Early Modern Whale

Two Royal chaplains are buried at the Parish church in Eversley, in Hampshire, http://www.stmaryseversley.org.uk/ They are Alexander...

I have been listening, over and over, to Handel’s 1707 ‘Dixit Dominus’: I’ve got a version performed wonderfully by The Sixteen Choir and ...

Imagine scholarship without the OED (if you can). Now that the power of the computer has been integrated so consummately with that dictiona...

Charles Cotton again … I’ve always considered Orsino a character delivered in Shakespeare’s highest style of comedy. But students tend to di...

It was 1642, and Ben Agar had ambitious schemes to set up, in Kingston-on-Thames , ‘a private Schoole or Nursery, for the generall education...

I was thinking again about Sir Thomas More and his household: that grave company of clever adults (two or three of the young women present d...

This gentleman was a Frenchman called Floram Marchand, who arrived in England in with an unusual and apparently popular act. The confused...

Rowland Lockey's copy (so attributed) of the lost Holbein, 'Sir Thomas More and his Family', in the Nostell Priory version. The ...

I was interested by this http://earmarks.org/archives/2006/04/19/91 posting on the 'Earmarks in early modern culture' blog. Off at ...

“So it would incite, and cause them to say unto themselves, wee are induced and perswaded, nay, in a manner we are even compelled, and as i...

This is a very offensive image, and I curtail my parody of Donne before I make things worse. The artist is Christiaen van Couwenbergh,...

2. By eating a pound of Red Cherries upon a wager 11. By eating a Cucumber 12. By a Melon 13. By Redishes 14. By Drinking Wate...

As we are interested in the notion of women using art to reply to a male exponent of the art form, this painting by Judith Leyster of 1631, ...

‘These are the ears which have hearkned to so many base, scurrilous, profane, lust provoking songs’. A stray comment on my blog repea...

I had forgotten, in posting last about Richard Saunders and his systematic account of foretelling fortunes from the face, this passage in Th...

Richard Saunders was one of those astrologers who published an annual almanac, and I suppose that back in those days of almanac buying, you ...