2017-06-21 07:31
This has to have been be one of the most enjoyable days I've experienced in all my years of cycling. There can't be many days in Derbyshire where it's warm for a start at 7.15am. The weather… Read More
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Early Modern Whale Blog
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Blog of a professional academic: reviews, small essays, bias towards Renaissance culture, plus personal interests in natural history, cycling.
2017-06-16 16:18
A casualty list:“A note of the men’s names deceased out of the Dragon.1 William Thomson. 2 Job Harket. 3 William Allin.4 Raphe Arden. 5 Christopher Scot. 6 Edward Major.7 Thomas… Read More
2017-06-05 07:25
The Bodleian library has just announced the purchase of this letter sent by the enterprising Edward Millington to Lady Jane Gerard in 1673:http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/archivesandmanuscrip… Read More
2017-06-01 13:16
http://reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=sat:3105#page/1/mode/1up“A deep measure of Repentance, a greater proportion of Sorrow is certainly required of Consecrated person… Read More
2017-05-17 13:44
My images are of stained glass now in the church of St Mary the Virgin, Shrewsbury. The panels, purchased by the Reverend William Gorsuch Rowland in the second quarter of the 19th century, w… Read More
2017-04-29 17:36
I never really thought I'd ever see such a rarity. Last year I heard reports of a couple of flowers at the Hartslock Nature Reserve. My wife and I went along on the 17th, and though we saw a… Read More
2017-04-18 14:02
I return to George Garden’s An apology for M. Antonia Bourignon in four parts, published in London in 1699.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoinette_BourignonThe portrait of A… Read More
2017-04-12 11:06
"An assembly, meeting, or company. Obs.?a1513 W. Dunbar Poems (1998) 196 Lat anis the cop ga round about, And wyn the covanis banesoun.spec. A gathering of witches; a ‘co… Read More
2017-04-03 09:42
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-39477017I drew a Shakespearean colleague's attention to this intriguing item. The notebook is held open in the valuer's hand during the clip, s… Read More
2017-03-29 08:28
As our non-elected national leader presses on towards a future in which she forces legislation through using Henry VIII’s 500 year old form of government by proclamation - somehow not… Read More
2017-01-07 17:35
The image of the 17th century English aristocrat is fixed forever by Van Dyke. In this post, which is inspired by Adam Smyth’s review of Wendy Wall’s Recipes for Thought: Knowled… Read More
2016-12-24 15:16
I attended a viva voceexamination last week, in which the candidate stuck out his neck and suggested that the anonymous author of The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret… Read More
2016-12-20 12:14
I do not know how much institutions round the world pay for access to this resource. It is time ProQuest cut their fees, for the database has not worked properly for years now. Here's an e-m… Read More
2016-09-15 20:23
I read James Serpell’s piece on familiar spirits, ‘Guardian Spirits or demonic Pets: The Concept of the Witch’s Familiar in Early Modern England, 1530-1712, which appeared… Read More
2016-09-11 19:30
A pleasant pre-term trip to Lund University occupied me last week. One flies to Copenhagen to get to southern Sweden: this gave me the idea that I could spin out my trip home with a trip to… Read More
2016-07-11 20:59
A holiday in Alsace, in the celebrated village of Riquewihr. All new to me, and stemming from a recommendation from a cycling friend years ago.Alsace reminded me in some ways of Belgium: a p… Read More
2016-07-01 11:25
As the nation bids farewell forever to another good that we had in common, I surprise myself by thinking that at least we have some people still who can voice such sentiments, and use such w… Read More
2016-06-29 20:25
What was Godfrey Goodman’s The Creatures Praysing God: or, The religion of dumbe creatures. An example and argument for the stirring up of our devotion and for the confusion of atheism… Read More
2016-06-16 17:12
... Yes, you'd like an army of Sidney Cartons,The best world made conveniently by wasters, second rates,Someone we could conveniently spare,And not the way it has to be made,By the loss of o… Read More
2016-06-11 14:17
Because of Frank Thorney in The Witch of Edmonton, I have been thinking about exemplary penitence in early modern culture, and the way the felon who, accepting their punishment as just, and… Read More
2016-06-02 15:45
This week, a piece of mild Restoration era smut, delivering something rather less strong than the title promises. The ballad deals with a marriage contracted between two women, Susan, who dr… Read More
2016-05-25 16:05
These admonitory images are from Thomas Jenner's The ages of sin, or Sinnes birth & groweth With the stepps, and degrees of sin, from thought to finall impenitencie. The book appea… Read More
2016-05-19 07:15
I had always rather casually assumed that Elizabeth Sawyer, in The Witch of Edmonton, could have been seen as a particularly striking example of a witch possessed of an evil eye - throu… Read More
