It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
I recently came across a striking passage in Samuel Pepy's diary in which he receives advice on how to get his wife Elizabeth pregnant. At the time of writing, July 1664, he and Elizabeth had been married for eight years, but they remained childless. While attending a dinner on 26th July, Samuel asked the women …
Stretching from the West End to the City, the coffee-houses of 17th and 18th century London formed the capital's intellectual and social heartbeat. Coffee, a relatively new and exotic import, was only half the attraction: coffee-houses were forums for intellectual discussion, havens for dirty business deals and places where lords and sharpers won and lost …
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten". Ecclesiastes 9:5 How will we be remembered we die? Will we be remembered at all? These are questions which occupied minds in early modern England just as …
Continue reading “Teaching marble to lie”: Remembering the dead in early modern monuments