Early Modern Whale

George Daniel, of Beswick (his dates were 1616–1657) vowed that he would never again take razor to his beard after the execution of Charles ...

I spent an almost spookily quiet Sunday (the England match was on TV) cycling in rural Hampshire. After two visits to churches, one of whic...

On Sunday, as I was coming back from completing the 105 mile 'Circuit of the Cotswolds' Ride (I was rider 396) http://www.circuitoft...

I’ve been unable to get on-line, my ISP having problems. I’ve anyway been reasonably busy with the effort to get degree results out afte...

Posting on the number of the beast reminded me of Dame Helen Gardner - not that the late Merton Professor of English was in any way satanic ...

The world seems to have survived 6.6.06, despite those ominous words, ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of t...

Some years back, we used to run ‘poetry seminars’ for our students. They were more a training for speaking up in class than designed to mee...

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...