[This is excerpted from the talk I gave at the New York Academy of Medicine on 13 September 2016, which was itself excerpted from my book The Courtiers' Anatomists] Under cover of night, the dead of Paris made their journey from the burial grounds to the places of dissection. In this era of recurrent plagues, …
Category: History
Vesalius and the beheaded man
On the 12th of May, 1543, Jakob Karrer von Getweiler was executed in Basel, Switzerland. Reports say he was beheaded, although hanging was a more usual mode of execution. Karrer was a bigamist who attacked his legal wife with a knife after she discovered his second wife. According to a contemporary account, Karrer was a …
The Witches
This review appears in The Public Historian, vol. 38, no. 2 (May 2016), pp. 98-99 The Witches: Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff. New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2015. ix + 496 pp.; figures, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $32.00; paperbound, $30.00; eBook, $14.99. Like many academic historians, I have a complicated relationship with …
The Moving Skeleton
Here's the full version of the Slate blog post: I've been reading Charles Burney's collection of newspapers for close to two decades: first turning fragile pages in the Rare Books and Music Reading Room at the British Library, then dipping periodically into the many boxes of microfilm there, and now online, unfortunately behind the Gale paywall. …
More resources for digital history
The American Historical Association has a page on its website with a summary of its 2015 Digital History Workshop (there will be another at the 2016 annual meeting) and a slew of resources for those interested in exploring this world: http://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/digital-history-resources/getting-started-in-digital-history
Mapping histories of medicine
A great post by my friend, the Dutch historian of science Marieke Hendriksen, on employing digital humanities techniques.
Over the past few months, I have started exploring the many possibilities offered by Digital Humanities technologies. Digital humanities ‘can be described as a set of conceptual and practical approaches to digital engagement with cultural materials’, as this excellent online resource from UCLA puts it. Another excellent resource for historians to learn more about digital tools and techniques is Adam Crymble’s ‘The Programming Historian.’ One of the things I find most fascinating is the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to represent historical data. While keeping in mind that maps are always distorted in some way, entering historical data about events, people, and dates into a GIS application can visualize connections and networks that are otherwise difficult to grasp.
Network visualization of 17th C correspondents discussing anatomy via E-Pistolarium project.
For example, the ‘Knowledge circulation in the 17th century’ project in the Netherlands gives insight not only…
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Modiano and the Weight of History
I picked up my first novel by Patrick Modiano in a bookstore in Strasbourg last fall. He had just won the Nobel Prize and it was obvious that the bookstore had scrambled to find copies of his books: there were new paperbacks with moody photographs on the covers and red paper straps that read “Prix …
Animal Paris, part 1: Fagotin and his kin
This is the first post in a occasional series on animals in (mostly) early modern Paris. 29 April 2015 Last week, a US judge apparently ruled that two research chimpanzees are “legal persons” and have standing to pursue a court case against their captivity. As the work of historian Alan Ross is revealing, non-human primates …
Coming in May … my long-awaited book, The Courtiers’ Anatomists!
To appear from the University of Chicago Press on May 20. See the Chicago website or Amazon. Book launch party at OSU on May 21. More soon!
Anita Guerrini 