Saturday Notes
Helen Pidd,"Find of Sun King's secret diaries sounded almost too good to be true. And it was ...," Guardian, 29 April. For her biography of Louis XIV's mistress, Madame de Maintenon, Veronica Buckley quoted extensively from the private diaries of the Sun King. That was a mistake .... Hat tip.
"Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls (1819)," Pink Tentacle, 25 April, reproduces fine illustrations from anatomy scrolls, painted in 1819 by the Kyoto-area physician Yasukazu Minagaki (1784-1825). They are realistic, even gruesome, depictions of scientific human dissection. Hat tip.
Mark Mazower,"Whatever happened to Old Europe?" TLS, 30 April, reviews Bernard Wasserstein's Barbarism and Civilization: A history of Europe in our time. Hat tip.
American campaign rhetoric threatens to trivialize everything it touches. In the face of a tanking economy and interminable warfare, who's whose former pastor occupies the sound bytes and unemployment = the Holocaust. Ahistoricality has the story.
Finally, Cliopatria's friend at Early Modern Notes and our former colleague, Sharon Howard, is the Queen Mother of the History Carnivals and an organizing genius at The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913. Dr. Howard's first book, Law and Disorder in Early Modern Wales: Crime and Authority in the Dembyshire Courts, 1660-1730, has just been published by the University of Wales Press. Congratulations!