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Becoming a Lord in Three Easy Steps
By Fraser McNair Social mobility is not new. Any medieval society was filled with as many ambitious people looking to make their way in the world as any modern one. What is more difficult to see, in many cases, is how a wannabe nobleman turned their dreams into reality…
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Some reflections on Charlie Hebdo
By Hira Amin 9/11 is often cited as a watershed moment in contemporary history. The pervasive narrative was that these extremists hated Western freedom and democracy and Islam is an inherently violent and dangerous religion. In the wake of the brutal Charlie Hebdo attacks, one of the most striking features of the coverage was simply…
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14. Turkeys and Devils: Jesuits in Parisian Streets
By Tiéphaine Thomason, @teaphaine It should come as no surprise that, in a society of highly variable literacy, satire was often oral. Such was the world of the Parisian street in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This satire was often set to popular tunes to be sung, as well as recited, and stuck up on…
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22. A Hand-Coloured Fashion Print
By Marlo Avidon (@MarloAvidon) In the nearly two centuries between the decline of the sixteenth-century costume book and the rise of the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century fashion plate, the late seventeenth century experienced a brief resurgence in printing images of contemporary dress. Created almost exclusively in France and either depicting ambiguous, unnamed mannequins known only…
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Hunted, or Charpentier’s Mythic Appropriations
David Martin (daim3@cam.ac.uk) “I am he who, born in another age, was known during the last century.” So begins a despairing Marc-Antoine Charpentier in his Epitaphium Carpentarii, or musical epitaph. For much of his life, he believed that he was little more than a glorified chorister for the Duchesse de Guise, despite his training in…
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