Early Modern

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

This is a post about a legacy of surrealistic and evocative art that originated from a very old book and a nearly-as-old garden, which influenced a philosopher who lived hundreds of years later and an artist living even later still. Might I present to you, dear readers, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili? The famous printer Aldus Manutius […]

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Birth of the Virgin Mary Sculpture

Birth of the Virgin Mary Sculpture

This is a near life-size wooden sculpture of the birth of the Virgin Mary with her mother Saint Anne. It comes from a church called Ebern in southern Germany and dates to around 1480. The sweetness of this pair really stands out, especially Anne’s exhausted but happy expression as she rests after giving birth, one

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Eve and Lilith Wooden Base

“Third Day of Creation” Painting

Hieronymous Bosch, “Third Day of Creation,” (c. 1490-1510). Bosch was a proto-surrealist oil painter from the Medieval Netherlands with a wonderfully twisted imagination. This painting represents the world as he imagined it before the creation of animals. Here, the color scheme (typical for the exterior of tryptichs, which this was) brings out the drabness of

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Eve and Lilith Wooden Base

Eve and Lilith Wooden Base

This wooden base for a small statue features Eve and Lilith, two primal females in Christian mythology. These characters also underlined negative assumptions about women’s basic nature. Eve on the left shows weakness and over-curiosity by consuming the fruit forbidden to her. Lilith, thought to be Adam’s first wife, shows disobedience perhaps arising from her

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French Book of Hours Illustration

French Book of Hours Illustration

This illustration from a French _Book of Hours_ dating c. 1475 depicts a bleeding Eucharist wafer that medieval people considered miraculous. It even has a name: “the Sacred Bleeding Host of Dijon.” Medieval people were spellbound by miraculous bleeding communion wafers such as this one, but there was an ugly underside to this devotion: it

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Hawk Hat

Here is a teeny hat for a hawk to wear during a hunting expedition. Dating to about 1700 CE, it was made for somebody’s pet “bāz”, or falcon/hawk in Persia/modern Iran. The cover here is made of velvet and silver thread, but that’s not the only reason we know it was meant for this bāz

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Michael the Archangel and the Conquering of Peru

This enormous oil painting of Saint Michael the Archangel was completed in Peru (Cuzco) around 1700. Despite the picture’s large size (it was at least 5 feet tall), no artist’s name appears on it. And that’s because the Spanish conquerors had commissioned the piece as propaganda and couldn’t care less about the artist. At this

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Feces Dispersal

This painting is a super blunt image of a woman relieving herself. Painted in the early 1600s, it gets at a very different perspective (compared to modern USA) about human effluences in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. Instead of pushing our human elimination as far away as possible, urban dwellers strove to use it. Historian

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Dr. Francesco Lodá: Dueling in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Shippensburg University was very lucky to have Dr. Francesco Lodá speak this evening about dueling in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Focusing especially on the Italian Marcelli familial school-of-arms, Professor Lodà demonstrated that the most advanced Masters of Arms achieved very high status, despite the fact that they had not originated from the aristocracy

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Dr. Timothy May Talk

Dr. Timothy May Talk on Mongolian History

Dr. Timothy May, specialist in Mongolian history, spoke at Shippensburg University this evening. My favorite annecdote was when he talked about the Daoist monk who warned Chinggis Khan that he would live longer if he quit drinking, hunting, and having quite so much sex. The leader of ored the monk, and Chinggis Khan died from

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Eastern State Penitentiary

The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia is definitely worth visiting. It was a unique and highly influential prison, and the current site now has first-rate displays with the buildings intentionally kept in a state of semi-decay. The ambience perfectly matched the subject.   Once the USA’s largest prison, Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 with

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