Haboku Sansui Painting
“Haboku sansui” is a breathtaking splashed-ink painting done by the Zen Buddhist monk Sesshu Toyo in 1495.
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Early Modern
15th Century Aquamanile
This is a 15th century aquamanile (pouring water vessel) representing the humiliation of Aristotle by Phyllis: a sort of “world-turned upside down” motif that actually reinforced ideas that men’s real place is above women. Picture taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
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Japanese Bathhouse
This woodblock print from about 1787 is by the Japanese artist Torii Kiyonaga, and it’s one of the most elegant examples of the distinct art from the Edo period in Japan, a time when the country’s artistic creativity generated works admired both at home and by Europeans. “Interior of a bathhouse” shows several women in
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Stopping Animal Cruelty in 19th-c Britain
Britain’s laws preventing cruelty to animals are some of the strictest in the world today, but earlier centuries quite differed. It took a man with a pair of pet leeches, a charismatic MP with a battered donkey, and changes to social classes brought about by the Industrial Revolution to change the scene. Folks living in
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Tomar, the Castle and Convent Where the Knights Templar Survived
The Knights Templar built the magnificent Castle and Convent of Christ in Tomar, Portugal, in the 12th century. But when the military religious order was dissolved and its members routed and killed after 1319, the kings of Portugal made Tomar a refuge for the monastic knights, changing their name to the Order of Christ and
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Yersinia Pestis
This baddie not only flourished in 14th and 15th century Eurasia. It also killed millions in the 6th cenuury, and struck again in 19th century China. Scientists are now thinking it might have caused a bottleneck in the population of Europeans in the Neolithic era too!
Jamestown Skull
Jamestown was the first permanent settlement by the English in the Americas, but its earliest years were hardly successful — in fact, the community almost died out at first, during the “starving time” winter of 1609-10. As settlers faced disease and drought, they also were surrounded by the hostile Powhatan peoples, which meant that leaving
Belladonna Poison
Belladonna was a poison used during the Italian Renaissance. Sean Carroll’s “Mindscape” podcast this week features Raychelle Burks, who discusses poisons, chemical analytic forensics, and history.
Oath Skulls in the Vehmic Courts of Early Modern Germany
This is an “oath skull” from the secret “vehmic” courts of northwest Germany’s Westphalia region. Dating to about 1600, it is carved with the initials S.S.G.G., which stood for “Stein, Strick, Gras, grün” (“stone, rope, grass, green”). The whole thing is macabre to modern viewers, and it might have been meant to be spooky and
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Beethoven’s Final Symphony
Almost 200 years ago (May 7, 1824), Beethoven’s Ninth – and final – Symphony debuted, and yesterday I got a chance to hear it at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Carlisle. It took the combined efforts of three groups (the Dickinson College Choir, Cantate Carlisle, and the Dickinson Orchestra) to perform the famously monumental
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Sexologist James Graham’s Celestial Bed
Late 18th-century Georgian Britain had such fascinating trends. An age of Enlightenment, it brought forth people who were in love with science and anything that sounded “science-y”, even when the actual science was missing. And, no surprise, interest peaked when said pseudo-science trend dealt with sex. This brings me to one James Graham (1745-1794), a
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The Three-Body Problem and Nicole-Reine Lepaute, an Astronomer Who Tackled It
This post is about a mathematical puzzle and a French astronomer-mathematician who tried to solve it: the Three-Body Problem, and Nicole-Reine Lepaute, an aristocratic woman working in Enlightenment-Era France. (See images one and two.) Practically as soon as Isaac Newton developed his ideas about gravity, he also realized that, while he could predict the orbits
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Christopher Clavius and the Debate over Geocentrism
Often revolutions are only recognized as such in the wake of their transformations. This was the case for the massive shift in human culture in accepting the fact that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around. Between the heliocentric model of Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543) and the Papacy’s condemnation of Galileo
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Timucuan Amerindians Record Their Written Language
At the time of the Spanish discovery of the Americas, the Timucuan peoples were the largest linguistic group around modern Florida and Georgia, numbering about 200,000. They were not united peoples but lived in different groups, sometimes hunting and gathering, other times farming, but their culture was rich (see second image for Timucuan lands in
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The History of Chartreuse
This photo shows a Carthusian monk mixing ingredients for the liqueur known as “Chartreuse,” a beverage so famous that it gave its name to a color. The monks have been producing this drink for centuries. The Carthusian order has been consistently strict since their founding in the late eleventh century. The monks have prayed and
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Enos Hitchcock, Who Believed the Youth Are Corrupted by Bad Reading Materials
This is Enos Hitchcock, (1745-1803) a clergyman whose life intersected the U.S. Revolutionary War and who was an ardent champion for the role of religion in the public sphere. He was concerned — *concerned*, I tell you, about the Direction of the Youth in his time. One of his works had the extraordinarily long title
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Sawney Beane, Scotland’s Most Famous Cannibal
Murder podcasts are so trendy right now, but horrible gory tales have attracted human attention for centuries. (#grendelwasnothefirst) Take this gent, for instance — the legendary Scottish cannibal, Sawney Beane! (Or Bean, but I like “Beane” better because the spelling invokes Days Of Yore). There are different accounts of when Sawney lived: the earliest put
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Smallpox Scars and Women’s Cosmetics
Take a good look at this painting from about 1650 by an anonymous English artist, and think about what it all means. Here we have two wealthy women’s three-quarter portraits — they wear jewelry and fancy clothes, and they are posed in a mirror image of each other. Suggestive of equality, right? But one woman
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The Visard, an Early Modern Woman’s Facemask
Masking women’s faces across history has a common denominator — the practice focuses on how society monitors female sexuality, and shows how often a woman’s place in society was equated with her sexuality. The creepy face mask known as a “Visard” in Early Modern Europe is a case in point. This French painting from 1581
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Polish Plait
I cannot imagine how knowledge of this Early Modern European hairstyle has evaded me for so long. It’s absolutely disgusting and I cannot look away, but I suggest really thinking twice before you flip to the second image. I am talking about “Plica Polonica” or the “Polish Plait”. It went by a bunch of different