Below you’ll find around 100 blog posts written between 2009 and the present. The bulk of them are imported from my blog Res Obscura, which is loosely themed around globalization, drugs, medicine and science, and intercultural exchanges in the early modern period. It also has a strong focus on visual culture and art history and has …
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"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 …
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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 …
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Thanks, Readers!
Having reached the milestone of 50,000 visitors today, I thought I’d write to say thank you to all who have read, commented on and shared this site. Its been rewarding for me to find that members of the general public are actually interested in the arcane oddities of historical research — the nature of the …
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 …
Update
My apologies for the paucity of posts recently! I just spent a week in the extremely beautiful coastal area near the village of Ubatuba, about three hours northeast of São Paulo, and a place where internet access is scarce. When I get the chance, I will upload and post some of the photos I’ve taken so …
Benjamin Breen 