Sybilla Oritur

The wikipedia article on this topic was just awful - incidentally - and i’m making an effort to rewrite it for the betterment of human knowledge.
Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the plot against the Medici (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).
Martines’ April Blood uses the Pazzi conspiracy as a nexus from which to analyse the volatile [...]

I had to write my first field exam yesterday and i realize that non-academics (and even some academics in departments that function differently from the JHU’s history dept) have no idea what i am talking about… consider this a contribution to general curiosity. Below is the email i rec’d at 10am and my responses with [...]

In the 1750s, there was a change in the social status of those members of the French polity who occupied chief administrative roles. Previously, families of the noblesse de la robe interspersed with the (very) occasional commoner served the bureaucracy of the King. As the noblesse de race, one of the great military nobles with [...]

I am not that thrilled with women’s studies as a field. The idea of choosing your object of study based solely on their biological sex disturbs me and seems both arbitrary and demeaning somehow to the women that get studied. People worthy of study should be chosen on the merit of their thought (or its [...]

Far from being writers — founders of their own place, heirs to the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses — readers are voyagers: they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling [...]

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Oh Sir Edmund Burke! My favourite conservative thinker - you who first encouraged my respect for conservative political thought. [...]

Image via Wikipedia

“In the year of Christ 1571, at the age if thirty-eight, Michel de Montaigne, long since bored with the slavery of parlement and public office but still vigorous, withdrew to lay his head on the breast of the learned Virgins in calm and security; he shall pass the remaining days of his life [...]

A few months ago, i was on one of my atheistic, nihilistic rants that generally occur when copious amounts of alcohol, etc. have been consumed. I remember exclaiming, forcefully i might add, that there could not be a God, because no God would have let Alexandria burn. I am an academic to the core.
Of course, [...]

There are bookmarks for websites across the top of my browser. Postcards are slipped into volumes i convince myself i am returning to “soon.” I am particularly fond of an embossed leather bookmark i picked up at the Frick back in 2003 - but what about bookmarking before, well, books?
It may be obvious to point [...]