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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]