Early Modern Whale

And other useless cycling advice from Shakespeare! Taking part in the Reading CC 'Reliability Trial' this last Sunday: 50.9 miles, 3...

I think this may be the only soft furnishing item once belonging to an early modern poet still in existence: the Reverend Edw...

I always meant to do a posting on this piece of 17th century concrete poetry by George Wither: John Broadbent included the second stanza in ...

A detail from a sumptuous still life, late 17th century, by Willem Kalf - that wonderful nautilus cup, modelled into a monster with a man fl...

I wonder when that familiar little bi-lobed icon first appeared? This is a detail from a tapestry of around 1410, which I have cropped (...

His what? Reading for a seminar, and for the first time in years, all the shouty poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and find myself enjoyi...

By that time, Gunnar had wounded eight men and killed two. Now he received two wounds himself, but everyone is agreed that he flinched neith...

As hair is proving to be so engaging a topic, and as I am spending too much time trying to justice to Emily Dickinson to offer a lo...

I was giving a poetry seminar earlier this week, and we got onto the subject of hair in Robert Browning’s poetry, and then, hair as a g...

The bibliography to end all bibliographies! Citations for Orpheus, Zoroaster, Cleopatra, Ovid, Cato, Hermes Tresmegistus, Albertus Magnus,...

The new version of ‘Blogger’ does not always seem to retrieve pictures properly, nevertheless, this post is solely about a picture, this i...

If you know the works of Thomas Traherne, then you will know that he wanted to go either to heaven, or back to his early childhood - and ...

Giovanna Tornabuoni, in 1488. How can so valuable a ruby hang on such a slender thread?

I enjoyed the caption competition over on ‘Blogging the Renaissance’ , but I came to it late, when as far as I could see there was no quip l...

I have a seminar to give on sections of Tennyson’s In Memoriam , http://victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/imov.html and this led me...

1607, 2007: tomorrow, the 10 th of January, the US Mint releases commemorative coins for the 400 th anniversary of the founding of the Jam...