memoirs of a Cyclist by Tim Hilton (Harper-Coll...