Tag Archives: popular culture
The Age of How-To
What made us modern? The list of the attributes of modernity keeps growing and changing. Once modernity meant “progress”; but that one took a huge shellacking in the last century, when some of the most “modern” nation-states behaved worse than the worst barbarian states of the Dark Ages. Then it was science—until anthropologists forced us […]
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 Tale of Monsieur Gout
“Gout,” wrote the eminent 17th century physician Thomas Sydenham, “destroys more rich than poor persons, and more wise men than fools, which seems to demonstrate the justice and strict impartiality of Providence, who abundantly supplies those that want some of the conveniences of life with other advantages, and tempers its profusion to others with equal […]
