Saturday, February 27, 2016

Early modern text messages, painfully transmitted

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The vanity of dogmatizing, or, Confidence in opinions manifested in a discourse of the shortness and uncertainty of our knowledge, and...
Tuesday, February 23, 2016

A votive painting to the witchcraft cult?

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A rather pleasing witchcraft image, from the Prado’s online collection: ‘Anonymous’ and ‘17 th century’, ‘oil on board’ is all the...
Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Satan in the form of a duck, c.1635

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From Thomas Gage ’s New Survey of the   West-Indies (1648, 1677 edition used here) ,   chapter 20, p. 379 ff . Gage, born into a Sur...
Monday, October 12, 2015

Tips for 17th century living: how to revenge yourself on an "impudent anus"

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It was clearly one of the hazards of urban living in early modern London that, if the door of your house offered even the shallowest of ent...
Thursday, April 02, 2015

Can't get enough of those late medieval kings? Henry VII's bed

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Jonathan Foyle with his royal bed After the hoopla about Richard III's putative bones (hmm, he was a blue-eyed blonde, was he, and...
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Thursday, February 19, 2015

At the Harry Price Library again

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A reading cushion full of witchcraft sceptics: A first edition Weyer, Scot from 1584 and 1651, John Webster, Francis Hutchinson A vis...
Saturday, January 03, 2015

Henry Holland's 'Treatise of Witchcraft' 1590: "I may speake truely as another doeth"

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Henry Holland is the most comprehensible of the English demonologists. His methodology is clearly apparent, his continental sources con...