An Immortal in Venice March 9, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernHere is a nice immortal story from late seventeenth century Italy. It appears in a very curious book entitled: Johann Heinrich Cohausen, Hermippus redivivus, or, The sage’s triumph over old age and the grave. If you want to be immortal you should probably give it a read. In any case, Beach introduces Signor Gualdi. There […]
A Goat, A Man and Two Prostitutes September 27, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : MedievalBeach recently ran across this sordid but fascinating episode in Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society (71). Those of a sensitive disposition might just want to go and do the washing up now. Those who are determined to read on prepare yourselves… Significant, too, is the Venetian court register that records, in the trial of a […]
11 Burning Libraries: Book Lovers Beware April 29, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Contemporary, Medieval, ModernThis blog has pioneered a series of burning libraries: books that didn’t make it (23 to date)… But what about real burning libraries? Libraries that, at some point in Antiquity or the Middle Ages, were gutted by fire, accidental or deliberate. I have included here a list of eleven devastatingly bad ‘burning libraries’ or ‘burning […]
How Islam Created the Italian Renaissance November 16, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, ModernThe Renaissance! What’s not to like: Leo flying; Micky chipping at marble; men in tights and women in bodices; the pop, snap, crackle of Kultur; and cherubs falling from the sky like hailstone. According to the textbooks fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italians, more particularly the urban Italians of northern Italy rediscovered the Greek and Romans and […]
Hot Mermaids from Renaissance Venice! October 22, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, ModernBeach is feeling very shallow today and so he thought that he would celebrate a wonderful new book that arrived through the post: Alison Luchs, The Mermaids of Venice (Brepols 2010). Why shallow? Well, he can’t celebrate the scholarship of the good Prof Luchs because he hasn’t read any of her words yet (another post, […]
Zen Letters and Names March 10, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, ModernThe Zen letters are the now lost and the perhaps never existing fourteenth-century missives that described a Venetian visit to the northern Atlantic and perhaps to New England or Canada. A supposed outline of them survive in a sixteenth-century publication by Nicolò Zen, a scion of the family. NZ describes the northern Atlantic and offers […]
A Fisherman’s Tale or a Venetian Invention? February 28, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, ModernLots of emails received in the last week about the Zen brothers and the possibility of a pre-Columbian crossing of the Atlantic by a northern route in the fourteenth century. We have decided to put up the most interesting passage in this respect that relates to some wind-blown fishermen from Europe who end up ‘over […]
The Lost Zen Letters: A Cautionary Tale about Children and Archives February 15, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern***Dedicated to KR who pointed Zenwards*** The story (as always) is a simple one, perhaps deceptively, perhaps dishonestly so. In 1558 in Dello scoprimento dell’ isole Frislanda, Eslanda, Engrouelanda, Estotilanda e Icaria fatto sotto il Polo artico da’ due fratelli Zeni, M. Nicolo il K. e M. Antonio (Of the Discovery of Frisolanda, Eslanda, Engrouelanda, Estotilanda and Icara […]
Post-Mortem Occult Discovery January 27, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernDon Giovanni dei Medici (obit 1621) was the son of the first Medici Count of Tuscany. He had, however, the very great misfortune to be born illegitimate and though acknowledged by his father, he was never in the Medici’s inner circle. It might have been this sidelining that led Don Giovanni dei Medici to become […]
Transvestite Knights in the Thirteenth Century March 7, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : MedievalUlrich von Liechtenstein (obit 1278) was a standard thirteenth-century knight. He had castles (three of them). He fought – above all, in Eastern Germany. And he also dressed up as a woman and rode from Maestre (Venice) up to Vienna. Yes, yes, Beachcombing stopped too when he first read this many years ago. But now […]