“If it bleeds, it leads” – the cynical motto of the modern media, which uses fear and sensationalism to drive up ratings and sell advertising. But were medieval and Byzantine narratives sources much better? They also tend to focus on unusual events and personalities, on political strife rather than peaceful business as usual, and on […]
Covid-19 has had many people reaching back to the plague which Apollo sends on the Greek army at the very beginning of Homer’s Iliad; Western literature begins with a devastating disease of unknown cause. The Greek commander, Agamemnon, had in fact wronged and abused Apollo’s priest, Chryses: disease is a hidden enemy which must have […]
The village of Barrington, in Cambridgeshire, presents the viewer with a quintessentially English rural scene: with its thatched cottages and village pub, and one of the best-preserved and extensive village greens in the country, it could not feel further removed in space or time from the Mediterranean world in the ‘Age of Justinian’. Yet this […]
In the preamble to his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides declares that the twenty-year conflict between Athens and Sparta was a war like no other, an object lesson for humanity involving what for him was the whole known world. His purpose in writing was to discover by careful research the truth about events in […]
Early medieval England experienced nothing quite like the Coronavirus, although plagues and afflictions of other kinds came all too frequently. The venerable Bede (d. 735) and other contemporary writers preserved grim accounts of waves of plague that swept over all Britain in the 660s. Later, 896 saw the end of three years of an unspecified […]
Endless war. I caught onto this phrase several decades ago, already several decades into my work on the literature and history of the First World War. There, as the conflict wore on, the phrase gained its own embattled place. On or about the midpoint of war, the irrepressible energy of irony and satire generated a […]
Toilet paper has become the unlikely posterchild of the coronavirus. Toilet paper, and its absence. Much has been written about what seems, at first sight, an unlikely association: after all, diarrhea is not one of the disease’s side effects. Hypotheses abound, from the sociology of herd response (copy-cat behavior) over the economics of panic buying […]
Each evening the world awaits with anxiety the new numbers John Hopkins University provides for the spread of COVID-19 around the globe. This fascination with mortality rates during an epidemic is nothing new. The Historia Augusta, a biography of Roman emperors composed in late antiquity, reports that during the peak of a pandemic in 262 […]
“If it bleeds, it leads” – the cynical motto of the modern media, which uses fear and sensationalism to drive up ratings and sell advertising. But were medieval and Byzantine narratives sources much better? They also tend to focus on unusual events and personalities, on political strife rather than peaceful business as usual, and on […]
Covid-19 has had many people reaching back to the plague which Apollo sends on the Greek army at the very beginning of Homer’s Iliad; Western literature begins with a devastating disease of unknown cause. The Greek commander, Agamemnon, had in fact wronged and abused Apollo’s priest, Chryses: disease is a hidden enemy which must have […]
The village of Barrington, in Cambridgeshire, presents the viewer with a quintessentially English rural scene: with its thatched cottages and village pub, and one of the best-preserved and extensive village greens in the country, it could not feel further removed in space or time from the Mediterranean world in the ‘Age of Justinian’. Yet this […]
In the preamble to his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides declares that the twenty-year conflict between Athens and Sparta was a war like no other, an object lesson for humanity involving what for him was the whole known world. His purpose in writing was to discover by careful research the truth about events in […]
Early medieval England experienced nothing quite like the Coronavirus, although plagues and afflictions of other kinds came all too frequently. The venerable Bede (d. 735) and other contemporary writers preserved grim accounts of waves of plague that swept over all Britain in the 660s. Later, 896 saw the end of three years of an unspecified […]
Endless war. I caught onto this phrase several decades ago, already several decades into my work on the literature and history of the First World War. There, as the conflict wore on, the phrase gained its own embattled place. On or about the midpoint of war, the irrepressible energy of irony and satire generated a […]
Toilet paper has become the unlikely posterchild of the coronavirus. Toilet paper, and its absence. Much has been written about what seems, at first sight, an unlikely association: after all, diarrhea is not one of the disease’s side effects. Hypotheses abound, from the sociology of herd response (copy-cat behavior) over the economics of panic buying […]
Each evening the world awaits with anxiety the new numbers John Hopkins University provides for the spread of COVID-19 around the globe. This fascination with mortality rates during an epidemic is nothing new. The Historia Augusta, a biography of Roman emperors composed in late antiquity, reports that during the peak of a pandemic in 262 […]
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