My system of keeping track of interesting sites is quite muddled. I use old-fashioned bookmarks in my browser; sticky notes with urls can be found lingering in the corners of my Apple Dashboard; I mail interesting links to whoever I think is interested; I stick links into WordPress posts I think I might at some [...]

Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007) had been waiting for me on my bookshelf for a while, and this week I finally got round to it. It was a great read. Vanities of the Eye is a wonderfully erudite book, teeming with information and [...]

I just came across a great website on early modern culture — Appositions: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture. It just hosted the ‘first-ever, fully electronic conference in the field of Renaissance and early modern literary and cultural studies.’ As far as I understand, this electronic conference will result in an [...]

I am at the European Social Science History Conference in Lisbon this week. You may wonder what a scholar of English literature/cultural historian is doing at a social science history conference, but there is an extensive culture network within the ESSHC. In that network Willemijn Ruberg of the University of Limerick organised 5 panels on [...]

…is an early modern edition, and it is now up at Mercurius Politicus!

Roy Booth at Early Modern Whale wrote a fascinating post on pamphlets about the demolition of the Eleanor Cross in Cheapside in 1643 (or was it 1642? May 1643 according to this pamphlet). Interestingly, in accordance with the conventions what Roy calls the “minor genre of the speaking statue” (made me think of The [...]

I was browsing through Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586), and came across this emblem on reading. The motto: Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit — “it is the use of books, not reading that makes wise men.” I have no wise thoughts on the emblem, but it does give a glimpse into early modern [...]