Ancient Romans buried their dead outside city walls to avoid contamination. Medieval Christians, in contrast, kept their dead close, in churchyards or even within church walls, in crypts below the nave or entombed in the floor. Later, elaborate above-ground tombs in the great cathedrals commemorated bishops and noblemen, although the “transi” tombs popular from the …
[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, …
An occasional blog, beginning with this lion from Versailles. Lions were a favorite symbol for Louis XIV, and, it turns out, there are lions and other animals to be seen all over Paris. Mar… Source: Hidden Animals of Paris/Les animaux cachés à Paris
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 …
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 …
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!
19 November 2014, Berlin When I was in France last weekend the big news was the sighting of a tiger outside Paris. A blurry picture of the beast itself circulated widely, and pictures of its footprints seemed to indicate, at the least, some kind of big wild feline. Some 200 police and a helicopter were …
Paris, 26 November 2013 This morning I decided to find Montmor’s house. Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor (1603-1679) was the Master of Requests for Louis XIII and XIV, and ran a much-fabled scientific salon from his home in the 1650s and 60s. His hôtel still stands at the edge of the Marais at 79 rue du …
When the anatomists at the seventeenth-century Paris Academy of Sciences wished to dissect an animal – which was often – they called on Claude-Antoine Couplet (1642-1722). Couplet was an élève (literally, a student) of the Academy, although he was hardly an adolescent. When the Paris Observatory opened in 1672, Couplet moved in as its concierge, …
Last month, someone broke into the Paleontology wing of the Paris Museum of Natural History, and used a chain saw to cut off one of the tusks of the elephant skeleton there. The skeleton dates from 1681 and is the oldest specimen at the museum. Here is a little on the skeleton’s origins, from my …
