Early Modern Whale

To: Enquiry, British Horse Society Subject: Inquiry from a scholar Hello: a strange one for you, this. I am an academic at...

…That both of them coming to the said Copse about 9 of the clock in the morning, the said William Aven took the sword, and laid it down ne...

About time this blog had a musical interlude, and heavens knows I need one. So, if you click this link, you get, off a very old recording o...

Here's the latest Chinese dinosaur, Gigantoraptor, side by side with Jacques de Gheyn's zoomorphic monster in one of his drawings of...

I have always harboured suspicions about archaeologists – their vociferous pretensions to exclusive ownership of the past, the endless flex...

It is hard, off hand, to think of many cultures as ill-served by their medicine men as early modern England , where catastrophically unhygie...

“Scriptures declare many men to be condemned to eternal torments, when no woman at any time condemned may be read of …” So, next time I re...

The real life Malvolio here is Sir John Pettus (1613?-1685). He was one of those types of people I love to find: transitional, displaced, cr...

To round off a very dull wet Sunday, TV offered a choice of either a documentary about the wreck of a pirate ship, or the BBC's full blo...

A Sunday morning of interminable rain, so no cycling: I find myself reading an interminable book, Donne’s Fifty Sermons of 1649. In this ...

Captain James Hind was a highwayman and Royalist soldier, widely believed to have assisted in Charles II's escape after the Battle of W...

Rather than pressing on with other tasks, I have been reading John Sheffield’s Antapologia, or, A discourse of excuses setting forth t...

My good friend Tupper, man of many and fearless opinions, urges me to ‘lighten the pudding’ (his very words) with one or two less formal po...

Resourceful sort of being, Satan, able to take on all kinds of shapes – but, a flock of geese ? I mean, steady on… “I have thought conv...

‘Floreat’ – and then a date. It usually means a writer only known of from a solitary publication: in that year, through the kindness of th...