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Essays
![Liberal Visions and Boring Machines: The Early History of the Channel Tunnel](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-early-history-of-the-channel-tunnel/chunnel-feature.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Liberal Visions and Boring Machines: The Early History of the Channel Tunnel
More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism. more
![Rhapsodies in Blue: Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/anna-atkins-cyanotypes/anna-atkins-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Rhapsodies in Blue: Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes
In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate” themselves. more
![Cliché-Verre and Friendship in 19th-Century France](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/cliche-verre-and-friendship-in-19th-century-france/cv-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Cliché-Verre and Friendship in 19th-Century France
In the 1850s, as photography took its first steps toward commercial reproducibility, a more intimate use for light-sensitive plates briefly bloomed. It had a few names: heliographic drawing, photographic autography, or, as it is best known today, cliché-verre. Miya Tokumitsu takes us to the towns and forests of France where a group of friends began making marks on photographic plates, and finds their camaraderie cohere in lyrical arrangements of topography and light. more
![The Reluctant Levitator: Teresa of Avila’s Humble Raptures](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-reluctant-levitator/sargent-avila-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Reluctant Levitator: Teresa of Avila’s Humble Raptures
Levitation was the last thing Teresa of Avila wanted. It drew the wrong kind of attention and embarrassed her in public. She tried to remain grounded, clinging to furniture when the weightlessness set in, and then suddenly, it stopped for good. Carlos Eire reads Teresa's autobiographic Vida and finds the 16th-century saint complaining to God about the aethrobatic miracles that he forced her to endure. more
![The Silent Treatment: Solitary Confinement’s Unlikely Origins](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/silent-treatment/solitary-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Silent Treatment: Solitary Confinement’s Unlikely Origins
Characterised today by the noise of banging, buzzers, and the cries of inmates, solitary confinement was originally developed from Quaker ideas about the redemptive power of silence, envisioned as a humane alternative to the punitive violence of late-18th century jails. Revisiting Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, Jane Brox discovers the spiritual origins and reformist ambitions of solitary’s early advocates, and sees their supposedly progressive desires come to ruin by the 20th century. more
![Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/stamped-by-harmonic-stars/agrippa-feature-2.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy
Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. Anthony Grafton explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a path that leads both upward and downward: up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth. more
![Free Speech and Bad Meats: The Domestic Labour of Reading in Milton’s *Areopagitica*](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/free-speech-and-bad-meats/milton-psyche-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Free Speech and Bad Meats: The Domestic Labour of Reading in Milton’s Areopagitica
Does a healthy intellectual culture resemble a battlefield or a kitchen? Revisiting Milton’s Areopagitica, a tract often championed by today’s free speech absolutists, Katie Kadue finds a debt to the work of early modern housewives. In their labours to preserve food and transform it into wholesome cuisine, Milton saw an analogue for how the reading public might digest books — good and bad alike — into nourishing ideas. more
![Liquid Bewitchment: Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/liquid-bewitchment/gin-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Liquid Bewitchment: Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850
The introduction of gin to England was a delirious and deleterious affair, as tipplers reported a range of effects: loss of reason, frenzy, madness, joy, and death. With the help of prints by George Cruikshank, William Hogarth, and others, James Brown enters the architecture of intoxication — dram shops, gin halls, barbershops — exploring the spaces that catered to pleasure or evil, depending who you asked. more
![Travelling Tales: *Kalīlah wa-Dimnah* and the Animal Fable](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/travelling-tales/k-and-d-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Travelling Tales: Kalīlah wa-Dimnah and the Animal Fable
Influencing numerous later animal tales told around the world, the 8th-century Arabic fables of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīlah wa-Dimnah also inspired a rich visual tradition of illustration: jackals on trial, airborne turtles, and unlikely alliances between species. Marina Warner follows these stories as they wander and change across time and place, celebrating their sharp political observation and stimulating mix of humour, earnesty, and melancholy. more
![Radioactive Fictions: Marie Corelli and the Omnipotence of Thoughts](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/radioactive-fictions/radium-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Radioactive Fictions: Marie Corelli and the Omnipotence of Thoughts
Outselling books by Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells in their day, Marie Corelli’s occult romance novels brim with fantasies of telepathy, mesmerism, and radioactivity. Steven Connor revisits The Life Everlasting (1911), where the recent discovery of radium shapes the mechanics of phantasmal machines and psychic forces able to pass through all impediments. more
![Wonder and Pleasure in the Oude Doolhof of Amsterdam](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/oude-doolhof/doolhof-featured-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Wonder and Pleasure in the Oude Doolhof of Amsterdam
For almost 250 years, a mysterious pleasure park sat on the banks of Amsterdam's canals. Angela Vanhaelen leads us on a tour of the bawdy fountains, disorienting maze, and mechanical androids in the Oude Doolhof — an attraction that mingled pagan, protestant, and imperial desires. more
