The Journal of the History of Ideas Blog

Tag Book History

Breadcrumbs in the Library

by guest contributor Erin McGuirl In the spring of 1989, Mai-mai Sze (1909-1992) and her partner Irene Sharaff (1910-1993) were looking for a home for their library. The collection is strong in East Asian religion, philosophy, and scientific history and… Continue Reading →

The Early History of Arabic Printing in Europe

by Maryam Patton In the middle of the ninth century, Paulus Alvarus complained about Spanish Christian youths who were abandoning Latin for the native Arabic of their new conquerors. Yet nearly seven hundred years later, when the last Muslim state… Continue Reading →

Inverting the Pyramid: Notes on the Renaissance Society of America Meeting (26-28 March, Berlin)

by guest contributor Brooke S. Palmieri To begin with, of the 903 total events held at the Renaissance Society of America meeting in Berlin, I was able to attend 10. But the historian has ways of interpreting such a huge… Continue Reading →

Personal Philology

by guest contributor Richard Calis For those who care to look closely enough, the world of early modern philology has many treats in store. Contrary to its reputation as nit-picking, dull scholarship, philology is in fact a discipline full of… Continue Reading →

The Bookends of Chronicles: Decisions about Time

by Madeline McMahon At the very end of Jerome’s chronicle, after the narration of events has stopped, time is tallied up: “The whole list (canon) from Abraham until the time written above, 2,395 years. And from the flood until Abraham… Continue Reading →

Imagining the World of Early Print

By guest contributor Devani Singh Amongst the incunabula or “cradle books” – those produced before 1500, in the infancy of printing – currently on display at the Cambridge University Library is a more recent manuscript. It is an autograph copy… Continue Reading →

An Open Letter Across Time

by John Raimo Thomas Mann received a curious letter on December 25, 1936. The Nobel Prize-winning author had entered into exile in Switzerland after publicly denouncing the Nazi regime years earlier. Mann’s works had been already banned as “un-German,” despite… Continue Reading →

Annotations and Generations (II)

by guest contributor Frederic Clark Adam Winthrop died in 1623—seven years before his son John would board the Arbella and sail to Massachusetts. John Winthrop’s son, John Jr., was studying abroad at Trinity College Dublin at the time. His father… Continue Reading →

Annotations and Generations

by guest contributor Frederic Clark The history of reading has recently witnessed an explosion of interest, doing much to transform and reinvigorate the practice of intellectual history. Although recent histories of reading range across every conceivable genre and period, early… Continue Reading →

Records of Student Life in Early Modern Europe

by Madeline McMahon Much of student life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe revolved around writing in books. Unlike modern library copies of frequently assigned texts or even students’ personal copies (such as this outraged copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter… Continue Reading →

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 JHI Blog — Powered by WordPress

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