Carnivalesque XXXVI

by mercuriuspoliticus

From Monday, January 21 to Saturday, February 16

Fellow Bloggers, there is no need to fear,

For weeks (forsooth) I have toil’d at my desk;

Scouring all things early modern in the Blogosphere,

To bring you this edition of Carnivalesque.

Nemo me impune laceffit.

The man in the moon

Christopher Thompson writes on William Gilbert, rector of Orsett prior to the English Civil Wars, who contemplated the possibility of life on other planets. Meanwhile Inkhorn discovers what Robert Burton had to say about little green men.

More on other early modern Fox Mulders can be found in David Cressy’s article on Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon.

The Puritan revolution

Roy Booth searched for pamphlets about the the civil war attacks on Cheapside Cross. What he discovered confounded his expectations – one of the highlights being a puritan plan for a replacement after the old cross had been demolished.

Nancy Shoemaker writes – in a wonderfully illustrated article – about the importance of the whale in the lives of the Plymouth colonists. In the same issue of Common-Place, John Fea writes about Presbyterians in love.

A close reading on reading

At Serendipities, a woodcut from an emblem book sparks wider thoughts on the nature of reading in early modern Europe. For more on emblem books, check out the English Emblem Book project, the German Emblem Book project, or the OpenEmblem portal.

The chronicles of William Hone

Vince Hancock presents a regular podcast inspired by the almanac of William Hone, which looked at folklore and other interesting tidbits from fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Prating prelates

Roy Booth blogs about a preacher in the 1680s struggling against the temptations of chess – as the preacher puts it, “it is a great Time-waster”. No doubt some of us would say the same today about blogging… Meanwhile I post about a more pompous preacher from earlier in the century, Henry Walker, and how he was caricatured in royalist pamphlets.

Oh, how cruel the volley

A haunting ballad about the battle of Ticonderoga prompts Tim Abbott to re-tell a literally haunting ghost story about the Black Watch.

For God and trade routes

Headsman posts about 26 Christian martyrs, executed in Japan in 1597.

Nasty, brutish and short?

Melvyn Bragg leads discussion in a recent episode of In Our Time about Hobbes, Rousseau and the social contract. Greg Afinogenov also posts on Hobbes and the fragility of the social contract.

Court in the act

Charles Bainbridge blogs about Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.

De Nachtwacht

Jen at Diary of 1 investigates Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, and how it has taken on a life of its own.

There is lately printed and published

The recent addition of 2004 deaths to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography includes a number of eminent early modern historians. But is the DNB’s verdict final? Mercurius Rusticus considers Conrad Russell, while Oxoniensis looks at Christopher Hill.

Cardinal Wolsey reviews David Childs’s biography of the Mary Rose – Henry VIII’s flagship and now thankfully preserved for the foreseeable future thanks to a National Lottery grant of £21 million.

Kristine Steenbergh reviews Germaine Greer’s biography of Anne Hathaway. Meanwhile, you can hear Greer talk about the book in a Guardian Unlimited podcast.

And finally…

An alternative guide to Early English Books Online, courtesy of Sarah Redmond at LOL Manuscripts: highlights include posts on how to read black-letter print, understanding early modern religious iconography, and some less well-known images of the world turned upside down…

Licensed and entered according to the Act for Printing.

London Printed by N.P., 2008