The Paramaterial Phantasy
While I have not been posting to this blog on early modern vision as regularly as I want, I have been busy making more woodcuts inspired by the medieval and early modern periods. While my Henry VIII woodcut attained some popularity on social media sites not long after I made it, I had yet to […]
Part I. “He thinks tis but our fantasy”: The Ontology and Epistemology of Ghosts and Spirits In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the skeptical and possibly Stoic Horatio reveals to the melancholic eponymous prince that he has seen a phantasm. Before Horatio can even reveal his harrowing yet problematic tale of seeing a “form like [Hamlet’s] father,” […]
Last week I received the following Tweet from scholar and #WoodcutWednesday fan Sjoerd Levelt: Another Adamite expose with a similar woodcut may be "the first depiction of an erect penis in English popular print." #TheMoreYouKnow — John Overholt (@john_overholt) October 24, 2013 I’m not sure how I attained a reputation to have expertise on […]
For some time, I’ve been toying around with the idea of making small semi-interactive interfaced presentations on various important aspects of early modern life and culture. My first attempt, which was quite long, explained the sensitive soul and is still in progress. Because that file is so large and unwieldly, I thought I would try […]
Than who is he that will take pleasure in vayne apparell, which if it be worne but a while will fall to ragges, and if it be not worne, will soone rotte or els be eaten with mothes. –Anatomie of Abuses. Philip Stubbes. The past week I’ve been terribly sick, and while I was not […]
Having previously written three separate entries on cats, I reluctantly post this for fear of becoming identified as a cat blog.1 My first cat post concerned identifying the strange woodcut on William Griffith’s 1570 edition of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, which, although presenting original research, sadly remains the least viewed of my cat trilogy. […]
In Petrarch’s Secretum written somewhere between 1347 and 1353 and circulated posthumously, Petrarch shapes a dialogue between himself and a fictionalized Augustine. Augustine chastises and instructs Petrarch for favoring an attention to the world over devotion to God and spiritual things. Towards the end of book one of this dialogue, Augustine reveals the tensions inherent […]
While studying mind models available in the early modern period, I noticed an unusual confluence of supposed “influences” on the mind that generate paradoxical aspects within medieval and early modern constructions of the Imagination or the Phantasy. These paradoxes reveal a Phantasy that resembles but differs from our ordinary contemporary understanding of the imagination. For […]