In the News

New York Times: Decoding the Defiance of Henry VIII’s First Wife (Jennifer Schuessler on Vanessa Braganza)

July 07, 2022

Using a process she called “early modern Wordle,” a scholar claims to have uncovered a hidden message from Catherine of Aragon in a book of jewelry designs.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg: "Is It Permitted to Flee the City? The coronavirus creates an unsettling tunnel in time between 21st-century New York and the world of 16th-century rabbis," TABLET

April 20, 2020

"The longer the current COVID-19 ordeal unfolds, the more the word “unprecedented” is repeated. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/coronavirus-16th-ce…

Stephen Greenblatt: Invisible Bullets. What Lucretius Taught Us About Pandemics (The New Yorker)

March 16, 2020

Excerpt: "In 1585, the greatest Elizabethan scientist, Thomas Harriot, was sent by his patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, to the nascent English colony in Virginia to assess the natural resources, observe the Algonquian inhabitants, and weigh the colonists’...

Stephen Greenblatt: What Shakespeare Actually Wrote About the Plague (The New Yorker)

May 07, 2020

Excerpt: "Shakespeare lived his entire life in the shadow of bubonic plague. On April 26, 1564, in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church, in Stratford-upon-Avon, the vicar, John Bretchgirdle, recorded the baptism of one “ Gulielmus filius Johannes...

James Hankins on Social Distancing during the Black Death

March 28, 2020

https://quillette.com/2020/03/28/social-distancing-during-the-black-dea…

Hannah Marcus: Galileo’s Lessons for Living and Working through a Plague

April 30, 2020

An outbreak in Italy in the 1630s forced him to find new ways of doing his research and connecting with his family https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/galileos-lessons-for-…

Anna Burgess (Harvard Library Communications): History at your fingertips: Harvard Library seeks volunteers to help transcribe 18th-century handwritten materials from its North America Collection

April 23, 2020

We can’t rewrite history, but re-typing it? That’s a different story — and it’s a story Harvard Library wants to tell with users’ help. The library’s innovative new project invites the public to help transcribe its collection of digitized colonial-era...

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