"Why Does ‘S’ Look Like ‘F’?": A Beginner’s Guide to Reading Early Modern Texts

Last month, I came across a recently digitized book from 1680 with the innocuous-sounding title The School of Venus. After browsing it for a few moments, however, I realized I’d stumbled onto something truly interesting. It was a sex manual, and a rather free-spirited one at that, as the frontispiece engraving suggests: It occurred to …

The Art of Fooling the Eye

PARRHASIUS, it is said, entered into a pictorial contest with Zeuxis, who represented some grapes, painted so naturally that the birds flew towards the spot where the picture was exhibited. Parrhasius, on the other hand, exhibited a curtain, drawn with such singular truthfulness, that Zeuxis, elated with the judgment which had been passed upon his …

Some updates you may have missed

  Over the past month I’ve been updating a few of my earlier posts on Res Obscura to reflect new information or add new links and images. Since these updates don’t register as new posts, I thought I’d make a handy list: • Poorly-written poems about nature by 17th century apothecary James Petiver. These poems …

Happy Lupercalia

Many of us in the western world celebrated (or lamented) Valentine’s Day yesterday, that annual rite of socially-determined romance. You may have heard about this holiday’s surprising connections to the ancient Roman holiday of Lupercalia. Yet how many know the details of how V Day began as a Bronze Age rite celebrating the primordial power …

The Baron and the ‘Savages’: Lahontan in North America

An early French edition of Lahontan’s travelogue. I’ve spent the last week in UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center reading a book that was once sensationally famous but has since fallen into obscurity: the Baron de Lahontan’s Nouveux Voyages dans L’Amerique Septentrionale, published in English as New Voyages to North America (London, 1703). After reading less …

Oddities from the Royal Society

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 …