#early modern printing

[crazyfox-archives]

An illustration depicting Kōtokuin Temple (高徳院) and its large bronze image of Amida Buddha in Kamakura as it was in the mid-17th century

From “Tales of Kamakura” (鎌倉物語 “Kamakura Monogatari”) by Nakagawa Kiun (中川喜雲) and illustrated by Hishikawa Moronobu (菱川師宣), published in 1659

Image from the temple’s official website

[the-cricket-chirps]

Asai Kiyoshi

Early Cat

Ca. 1940s.

[nyxshadowhawk]

Have you ever wondered what characters from Greek mythology would look like in a medieval AU? Wonder no more:

In the first picture are Hercules on the top left, Menelaus and Helen in the middle, Paris underneath them, and Hector and Agamemnon underneath Hercules. In the second picture are Janus, Saturn, Picus, and Faunus on the right, and Juno on the left.

(This is the Nuremberg Chronicle, a fifteenth-century German incunabulum.)

[greencheekconure27]

Some details from Maria Sybilla Merian's Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensum (1705)

(I'm afraid my phone camera isn't quite doing it justice but still.)

@onenicebugperday

[pagansphinx]

Hiroaki Takahashi Shōtei (Japanese, 1871-1945) • Snow on Ayase River • 1915 • Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

[historiartmoi]

Source

Lady With Camellias

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894

[archaeologysucks]

I've been reading Howard Pyle’s “classic” children’s version of the Robin Hood story, published in 1883, and if I had a nickel for every time he uses the word "stout", I would have $12.35, because he has used it 247 times in this 207 page ebook, including this shining example:

Learn another adjective, Howard. I am begging you.

[slugchild]

18th century printed book, with waste-paper binding showing underneath peeling/insect-damaged leather (from Preservation Underground, Duke University Library blog)

[studyscrasic]

There's a symposium happening at my university right now on Hebrew printing and type (inclusive of Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and other languages, too) and I am absolutely geeking out about it. There are folks here from some amazing institutions, including the Yiddish Book Center, and the talks so far have all been amazing. It's making me really want to work on my Yiddish again, and also just making me so happy for Jewish reasons!

[schistostegapennata]

Have you ever agonized over trying to find out where Gandae is now while trying to cite an extremely old book in Latin? Or tugged at your hair while wailing in despair at the fact that Leucopetrae was the name for present-day Weissenfels, Germany? Are you tired of messing about with geographical tables from the same time period as the book you're researching just to see if you can track down where that weird name was on the map so you can compare it to a map from today and find out the city's name? Or maybe none of these apply to you and you actually just want to mess around with some cool Latin words?

Well, have I got the database for you!!! Go to Latin Place Names at https://rbms.info/lpn/, cause it is wonderful and I may or may not have started dancing around my living room and whooping gleefully when I found it

[crazyfox-archives]

Rokuharamitsuji Temple (六波羅蜜寺) in Kyoto as it looked in the 18th century, with more extensive and elaborate temple grounds before the Meiji Restoration of 1868

Illustration from “An Illustrated Guide to Famous Places in the Capital” (都名所図会), 1790, written by Akisato Ritō (秋里籬島) and illustrated by Takehara Shun’chōsai (竹原春朝斎)

[david-watts]

the problem with having 1870s bookshelves is that most books published after then are much taller than the shelves

[enbycrip]

I am so *incredibly* sick of people just randomly blaming everything they don’t like on the internet - or, worse yet, just mindlessly scaremongering about the internet and its “effect on society” without the slightest idea of the actual precedents there are in history for the internet.

A really solid example is the invention and popularisation of the moveable-type printing press in the early modern period. Its effect on mass communication and the democratisation of knowledge and communication is very comparable.

It’s pretty reasonable to say that the main reason the Protestant Reformation happened when it did was because Martin Luther, unlike, say, William Wytcliffe, a 14th century English proto-Protestant, had access to the printing press and could put out pamphlets, meaning his evolving ideas could reach a potentially huge - and *very interested* - mass audience.

This wasn’t even limited by literacy rates, which were growing at the time, because there was also a huge culture of reading out loud and debating in most urban centres at the time, particularly in Germany and the Low Countries. And, given how quick and easy pamphlets were to print and distribute, it didn’t take long for pamphleteering wars to break out. I entirely stopped giving any credence to people claiming the internet was causing “the death of civility in society” after I read one of Thomas More’s (yes, the martyr *Saint* Thomas More, who is somehow *still* regarded as a stately and dignified man of conscience) flame war replies to Luther where he said “your shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck which your damnable rottenness has vomited up”.

[ephemeral-winter]

ugh I get that all of us who study anything pre-1800 have to stick together in the face of an uncaring and cruel academic job market etc but can I just say that as a medievalist I resent having to be in community with early modernists. look at them. they don’t even know latin

[beckybookshistory]

Just some beautiful 16th century binding, with parchment fragments used for reinforcements

📜 @BeineckeLibrary MS 866

[theenglishnook]

Early Modern English: Shakespearean Era to the King James Bible (1500-1700 AD)

Early Modern English is the linguistic epoch that spans roughly from the late 15th century to the late 17th century. It represents a significant transitional phase in the evolution of the English language, bridging the gap between the Middle English period and the modern form of the language that we use today. During the Early Modern English period, several key developments profoundly influenced…