Oddities

Strange Creatures Intermixt with a Spaniard’s Voyage to the Moone, 1700

Leave a Comment / Africa, British Empire, East Indies, Monsters, Oddities, Print Culture, Space Travel, The Moon / By

Nathaniel Crouch (c. 1632 – after 1700) was an obscure but most interesting man: a London bookseller, he took the unusual step of authoring his own books on many subjects and publishing them under pseudonyms. Crouch’s nom de plume of choice was “R.B.” or “Richard Burton.” As revealed by the research of Robert Mayer, Crouch …

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The Baroque Monsters of Father Schott

1 Comment / Athanasius Kircher, Baroque, Eccentrics, Gaspar Schott, Jesuits, Marvels, Monsters, Oddities, Print Culture, Res Obscura, Seventeenth Century / By

In Portuguese, barroco means “imperfect pearl”: a fitting name for the Baroque era, a period that combined ornate beauty with a distinct taste for the odd, macabre and irregular. This interplay between the beautiful and the monstrous — and its connections to the rise of the “New Science” in the second half of the seventeenth …

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