Womens Culture

The Toast often does a good job with medieval memes, and with this one, they've knocked the proverbial ball out of the park. I link partially in anticipation of teaching ENGL 3300 (Women in Literature: Medieval Women's Literary Culture) shortly, where we'll read Julian and learn exactly why all things shall be well.

If Julian of Norwich Were Your Professor ...

. . . but the details behind da Vinci's Mona Lisa have long been obscure. Now, archaeologists in Italy have opened the grave believed to house the bones of Lisa Gherardini, the woman believed to have been the model for the famous painting. You can read about the excavation, Lisa's life, and the archaeological team's goals at Discovery News, as well as an update on the project.

In 2011, Middle English scholar Elaine Treharne found a (slightly racy) Latin poem, written by a sixteent-century Englishwoman for her tutor, pasted into an early modern printing of Chaucer. You can read the whole story -- who the Englishwoman and her tutor were, why it's important that the poem is in Latin, and a translation of the poem itself -- at the Early Modern England website.

This is a legacy post from my previous website.