People who are frequently mentioned in the fabric of this blog, arranged by date. Note that there is also a separate section for “Historians Of Note”.
Having just blogged on up-to-the-minute German Voynichiana, what of the rest of Europe? Here’s a quick sampling to whet your appetite, should you ever wish to feast on such morcels…
(2008) El castillo de las estrellas Enrique Joven [mentioned here]
Having worked with Enrique recently (he generously translated my History Today telescope article so that it could appear in Astronomia [...] Read more »
Sometimes a passing comment can open up a brief window onto an otherwise lost world. A 2002 email I made to the VMs mailing list I stumbled upon earlier today brought to mind one such instance, and six years on I found myself wondering just what had been said, what had been going on in a very particular context. [...] Read more »
And so up pops a delightful article by Eileen Reeves, who Cipher Mysteries regulars may remember as the author of “Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror”. Her paper, called “Of Language and the Lodestone”, covers a peculiarly Renaissance phenomenon: baptizing magnets with holy water and unholy words (nomina barbara, which Reeves summarizes as “foreign utterances whose [...] Read more »
I know, I did indeed say that I wasn’t going to post anything for a while… but then this wonderful translation (from the Russian) of Evgeniya Taratuta’s (1957) “Our Friend Ethel Lilian Boole” popped up, made by Séamus Ó Coigligh (who retired as Curator of Cork Public Museum as long ago as 1981). Uhhh… whatever [...] Read more »
I suppose this is the review I’ve spent two years steeling myself for. No matter what book critics may say, reviewing other people’s books is an easy word-game to play (typically revolving around inserting themselves into the commentary): whereas putting your own writing under the same spotlight is something closer to therapy. What, with the benefit [...] Read more »
Even though people often assert (rather lazily) that the Voynich Manuscript is the only artefact ‘of its kind’, this is false, because there are plenty of similar documents. For the most part, the significant difference is merely one of scale, not of type - for example, the similar enciphered Quattrocento documents that do exist are neither [...] Read more »
Fancy a walk around London? There are some real scorchers to choose from at London Walks, a company offering fascinating pedestrian slices through the many-layered cake that is our dear Londinium. But for Voynicheros, one walk in particular stands out: “Anarchy in the UK - Mob Rule & Terror Tactics” hosted by writer Ed Glinert, and [...] Read more »
Following on from my September 2008 article in History Today, I’ve just posted up an online Juan Roget bibliography listing the current set of primary, secondary, and tertiary references to Girolamo Sirtori’s claim to have met the “first inventor” of the telescope in Gerona.
While my article received a lot of positive attention from the Spanish [...] Read more »
In glamorous Salford last year, the Early Book Society for the study of manuscripts and printing history held a conference called Codices and Community: Networks of Reading and Production, 1350-1550. Just after the ”Weird Science” panel chaired by Toshi Takamiya, there was a talk by Teru Agata (an associate professor at Asia University, a private university [...] Read more »
For me, there’s something wonderfully apposite about the “Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian” exhibition currently downstairs at the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery in London. Having just read and reviewed the revised (2006) edition of David Hockney’s “Secret Knowledge” book, the opportunity of looking really up close at some of the key pictures on Hockney’s [...] Read more »
