The Chauvet Caves in Ardeche, France, contain some of the oldest artwork made by Homo sapiens. 36,000 years ago, during one of the last ice ages, the people who adorned Chauvet did so with extreme sophistication. They really thought about how viewers would perceive their paintings in light of the curvature of the cave walls […]
The region of Ardeche in south-eastern France has a long history of exporting its produce. The Chestnut trees that grow here amazed me, because they are practically non-existent in the U.S.. Here I am standing next to a famous Chestnut tree over 300 years old — the trunk was massive. Grapes for wine (second picture)
Notre-Dame in Thines, France, is a jewel of a Romanesque church that I will definitely incorporate in my Medieval class this coming fall. It sits high up the hillside of Thines. Cars can’t go into many of the town’s tiny streets, so we walked along a dirt trail for about a kilometer to see it.
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In Province, France, some amazing ruins from Ancient Rome provide testimony to the wealth and engineering skills the empire’s elites commanded. The Pont-du-Gard still exists as part of the once-enormous aqueduct that brought water 50 kilometers away into the town of Nîmes. Built around 50 CE, it had to have an extremely low gradient to
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From 1309-1370, the central office of the papacy was not Rome, but the French city of Avignon. Petrarch bitingly referred to this situation as “the Babylonian captivity” of the papacy because he thought it was such a displacement. Although the Catholic Church was extremely powerful by this point of the Middle Ages, the King of
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This view of the southern French city of Uzés is taken from the top of a Medieval tower that now forms part of the town’s Medieval garden. The photos that follow show some of the many plant specimens that were grown in this region in the Middle Ages for all sorts of medical and alimentary
Romanesque architecture (dating from about 1050 on) is my favorite style of them all. Romanesque buildings are rare, their interiors are shadowed and their stone heaviness is evocative and mysterious, and the sculptures are whimsical. The latter quality is clearly evident in a tiny church from the 13th century Ardeche village of Chambonas. This church,
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Stories from the French Revolution leave a physical mark even in the southern French countryside. Here are two episodes that reflect the violence of the counter-revolution and explain the reasons that the peasantry revolted in the first place. The last three images show an aristocratic mansion and fortress in the small mountainside village of Banne.
The limestone rocks that form the bedrock of the Bois Païolive come from the Jurassic Period, 180 million years ago. Aeons of erosion created unusual rock outcroppings, which the French government back in 1934 declared to be an ecologically protected area. There is incredible biodiversity in the Païolive, but the most notable trees are the
The Parc Montsouris was one of four urban green park spaces planned for each cardinal direction under the French Emperor Napoleon III. After the Revolution and the many urban uprisings that followed, Napoleon III undertook a massive revitalization of the capital. The Parc Montsouris, located in the south of Paris, was officially inaugurated in 1875.
You are looking at the cover of one of the very first science-fiction novels. Written by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1608 (but published posthumously), _Somnium_ (“the dream”) tells the story of a youth named Duracotcus who undertakes a journey to study with the astronomer Tycho Brahe. When Duracotus returns home, his mother explains to
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The Phaistos Disk has resisted scholarly attempts at translation for over a century, illustrating the ways that cryptography operates exactly the opposite of the “Indiana Jones” method: no flash of laterally thinking insight will work here. Dating from about 1700 BCE, the Phaistos Disk was found on the Island of Crete, and is made of
Tycho Brahe (d. 1601), arguably one of the best naked-eye astronomers in history, also had one of the most famous noses in history. Mostly remembered for his accurate and detailed observations on the locations of stars and planets, twenty-year-old Tycho got into a drunken argument with a distant cousin about who was the better mathematician.
Miracle stories from the early Middle Ages include some accounts of saints who could successfully induce abortions. One such legend is from a seventh-century book of the life and miracles of the Irish St. Brigid of Kildare, who was said to have died around 525 CE. In the story, a woman had sex for pleasure
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Women’s interest in birth control can be traced back in time as far as historical records permit. This Ancient Egyptian condom might date from the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Not shown – because we only have a description in the Kahun Medical Papyrus from 1825 BCE – is a pessary (a mixture of substances inserted into the
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“Stop! Here is the empire of death” reads the entrance to the catacombs of Paris. And if you don’t want to see photos of some of the six million bodies buried here, don’t scroll on through these images. Touring the catacombs has to be one of my favorite experiences in Paris. I have never seen
The most visited necropolis in the world is the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. It brings 3.5 million visitors a year, and it is a wonder. The layout is maze-like, with bodies upon bodies memorialized in stone sepulchres. There are paths to find various memorials and graves, but they wind around, turn corners, and go uphill. Père-Lachaise was
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The Museé de l’Orangerie was established in 1852 and specializes in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Claude Monet’s massive murals _Water Lilies_ reside there. I loved Paul Cézanne’s _Dans le parc de Chateau-Noir_, and Marie Laurencin’s works (a rare women artist for the museum) — _Femmes au chien_ is the one shown here.
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I love that as I get ready to write up my syllabi for this coming fall semester, perhaps a wee bit wistful of my fabulous summer coming to an end, I am reading about a time in the early 20th century when teaching college students was a lot more stressful. And that’s where the great
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Behold the Cairo Toe, the earliest surviving prosthesis ever made. About 3,000 years ago in an Ancient Egyptian chamber lying west of Luxor, Egypt, a high-status woman was buried, and accompanying her remains was an artificial big toe made of leather and wood to fill in for a missing digit. The site was at Sheikh
