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When Mary Chater’s husband, the Rumpole of the Bailey actor Julian Curry, died last June, a friend recommended that she should read the speech in King John in which the widowed Constance laments the loss of her young son. “ ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child/Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me’,” quotes Chater who, like her husband, is a former RSC actor. “ ‘My life, my joy, my food, my all the world’. I’ve never read or said out loud words that so chimed with my emotions, especially immediately after Julian died. I...

More than 600 years ago, someone intricately folded, sealed and posted a letter that was never delivered. Now, scientists have digitally "unfolded" this and other similarly locked letters found in a 17th-century trunk in The Hague, using X-rays. For centuries prior to the invention of sealed envelopes, sensitive correspondence was protected from prying eyes through complex folding techniques called "letterlocking," which transformed a letter into its own secure envelope. However, locked letters that survive to the present are fragile and can be opened physically only by slicing them to pieces. The new X-ray method offers researchers a non-invasive alternative, maintaining...

Botticelli Portrait Expected to Fetch $80 Million at Sotheby’s NEW YORK – Sotheby’s is preparing to sell next week a rare portrait by Italian painter Sandro Botticelli that experts value at $80 million, a record for an old master print that is in exceptional condition and is one of the only three portraits of the Renaissance artist remaining in private hands. “In my 30 years of professional career, I have never had a Botticelli that comes close to the quality, the condition, the beauty and the importance of it,” Christopher Apostle, New York director of the Sotheby’s department of Old...

Part I An Introduction Overview of the Renaissance Never in history has one man’s thesis so rattled the powers that be, than did Martin Luther’s ninety-five grievances he nailed to the Church door at Wittenberg. It was an act of defiance that would eventually topple a church state organization that held sway over kings and paupers alike for a thousand years. Every history class that covers the reformation will tell you that it was Johann Tetzel’sselling of indulgences that pushed Luther into action that day, Tetzel’s action was only the final straw, not the cause of the revolution. At the...

Birds of a feather flock together. When the cat's away, the mice will play. We all know and love these common, American proverbs. Sometimes ironic, often silly and amusing, these sayings test our brains—and our wit. And it's not just in English. Playing with language in literature, conversation, and art has been a hallmark of different cultures for centuries. With this in mind, over 450 years ago, Dutch master Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted his incredible Netherlandish Proverbs. Also known as The Dutch Proverbs, this oil on wood painting is a detailed masterpiece that visually represents over 100 Dutch proverbs....

At the bottom of a lake, a forgotten medieval town that has been ‘frozen in time’ looks ready to resurface, probably giving tourists a direct glimpse back into the past. Since 1947, the Italian village of Fabbriche di Careggine has been submerged under the waters next to a hydroelectric dam, but for the intervening years, it has remained in remarkably good condition under the man-made lake.

Click in the header. (One illustration here, the "thesis defense" of a fool.)

istory is the account of vast social movements and cultural changes. To be sure, individuals play their part. But they are usually understood to be products of their times. The Reformation, though, whose five-hundredth anniversary we observe this year and whose impact on not only the church but the world has been monumental, was largely precipitated by one man: Martin Luther. Yes, vast social movements and cultural changes were at work in sixteenth-century Europe. But Luther caused many of them, such as the educational explosion that would lead to universal literacy, the rise of the middle class, and eventually democratic...

It may be surprising for many to hear that a Reformation occurred in Italy. We normally use the term “Reformation” to describe the defection of Protestants from Roman obedience in places like Wittenberg, Strasbourg, Zurich, and Geneva. But surely the Italian peninsula was always loyal to the papacy? Yet Italy was also poised for gospel renewal in the opening decades of the 16th century. Waves of invasions by French and Habsburg armies, epidemic diseases such as syphilis, harvest failures, and a growing resentment toward clerical authority produced a generation of troubled hearts. And, as they did else elsewhere, reformers in...

Remains of the Ancrum Old Bridge, which stood during the 14th Century, has been found in the River Teviot after being hidden underwater for hundreds of years. Dating of the oak bridge timbers has confirmed a date of the mid-1300s, making the remains the oldest scientifically dated bridge ever found in its original position across one of Scotland’s rivers.

