Early Modern Whale

I have been clearing from my son’s room the books he has now outgrown – down to the Amnesty International bookshop with them al...

"Here lyeth Elizabeth Chute, Daughter of George Chute Knight and Dame Anne his wife, whoe lived 3 yeares and 6 monthes and dyed the 18t...

I missed my favourite, large-size teacup this morning, and eventually found it upside down on my son's desk, imprisoning a wretched cran...

There's lots of effort being made at approaching the erotics of early modern culture, with literary texts being picked over, and the sma...

I went out cycling late on Friday afternoon, and was across to Shottesbrooke, a few miles east of Reading, in time to pick up the key to Sho...

I have more or less given up on the National Trust: a visit to one of their historical properties feels to me increasingly like a visit to a...

I have been off-line, waiting fairly patiently for BT's server to go back up, unaware that Lupin the rabbit had wandered in out of the g...

I have to write a first year lecture on 'To His Coy Mistress', and this made me start thinking about ' carpe diem ' an...

1 st voice Humour, say, what makest thou here In the presence of a queen? 2 nd voice Princes hold conceit most dear, ...

"Foole that I was, who had so faire a state Fower or five thousant by the year at least And waste it so as I have done of late On Whore...

I had seen various references by social historians to the 1650 Act of Parliament by which the Puritan House of Commons sought to make fornic...

My latest thing (Tudor portrait memorial brasses) being recondite even by my standards - though I found a nice example in the University Chu...

My latest toy is something called a USB turntable, by Ion. This spins your time-hallowed vinyl in the old way, but connects umbilically to y...

‘Whipping Tom’, the subject of a news pamphlet and this street ballad, made his way to London in 1681. Contemporaries thought that he was e...

Back to the English landscape today, opting to go to a Church I'd been saving up, that at Ewelme in Oxfordshire (the odd name is Old Eng...

I can't continue with matters early modern without some reaction to my first trip to America. So here's your blogger and, sliding in...

This will be my last post for a couple of weeks. I am off with my son Tim to America, a first visit for both of us. A fly-drive, with large ...

Apart from the animals they knew well, much early modern zoology was suffused with folklore and traditional fantasies. I was reminded of thi...

Thomas Shipman: 'The Kiss, To Mrs. C.' Hold not your Lips so close; dispence Treasures, Perfumes, and Life from thence. ...

I bought this photographic print from one of my regular postcard dealers last weekend. There's no date or names, just the stamped 'H...