Wishing and Hoping: Card Tricks, Love Spells, and Methods of Escape
I’ll go one further and posit that we need our illusionists: to disprove our eyes, investigate our dreams, and sometimes charm the money from our pockets.
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Posts Tagged: medieval
Accessing the Past through Graffiti
Writing for Aeon, historian Matthew Champion delves into contemporary research on medieval graffiti. Exploring graffiti (a visual medium) allows for historians to learn more about the actual lives of the medieval world’s largely illiterate populace.
...moreRushdie Goes Medieval
Salman Rushdie, no stranger to controversy, now finds himself under scrutiny from a different sort of institution: the Times Literary Supplement. Michael Caines, writing for TLS, takes issue with Rushdie’s recent use of the word “medieval” in a statement made about the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Caines unpacks the word’s historical usage in distancing Renaissance thinkers […]
...moreCats Haven’t Changed Much Since the 1400s
Elegant words from a manuscript painstakingly illustrated by a fifteenth-century scribe: “Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam.” Translation: “Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night.” The blog Medieval Fragments has more on the cats that both bedeviled and entertained the monks of the Middle […]
...morePeople of Color in Medieval Art
A few days ago, Morning Coffee dispenser Dan Weiss mentioned Medieval POC, a blog examining the appearance of people of color in European art history. The blog’s creator, Malisha Dewalt, recently participated in a roundtable chat with other art historians and medievalists for NPR’s Code Switch. Their conversation is eye-opening, ranging from the way art textbooks […]
...moreA Very Medieval Holiday Season
If the usual array of winter holidays is simply not enough for you, you might consider checking out the medieval December saints calendar (part 1 and part 2). Who needs “New Year’s Eve” when you can have the Feast of Pope St. Sylvester instead?! It may be a little too late in the month to […]
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