Monthly Archives: February, 2011

The Canker Friar

[Note: In the course of doing research, historians sometimes come across stories that seem to cry out to be told. Here’s one that I encountered in the Inquisition file in the Venetian State Archive a few years ago. It’s from Archivio di Stato, Venice, Sant’Uffizio, b. 23, containing the trial testimony of Antonio Vulpino, 9 […]

The ‘Professors of Secrets’ and Their Books

Last weekend, “This American Life” host Ira Glass revealed what he claimed was the original formula for Coca-Cola. He found it buried in an article in the archives of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The recipe spread across the Internet, republished everywhere from CNN to Al Jazeera. The revelation of the secret—more valued than KFC’s famous “11 […]

The Aquavitae Brothers

The Renaissance was an era of new diseases. Between 1347 and 1600, Western Europe was struck by a succession of new and baffling epidemics. Not only did Europe experience its most devastating demographic upheaval as a result of the rapid, epidemic spread of the Black Death (presumably bubonic plague), it was struck by a succession […]

A Balm To Heal All Wounds

“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” (Jeremiah 8:22) Jeremiah’s plaintive words express the fundamental lament of the human heart: In times of tragedy and sadness, where is God in this moment? Has He abandoned us? While in the passage from Jeremiah the Balm of Gilead is used as a metaphor about […]

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