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| Jael & Sisera, via Rachel Clark (see below) |
Your must-read this month comes from the new Journal of Digital Humanities where Sarah Werner (aka Wynken de Worde) has a fantastically illustrated piece called Where Material Book Culture Meets Digital Humanities. It's a thought-provoking attempt to think through the vagaries--and more importantly, the amazing opportunities--that new digital tools offer for the study of early modern books.
Speaking quite literally of the "early modern," Newton Key's Crowdsourcing the Early Modern Blogosphere offers a history of, well, the early modern blogosphere (using the Mistress of Misrule's Early Modern Commons as a guide). Check out the attempt to visualize the network of early modern blogs, as well as the extended meditation on how the blogosphere uses and defines the very term "early modern."
Prepare for your jaw to drop when you read Rachel Clark's account of How I discovered a 16th-century book on the discard shelf. The book in question is a 1591 Latin bible printed in Basel (from which the image above is taken).
Whitney Trettien at d i a p s a l m a t a looks at the history of "mourning pages," the early modern precursors to the famous black page in Tristam Shandy.
Echoes from the Vault has a great post--the first of two--on bad behavior in the King James Library.
Bibliodyssey has a series of luscious illustrations of hunting from a 15th-century Flemish manuscript in The Time of the Hunt
The group blog from the Folger Shakespeare Library--The Collation--is always necessary reading. My favorites among the recent crop of posts are Heather Wolfe's account of a collaborative cross-media exercise in paleography (featuring some Anthony Bagot letters and, enticingly, pirate (!) depositions; and the crocodile for September, which turns out to be an elaborately embroidered binding for a Book of Psalms.
As Halloween approaches, attention turns to the macabre and magical. Shakespeare's England has the story of a poor young women suffering terrible fits--she threw up crooked pins!--which were blamed on an old woman with "the Marks and Tokens of a Witch." By the way, that post links to the digital project Witches in Early Modern England
The Renaissance Mathematicus takes down the silly idea that Isaac Newton was a sorcerer.
Wonders & Marvels has the story of one Mrs. Adkins, who in 1679 returned from the dead as the ghost of a murderous midwife intent on revealing her ghastly crime.
Executed Today has the story of Jeronimus Cornelisz who was noosed by the Dutch East India Company in 1629 for mutiny and murder.
Early Modern Whale looks at the funeral monument of "two most worthie and religious gentleweomen" in Perfection faeminine.
The Many-Headed Monster asks the age-old question: What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
The Eagle Clawed Wolfe has some awkward questions about Carlisle Castle
And, finally, as an antidote to what ails you, we turn to the history of medicine: check out the new blog The Crooke Book on Helkiah Crooke's Mikrokosmographia. And, as flu season approaches, Dr. Alun Withey offers the early modern remedy that should have been.