Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.It was another busy twelve months for the PDR, for the second year on the trot hitting 10 million pages viewed! A huge thank you to all who've wandered our hallowed halls and to all our brilliant contributors. And to all our Friends who keep the whole show afloat. From the 65 collection posts, 22 essays, and 1 conjecture piece that we had the honour to publish, here's a rundown of the ten most read. ...
Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy. Read More »
***
Our post on Johannes Hartlieb's 1462 Kräuterbuch (“Book of Herbs”), the only fully illustrated herbal from the incunabula period of German history, and one which enfolds, verbatim, much of Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur, published a century earlier and considered by scholars to be the first natural history written in German. Read More »
***
Our post on mid-sixteenth century broadsheets depicting wondrous, celestial events which circulated widely across the Holy Roman Empire against the backdrop of Reformation. Read More »
***
Our post on Sutherland Macdonald, Victorian England’s first professional tattoo artist, featuring a set of photographs of his work found in the records from the Copyright Office at Stationers' Hall. Read More »
***
Our post on Maria Sibylla Merian’s set of spectacular engravings of insects and their floral abodes — one of the first natural histories of Suriname. Read More »
***
When Georgiana Houghton first exhibited her paintings at a London gallery in 1871, their wild eddies of colour and line were unlike anything the public had seen before — nor would see again until the rise of abstract art decades later. But there was little intentionally abstract about these images: Houghton painted entities she met in the spirit regions. Viewing her works through the prism of friendship, loss, and faith, Jennifer Higgie turns overdue attention on an artist neglected by historians, a visionary who believed that death was not the end, merely a new distance to overcome. Read More »
***
Our post on Wanda Gág's classic from 1928, the oldest American children's book still in print and a new entrant intro the US public domain in 2024. Read More »
***
Labelled a “cretin” and “imbecile” in his lifetime, the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind had profound talents when it came to drafting the feline form. Kirsten Tambling reconstructs the biography of this elusive figure, whose savant-like qualities inspired later French Realists, early psychiatric theorists, and Romantic visions of the artist as outsider. Read More »
***
Our post showcasing more than a hundred stereographs, made by the American Colony in Jerusalem among others, depicting daily life in Palestine before the British Mandate. Read More »
***
Reading is a form of necromancy, a way to summon and commune once again with the dead, but in what ersatz temple should such a ritual take place? Andrew Hui tracks the rise of the private study by revisiting the bibliographic imaginations of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and finds a space where words mediate the world and the self. Read More »
