Sybilla Oritur

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 [...]

We see them all the time - the logo on the bottom of the TV screen telling you that this CSI episode is playing on CTV. Digital watermarking, “the process of possibly irreversibly embedding information into a digital signal. The signal may be audio, pictures or video, for example. If the signal is copied, then [...]

When i come up with a better formulation than Felix Gilbert’s on page 274 of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, I’ll let you know:
But if in its formal aspects the History of Italy corresponds to humanist prescriptions, these are not the features which the reader considers as determining the character of the book. Rather it is a [...]

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i think, perhaps, reading Guicciardini, Rucellai and Machiavelli may be better for my mental health than a truckload of pills or hours on a therapist’s couch. Also less expensive. I am so much more willing to stomach platitudes when they are artfully composed by a mind greater than i.
“In all human decisions and [...]

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Ok. That’s it. I am tired of finding references to Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in just about every article I read – in works ostensibly about the French Revolution, literary theory and even early modern witchcraft theory. It was going to be on the summer reading list – but it has just [...]

I’ve found myself defending my respect for the faith of men like Descartes, Pascal, Newton and - most importantly - St. Francis of Assisi. The rosary i picked up from Assisi along with the Assisi rock i use as a paperweight out of reverence for someone who believed in something, something good, so strongly he [...]

Add to the list of things which most girls don’t talk about at parties but which are pillars of my conversational repetoire: Profane excretion.
He prepared himself by taking somewhat laxative, and came in on a solemn day, thrumbled in to the very altar, and there voided himself. Very soon, we may be sure, a cry [...]

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Historians are battling it out over just how incredible the English defeat of the French troops at Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War - somehow this debate is linked to advice given to Gen. Petraeus: No matter how successful an offensive, the general population must be won over in order for insurgency to [...]

Just hit send on my abstract submission for the Northeast Modern Languages Association Conference held this upcoming April in Montreal.
Back to my Latin translations…
Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, in recounting various aspects of Nero’s life, presents clues to the socio-political circumstances and concerns of its contemporary audience. This paper analyzes the depiction of those [...]