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In 1621 Robert Burton first published his masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy, a vast feat of scholarship examining in encyclopaedic detail that most enigmatic of maladies. Noga Arikha explores the book, said to be the favorite of both Samuel Johnson and Keats, and places it within the context of the humoural theory so popular...
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During the time of his ‘spiritual awakening’ in 1744 the scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg kept a dream diary. Richard Lines looks at how, among the heavenly visions, there were also erotic dreams, the significance of which has been long overlooked. Among the many works of the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher, religious teacher and...
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Arika Okrent explores the rise and fall of Volapük – a universal language created in the late 19th century by a German priest called Johann Schleyer. Johann Schleyer was a German priest whose irrational passion for umlauts may have been his undoing. During one sleepless night in 1879, he felt a Divine presence telling...
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Of all the attempts throughout history to geographically locate the Garden of Eden one of the most compelling was that set out by minister and president of Boston University, William F. Warren. Brook Wilensky-Lanford looks at the ideas of the man who, in his book Paradise Found, proposed the home of all humanity to...
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On the run from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin committed suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Anca Pusca, author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change, reflects...
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In 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the first ever book that could be described as ‘mathematical fiction’. Ian Stewart, author of Flatterland and The Annotated Flatland, introduces the strange tale of the geometric adventures of A. Square. Edwin Abbott Abbott, who became Headmaster of the City of London...
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Between 1617 and 1621 the English physician and polymath Robert Fludd published his masterwork Utriusque Cosmi, a book split into two volumes and packed with over 60 intricate engravings. Urszula Szulakowska explores the philosophical and theological ideas behind the extraordinary images found in the second part of the work. Robert Fludd was a respected...
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In 1906 the American physician and neurologist Henry Morton Prince published his remarkable monograph The Dissociation of a Personality in which he details the condition of ‘Sally Beauchamp’, America’s first famous multiple-personality case. George Prochnik discusses the life and thought of the man Freud called “an unimaginable ass”. 1. Morton Prince—physically hale, philosophically heterodox,...
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In the 82 illustrated plates included in his 1680 book The Anatomy of Plants, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew revealed for the first time the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. Brian Garret, professor of philosophy at McMaster Univerity, explores how Grew’s pioneering ‘mechanist’ vision in relation to the...
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Dr Mario A. Di Gregorio, professor of the History of Science at the University of L’Aquila and author of From Here to Eternity: Ernst Haeckel and Scientific Faith, takes a look at Haeckel’s theory of “monism” which lies behind the mesmerising illustrations of his Kunstformen Der Natur. Few people were better known in the...
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This year, over 100 years after the publication of her seminal Anarchism and Other Essays, the writings of Emma Goldman enter the public domain. Kathy E. Ferguson, Professor of Political Science & Women’s Studies at the University of Hawai’i, provides an introduction to Goldman’s life and her particular brand of anarchism. Emma Goldman was...
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