This blog post is a preliminary sketch of what and when medieval Western Europe (hereafter, for simplicity’s sake, “medieval” or “medieval people”) would have known…
This series of posts is going to be about sky burial, ecomaterialism, edibility, and birds vs worms as eaters of bodies, and it’s going to…
Giving a talk at Cornell this Thursday! The Bare Life of (Medieval) Oysters,” March 12, 4:30, Goldwin Smith Hall 142 By some miracle of diligence, I…
National Squirrel Appreciation Day came and went, as it always does, with me in the yard, hiding my nuts, and missing my chance, again, to…
Massenet’s Thaïs, perhaps better known, to some of you, from Hroswitha’s play “Paphnutius,” features our holy harlot staring into her mirror, feeling her beauty fade, and…
Here’s a T-O Map from the Mandeville epitome that begins that famous fifteenth-century Carthusian miscellany, British Library Add 37049, f. 2v. (also famous for including the…
From Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 149(558), page 172, a 10th-c. manuscript. Drawn at the very end of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Here we see the four element,…
Over at the Smithsonian, Natasha Geiling writes about Santa, who has as many hometowns as Christ has foreskins. Santa lives at the North Pole, or, rather, the “North…
Image from Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame (BL NAF 24541, 52v), a child sold to the devil. Last night, some friends threw a spooky holiday…
Talking on Fox news about Eric Garner, NYC’s former mayor says: One of the things the mayor and Sharpton and the others are doing, they…