I reprint today a post on how Shakespeare can enhance your Halloween. It’s worth noting that Shakespeare’s most important audience for his late plays was James I, who was fascinated by the supernatural. There are those ghosts that Puck mentions... My fairy lord, this must be done with haste, For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger; At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there, Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all, That in crossways and floods have burial, Already to their wormy beds are gone; For fear lest day should look their shames...

Carmelite friars established Whitefriars in 1270, but the religious site was destroyed during the Protestant ReformationArchaeologists digging under the remains of a demolished parking garage in Gloucester, England, have found the ruins of a 13th-century monastery, BBC News reports. Established around 1270, the Carmelite friary—known as Whitefriars—was all but demolished during the 16th century. Historians had long been aware of the house of worship’s existence, but they didn’t know exactly where it was located. Researchers from the Gloucester City Council and Cotswold Archaeology took advantage of a redevelopment project in the city’s King’s Quarter neighborhood to investigate. “For around 300...

In what has been called a once-in-a-generation event, a complete and original copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio sold for a record-setting price just under $10 million at auction earlier this week. The First Folio, published in 1623, was the first complete printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Published seven years after the author’s death, the book marked not only the first complete collection of Shakespeare’s works, but also the first time those works were organized as comedies, tragedies and histories. There are around 235 copies known to exist, and only six complete ones owned privately.

Hong Kong's last authentic junk boat is struggling to stay afloat due to a lack of overseas tourists. The Dukling normally takes foreign visitors on scenic trips around its bays but these have dried up due to travel restrictions. Its owner says it is fighting to survive and having to focus on local citizens during the downturn. Junk boats have a long history in the former British colony dating back to the Han Dynasty. "The Dukling is the icon of Hong Kong, I am not only running a business on it, I am trying to maintain this treasurable piece of...

The burial, on a hilltop site near with commanding views over the surrounding Thames valley, must be of a high-status warlord from the 6th century AD, archaeologists from the University of Reading believe. The 'Marlow Warlord' was a commanding, six-foot-tall man, buried alongside an array of expensive luxuries and weapons, including a sword in a decorated scabbard, spears, bronze and glass vessels, and other personal accoutrements. The pagan burial had remained undiscovered and undisturbed for more than 1,400 years until two metal detectorists, Sue and Mick Washington came across the site in 2018... The PAS Finds Liaison Officer for Buckinghamshire...

Today in history, on October 7, 1571, one of the most cataclysmic clashes between Islam and the West — one where the latter for once crushed and humiliated the former — took place. In 1570, Muslim Turks — in the guise of the Ottoman Empire — invaded the island of Cyprus, prompting Pope Pius V to call for and form a "Holy League" of maritime Catholic nation-states, spearheaded by the Spanish Empire, in 1571. Before they could reach and relieve Cyprus, its last stronghold at Famagusta was taken through treachery. After promising the defenders safe passage if they surrendered, Ottoman...

The Jerusalem latrine was found in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, close to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1996 during excavations of a cesspool in the courtyard of a Spanish school. A microscopic fish tapeworm egg found in the medieval latrine at Riga. (photo credit: IVY YEH) From the bowels of history comes a study published this week in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B at Cambridge University in England, which details a first attempt at using the methods of ancient bacterial detection, pioneered in studies of past epidemics, to characterize the microbial...

As any grade-schooler can tell you, the alphabet weÂ’re using right now is made up of 26 letters. However, until not too long ago, this cast of letters had a few more characters that have since been killed off, quashed, or exiled into oblivion. The writing system used for modern English, along with many other European languages, is widely known as the Latin alphabet as itÂ’s the great-grandchild of the classical Latin alphabet spread across much of Europe by the Romans. However, like all writing systems, itÂ’s history is complex and muddled with a whole load of interconnected influences from...

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons. Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one...

I'm on my phone so I can't really paste the article. In Warren's so called DNA profile released they used admixture results to determine Native American ancestry. The problem is, almost everyone in Eastern Europe can do that with similar results to Warren. https://dna-explained.com/2014/05/21/finding-native-american-ethnic-results-in-germanic-people/