Most of you will know Ann Hathaway, whether it be from a biography of Shakespeare, from education, popular literature or the internet. The image most people have of her is based on a few facts. When they married, for example, William was eighteen while Ann was twenty-six and several months pregnant. In his will, [...]

Over at The Valve, Adam Roberts posted an unorthodox theory on who wrote the Ur-Hamlet.
Scholars suppose that there was a version of Hamlet before Shakespeare wrote his play in 1600 or 1601, and they refer to this version as the Ur-Hamlet. No text of the play survives, but an earlier version of the [...]

At the close of summer, I wrote a post on my plans to use a weblog in my MA course on gender theory in the first semester (see also this later post). I received a lot of very useful and encouraging comments, and took the plunge. The semester ended just before Christmas, student essays are [...]

The 35th Carnivalesque “We are the memory keepers” — medieval edition — is up at Atol · is · Þin · Unseon! It’s long and brimming with new (to me) things to read: sexuality in the middle ages, performative reading in class, and much much more. Thanks, Alun, for the pointer.

My hopes of Apple ever releasing an e-book reader with beautiful software and the same sleek looks as their new MacBook Air were crushed by the New York Times this morning. In an interview, Steve Jobbs declared that the idea of e-books is based on a fundamental mistake:
It doesn’t matter how good or bad [...]

A book token I got for Christmas came with a ticket from our National Railservice (NS), which allowed one free trip, as long as the traveler was accompanied by another person who did buy a ticket. So we made one of the longest Dutch train journeys possible from where we live (still only 2 hours), [...]

The discussion about Stanley Fish’s column on the uses of the arts and the humanities at the Valve (here and here) reminded me of the Belle van Zuylen lecture that Jeanette Winterson gave in Utrecht, just before Christmas. Her thesis was that art is essential equipment for the task of being human — a “basic [...]