2016-05-11 09:32
Over to this slightly remote church (for the area) last nighthttp://www.stmartinschurch.hampshire.org.uk/rental.htmat East Woodhay, justly rated for its acoustics and the total quiet outside… Read More
2016-05-09 18:52
The bad news about witchcraft and the devil raging in the last days was spread by print. Some of the earliest works about witchcraft were formidable accomplishments on the page, oceanic comm… Read More
2016-04-19 09:28
Three hundred and ninety five years ago today, Elizabeth Sawyer was led out to her hanging at Tyburn, after having been found guilty of the murder by witchcraft of Agnes Ratcleife.Candidly d… Read More
2016-04-16 14:59
Meditation VIII. Upon a Crum going the wrong way.What more mean and contemptible thing can there be then a single Crum, either in regard of its doing the least hurt, or effecting the least g… Read More
2016-04-03 14:13
The passage above is taken from the incorrigible Joseph Glanvill's work, A Blow at Modern Sadducism (1668) - a work whose boundless conviction somehow failed to extend to its own rather unde… Read More
2016-03-30 09:04
Ezekiel Culverwell! How could he not have been what he was, a pillar of godliness (as the ODNB joint life of members of the Culverwell family calls him)? Their lives read together like a god… Read More
2016-03-19 18:53
Karen Attar expoundsImages of a visit with a group of my students to look at early printed books about witchcraft in the Harry Price Library, Senate House (London University).Thanks to… Read More
2016-03-19 18:53
Alexander Roberts, ‘Preacher of God’s word at Kings Lynn in Norfolk’ produced his A treatise of witchcraft Wherein sundry propositions are laid downe, plainely discovering… Read More
2016-03-19 18:53
Back in September, because of one of those days where people cycle to raise money for charity round as many churches as they can, I was able at last to get inside a church I have ridden or d… Read More
2016-03-19 18:53
“Had my parents been so innocent as to have taught me this Doctrine in the time of my youth, I had saved my skull from being cloven to the brain in the late War for the Parliament agai… Read More
2016-03-17 18:33
As web piety or good netizenship requires, multiple 'spoilers' ahead.I went with a friend to see 'The VVitch'. The work has been put in on this film, and it benefits. I was startled to recog… Read More
2016-02-27 17:34
The vanity of dogmatizing, or, Confidence in opinions manifested in a discourse of the shortness and uncertainty of our knowledge, and its causes: with some reflexions on peripateticism, and… Read More
2016-02-23 21:33
A rather pleasing witchcraft image, from the Prado’s online collection: ‘Anonymous’ and ‘17th century’, ‘oil on board’ is all they have to say about… Read More
2015-01-03 12:39
Henry Holland is the most comprehensible of the English demonologists. His methodology is clearly apparent, his continental sources consistent and thoroughly cited. There is no specific case… Read More
2014-12-23 08:17
John King, Bishop of London, c.1559-1621‘The Anniversary’ (text after Robin Robbins)All kings and all their favourites, All g… Read More
2014-11-27 21:44
Herrick sends a tear downstreamI was scrolling through the text of Hesperides one day – there’s a first sentence that sounds like an academic’s awful version of the famous… Read More
2014-11-24 14:11
I rolled up to the Swan at Stratford on Wednesday 19thwith a party of students who will be taking my ‘Witchcraft and Drama’ course next term to see the current production of The… Read More
2014-11-23 12:40
Back again to Samuel Pordage’s Behmenist poem of 1661, Mundorum explicatio, his explanation of the worlds of Wrath and Love. Much of the poem consists of a lengthy contrast between a b… Read More
2014-11-05 21:23
Not the Pink Floyd album of 1972, but a line in Samuel Pordage’s lengthy poem of 1661, Mundorum explicatio:blessed Paradise Obscur’d by clouds, is hid from mortal eyes… Read More
2013-11-06 09:06
I was asking my students to point out for me, or find for me if they could, depictions of Adam and Eve by women artists prior to the nineteenth century (I’d thought of Suzanne Valadon)… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
From Thomas Gage’s New Survey of the West-Indies (1648, 1677 edition used here), chapter 20, p. 379 ff . Gage, born into a Surrey recusant family c.1603, educated at St Omer… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
It was clearly one of the hazards of urban living in early modern London that, if the door of your house offered even the shallowest of entryways, offering partial concealment from the stree… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Jonathan Foyle with his royal bedAfter the hoopla about Richard III's putative bones (hmm, he was a blue-eyed blonde, was he, and his DNA also indicates a break in the male Plantagenet line?… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
A reading cushion full of witchcraft sceptics:A first edition Weyer, Scot from 1584 and 1651, John Webster, Francis HutchinsonA visit yesterday to Senate House to look at a selection of item… Read More
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