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 cropped these flamboyant signatures out of a few seventeenth century documents I recently photographed. I love the little Celtic knot glyphs that tended to follow the last letter of one’s name in this period — one of many beautiful things that got lost in modernity’s push toward minimalism! And as a bonus, here’s a
Early Modern Signatures and a Dolphin Read More »
I was surprised to find that these images exist, but I’m glad they do. Apparently produced as part of a visual ethnography of the world’s cultures written by a Japanese interpreter for the Dutch merchant community in Nagasaki named Nishikawa Joken, they depict “people from each of the 42 barbarian countries outside of Japan.” (My
Japanese Ethnographic Portraits of South Americans, 1720 Read More »
Today I read an interesting manuscript held by the British Library entitled “A Voyage to Guinea, 1714-15” (shelfmark: Add Ms. 39946). The work is anonymous, but some clues on the final page and a mailing address tell us that the author probably wrote it in Jamaica around 1726 and then sent it to his sister
Scurvy, Shipwreck and Spaniards in the West Indies Read More »
The Wellcome Image Collection is one of the best digitized archives of rare, unusual and old images I’ve found on the internet. Here’s a selection of images relating to magic, witchcraft and sorcery. A figure holds a scythe as winged creatures fly above him, three figures approach on a horse, and another figure approaches from
Witchcraft and Magic Images from the Wellcome Library Read More »
John Jacob Berlu’s wonderfully titled The Treasury of Drugs Unlock’d (London, 1690) is a rare book, and I can find very little information on either the work itself or the author, who was apparently a London merchant of drugs, spices and other exotic commodities. I took the opportunity to look at the copy in the
A Drug Merchant in Seventeenth Century London 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 »
I have no coherent post to make today, but I wanted to share some of the miscellaneous things I’ve found so far in my research — the sort of stuff that would never make it into a finished paper, but which you still bother to write down because its funny or interesting or both. The
Oddities from the Royal Society Read More »
They eat with their fingers instead of with chopsticks such as we use. They show their feelings without any self-control. They cannot understand the meaning of written characters. – From Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650 (London, 1951). Chinese and Japanese representations of sixteenth century Europeans have always fascinated me. We’re used
Europeans as ‘Other’ Read More »
Greetings friends and strangers.This is the first post in a blog, RES OBSCURA, designed to serve as a record of the strange things I come across in the course of my research as a graduate student in early modern (sixteenth through eighteenth century) history. Early modern visual culture and natural history are special interests of
First post – The History of Four-Footed Beasts Read More »