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A tale of two cultures: a historian’s guide to Bolzano
By Zoe Farrell (@zoeffarrell) As part of my research fieldwork this year, I was lucky enough to be able to visit the city of Bolzano in Northern Italy. This South-Tyrolean city provides a perfect example of how small, provincial cities often have rich and diverse histories which make them prime points of study for enquiries…
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‘[W]ho so wyl a gardener be’: arboriculture in late medieval and early modern commonplace books
![‘[W]ho so wyl a gardener be’: arboriculture in late medieval and early modern commonplace books](https://doinghistoryinpublic.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/gardening-1.jpg?w=448)
By Laura Flannigan (@LFlannigan17) Recently, while on the hunt for signs of the reception and expression of legal ideas and practice in late medieval and early modern writing, I had cause to dip into some of the commonplace books surviving from the period. A ‘commonplace book’ has been generally classed by historians as an idiosyncratic, miscellaneous compilation…
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Uncomfortable History: Modern Skull Collecting
By Jeremiah J. Garsha (@jjgarsha) It is comforting to think of the collecting of human heads as existing in the distant past. When visitors to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford marvel at the shrunken heads display, they do so under a combination of alterity and distancing. The process of shrinking the heads renders them distinguishable…
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The Cancellation of Christmas
Philippa Carter (@extispicium) In The accomplisht cook (1660), the English chef Robert May recommended to his readers a feast ‘to be used at Festival Times, as Twelfth Day [of Christmas]’. All the budding cook had to do, May explained, was to construct – in pastry – a castle, a ship laced with gunpowder, a wine-filled…
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Tour de Force: A Selected History of Guided Tours
By Clemency Hinton (@clemencyhinton) Guided tours are part and parcel of today’s tourism industry. In fact, there are over 1,800 registered professional tour guides in the UK alone.[1] Tour guides (also known as rangers, couriers or interpreters) can be traced through history, leading one scholar to describe guiding as likely to be ‘among the world’s…
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