Jan 5, 2017 | Fun Historical Facts, Interviews Features and Reviews
While I wait for your feedback on what kind of posts to focus on this year, I will kick off this year’s posts with a seemingly unusual question: What do you get when you combine history with a murder mystery? Answer: The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian...
Dec 29, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
In a recent post, I described the many ways Medieval scribes and readers would transport their treasured books. There was one kind of book in particular that demanded its own post. Enter the Irish cumdach or ‘book shrine’. As Erik Kwakkel of Leiden University...
Dec 27, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
My Kindle has a couple of thousand books in it. Yes, thousand. Its size? smaller than most of my books and small enough to fit my jacket’s inside pocket. Nowadays, we barely spare a thought for the amazing fact that we can carry with us more books than an entire...
Dec 10, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
Two days ago, thieves broke into a chapel in my local parish. They left with a chalice, two candlesticks, and a Bible. When I heard about it, I wondered if the Bible’s publishers still followed the Medieval tradition of protecting books with curses. Which makes...
Nov 18, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
If you are in London until November 27th, you have a great opportunity to visit “Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds” at the British Museum. The exhibition contains treasures excavated from the Mediterranean and, as the Economist points out, explains how the ancient...
Nov 8, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
It was a slow day in 1450 and Herman Strepel, a scribe in Münster, Germany, was bored. With the last manuscript almost complete, he needed a new client. So, his eyes lit up when a passerby stepped into his store. His clothes spoke of a wealthy merchant. Perhaps even a...
Oct 22, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
Two lovely videos that explain first the traditional book-making process, then the modern one. I hope you find them as fascinating as I did! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRKsW-oVcHg The Art of Making a BookPowered By the Tweet This PluginTweet...
Oct 20, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
Born in 1623, Lady Margaret Cavendish was an outspoken aristocrat who traveled in circles of scientific thinkers and broke ground on proto-feminism, natural philosophy (the 17th-century term for science), and social politics. As far as I am concerned, however, she...
Sep 29, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
Aleppo, Syria, has recently been in the news for all the wrong kinds of reasons. Back in 1697, however, on the day before Easter, Reverend Henry Maundrell, a chaplain for the English Levant Company’s office in Aleppo, witnessed the tattooing process in Jerusalem on a...
Sep 4, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
It was the end of a particularly taxing day, and Canal, a prominent 14th-century Venetian merchant, was baffled. A friend had posed him a simple-sounding mathematical problem, but he still couldn’t figure it out. The problem went like this: the distance between...
