I’ve just finished reading Ulinka Rublack’s Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010) and came away from it with a newfound appreciation for how truly odd early modern clothing was — and how important these clothes were in people’s daily lives. Rublack, a Cambridge history professor, is very shrewd in noting that obsolete sartorial choices like […]
A Renaissance Merchant’s Life in Clothing Read More »
The Dogon people inhabit a rocky and mountainous territory in the center of the West African state of Mali. Their settlements range along the massive Bandiagara Escarpment, a sandstone outcrop of some one hundred miles that divides central Mali in two. Bandiagara Escarpment, central Mali. Map showing Dogon settlement patterns. Dogon migration into this inhospitable
Art and Architecture of the Dogon Read More »
I recently came across this image while browsing through the website for an exhibition entitled “Lost at Sea: the Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750” that is currently being held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. This artifact is one of those things that makes me love history — an object infused with
Image of the Week 4: Elizabethan Shipwreck "Poesy Ring" Read More »