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What do recipe books, hedgehogs, and tesseracts have in common?
I just finished a post for another blog (the Historical Recipes Project) about how to cook a hedgehog. But it’s not what you think. (God, like I’d ever eat a hedgehog–yikes!) This hedgehog is a sculpted sort of pudding made from cream, eggs, sugar, almonds, and ambergris. You might be familiar with ambergirs If you’ve […]
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In the Image of Dog He Created Them…
We’ve all heard the theory that people look like their pets (or is it vice versa?), and we’ve all seen the uncanny photos, like these featured in the popular listicle website, Buzzfeed (oh dear, number 23…) (As an aside: I joke that it’s because of this resemblance theory that I adopted a greyhound—it was a weight-loss […]
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Welcome to Rivendell, Frodo Baggins
I recently returned from a trip to the UK, and between cathedrals and castles and museums, I worried my jaw would freeze from all of the gawping. And I wondered: do most Americans feel a bit “Hee-Haw” when traveling? Exacerbating this feeling is that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool American West Coaster. I grew up in the […]
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Fascination of the Day: The Ripley Scrolls
There’s so much here, I don’t even know where to begin. I won’t be able to write a coherent sort of essay right now about the Ripley Scrolls, as I’m just now wrapping my head around their magnificence. There are 23 copies of the Ripley Scrolls, which get their name from the 15th-century alchemist George […]
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No, Not THAT Royal Baby
As I sit here unable to sleep at 3:00 in the morning, my Twitter feed is filling up with breathless (and often snarky) observations about the royal baby. Helicopters hover over St. Mary’s Hospital in London. The BBC has cameras aimed at the front door of the hospital. Media experts are yammering on about how—with […]
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Just a little post about Judi Dench . . .
. . . because I think she’s really cool and I like what she says here.
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Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General and Vile-Hearted Renaissance Peckerhead of the Month
Lately, I’ve been a little obsessed with early modern witchcraft. Perhaps it’s because of the poppet in my hedge. Or perhaps it’s because I took the BBC’s online quiz “Would You Have Been Accused of Witchcraft” (short answer: yes). Probably it’s a combination of the two: a realization that, had I lived in 17th-century England, […]
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The Poppet in the Hedge
Last week, my neighbor cut back our shared hedge considerably—about three feet. We didn’t think much about it until our family walk, when we were startled to discover this: It’s a fuzzy picture, but if you enlarge it you can see it’s a baby doll head impaled on a stick–caked in mud, with one eye […]
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What Would Newton Do? Rep. Paul Broun’s Scientific Asynchrony
The other day my 10-year-old daughter came home incensed: a friend had told her of a congressman’s assertion that evolution and the Big Bang Theory were lies sent by Satan to deceive Americans. She and her friend were spittin’ mad and spent their lunch hour talking about his stupidity (yeah, my daughter has some cool […]
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The Coolest Thing You’ll See All Day: The Renaissance Anatomy “Pop-Up Book”
My eldest daughter—burgeoning animal-rights activist and wannabe vegan (alas, she likes bacon and cheese too much to commit)—is supposed to do her first dissection soon in biology class. She is not happy about it, and after some thought, I realized I wasn’t really either: with all of the virtual tools at our disposal, do we […]
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Jennifer Sherman Roberts 