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The Hanging Baskets of a Medieval German Prague: English Travel Literature from 1815 to 1848
By Jana Hunter @janakhunter At the heart of Europe lies Prague: a city centred around the River Moldau, embodying antiquity, mysticism and the sublime. Its imposing and grandiose scenes received little attention from travel writers up until the Napoleonic Wars. Through travel literature, Prague emerged as a fantastical city providing escapism, both physically and mentally,…
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Michael Boym’s Illustrated Magna Cathay and Gushi Huapu, the Chinese Source of the Images
By Eszter Csillag Held at the Vatican Library, Magna Cathay (Borg. Cin. 531) is a never-printed map of China illustrated by the Polish Jesuit Michael Boym (1612–1659) when he returned to Europe from China. This map was part of a larger cartographical enterprise of the Jesuit order in the seventeenth century, when mapmaking was seen as one of the…
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7. A Book of Memory from Medieval Alsace
By Kate Falardeau (@kate_falardeau) Columns prop up a detailed architectural façade. To the left of the composition, the zodiac sign Capricorn emerges from a hypnotic spiral. To the right, a proclamation seems to be issued. The scroll, held by a ruler and an anxious looking man, actually contains a regimen to be followed during January…
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6. Eighteenth-Century Neon
By Jake William Bransgrove (@Jake_Bransgrove) At times of public celebration, the nocturnal Georgian city – otherwise dark, dangerous and shrouded in shadow – would be bathed in exceptional quantities of light. The act of illumination, as it was known, saw urban spaces lit in spectacular fashion. An instance of circumstantial festival, the mass deployment of candles, lamps,…
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