Detail of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis from an engraving showing the stories in Book IV Ovid’s collection of re-mythologized Greek and Roman stories within the pages of Metamorphoses is intensely rich with stories of transformations of all kinds. It should hardly come as a surprise then, that the collection includes stories…
Like its early modern collector, this thirteen volume work tried to gather and order the natural world.
Andreas Vesalius, Anatomia viri in hoc genere princip. Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis Andreas Vesalius’ diagrams of the human body are some of the most iconic and significant works in the history of early modern medicine, and the foundation of the modern study of anatomy. Born in Brussels, Vesalius taught anatomy at…
The foundational account of Caribbean piracy. Alexandre Esquemelin was a Flemish sailor and surgeon who traveled to the West Indies in the 1660s. Indentured on various mercantile and privateering vessels, his descriptions of the activities of British and Jamaican privateers formed the basis for generations of writing about the Golden…