![The Black Dandy of Buenos Aires: Racial Fictions and the Search for Raúl Grigera](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/raul-grigera/raul-grigera-feature.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Black Dandy of Buenos Aires: Racial Fictions and the Search for Raúl Grigera
A mysterious staple of Buenos Aires nightlife in the 1910s and 20s, Raúl Grigera was an audacious Afro-Argentine dandy, an eccentric bohemian icon, a man who called himself el murciélago (the bat). Paulina L. Alberto examines the racial stories told by photographs, comic strips, and newspaper articles about a person many knew only as “el negro Raúl”, searching for the life behind the legend. more
![Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-brothers-perrault/perrault-feature.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault
Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world. more
![The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/ether-dreams/ether-featured.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris
Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences. more
![Troubled Waters: Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/troubled-waters/uroscopy-feature.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Troubled Waters: Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine
From cabbage green to coarse meal, medieval manuscripts exhibit a spectrum of colours and consistencies when describing urine. Katherine Harvey examines the complex practices of uroscopy: how physicians could divine sexual history, disease, and impending death by studying the body's liquid excretions. more
![The City That Fell Off a Cliff](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-lost-city-of-dunwich/dunwich-lead.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
The City That Fell Off a Cliff
Beneath the waves, off the Suffolk Coast, lies a city taken by the sea through centuries of erosion. Matthew Green revisits Dunwich, a once lively port transfigured into a symbol of loss, both eerie and profound, for generations of artists, poets, and historians drawn to its ruinous shores. more
![Beast in the Blood: Jean Denis and the “Transfusion Affair”](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/beast-in-the-blood/jean-denis-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Beast in the Blood: Jean Denis and the “Transfusion Affair”
During the late 1660s in Paris, transfusing the blood of calves and lambs into human veins held the promise of renewed youth and vigour. Peter Sahlins explores Jean Denis’ controversial experiments driven by his belief in the moral superiority of animal blood: a substance that could help redeem the fallen state of humanity. more
![Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/figuring-the-womb/birth-figures-feature-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe
When the womb began to appear in printed images during the 16th century, it was understood through analogy: a garden, uroscopy flask, or microcosm of the universe. Rebecca Whiteley explores early modern birth figures, which picture the foetus in utero, and discovers an iconic form imbued with multiple kinds of knowledge: from midwifery know-how to alchemical secrets, astrological systems to new anatomical findings. more
![Images from the Collective Unconscious: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and the Eranos Archive](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/images-from-the-collective-unconscious/eranos-feature-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Images from the Collective Unconscious: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and the Eranos Archive
In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, mystic and founder of the multidisciplinary Eranos forum, began compiling a diverse visual archive that would allow dreamers to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of cultural history. Frederika Tevebring explores this grandiose undertaking and its effect on the archivist, as images from the collection began to blur with her psyche. more
![The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-emancipatory-visions-of-a-sex-magician/randolph-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics
Erotic magic, Black emancipation, gender fluidity, interplanetary spirit realms — these were but a few of the topics that preoccupied Paschal Beverly Randolph (b. 1825), an occult thinker who believed that his multiracial identity afforded him “peculiar mental power and marvelous versatility”. Lara Langer Cohen considers the neglected politics of Randolph’s esoteric writings alongside the repeated frustration of his activism: how dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation. more
![Illusory Wealth: Victor Dubreuil’s Cryptic Currencies](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/illusory-wealth/dubreuil-feature-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Illusory Wealth: Victor Dubreuil’s Cryptic Currencies
After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks are evaluated anew by Dorinda Evans, who considers Dubreuil’s unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time. more
![Eating and Reading with Katherine Mansfield](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/eating-and-reading-with-katherine-mansfield/Mansfield-thumb-feature.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Eating and Reading with Katherine Mansfield
Like fast food and snacks, the short story has been derided as minor cuisine, ephemeral and insubstantial, light fare compared to the novel’s sustenance. For Katherine Mansfield, a great master of the form, eating offered a model for the sensuous consumption of her fiction — stories, in turn, that are filled with scenes of alimentary pleasure. On the centenary of the New Zealand writer’s death, Aimée Gasston samples her appetites. more
![In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/in-search-of-true-color/in-search-of-true-color-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images
Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography. more
![Displaying the Dead: The Musée Dupuytren Catalogue](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/musee-dupuytren-catalogue/dupuytren-ribs-featured-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Displaying the Dead: The Mus ée Dupuytren Catalogue
When Paris’ infamous museum of anatomical pathology closed its doors in 2016, a controversial collection disappeared from view. Daisy Sainsbury explores the history of the Musée Dupuytren, and asks what an ethical future might look like for the human specimens it held. more