Lost and found in translation

Of all the cultural developments of the late Middle Ages in the West, none was more momentous than the (re)discovery … More

Life and death

Languages don’t die, they simply evolve, creating new idioms and generating new forms and variants. The death of a language … More

In his book ‘Les Démons’, Simon Liberati writes that good letters will return to our society when we’ve exhausted the … More

Just as a culture’s committment to literacy has made it nearly impossible for people to live their lives outside the … More

History doesn’t have time for housekeeping and tidying up. History is messy and expedient. A city’s ruins are another’s foundations. … More

Nearly all pre-modern societies were loathe to experiment, try new things and embrace novelties. A measure of how modern we … More

In one of his letters, the 14th-century Italian poet and proto-humanist Petrarch complained that he found it hard to read … More

A telling distinction between the distant Renaissance and the familiar 21st century is the popularity of utopian thinking during the … More

There were many dictators in late medieval Europe, but not the kind of dictators you’d expect. Not the autocratic rulers … More

It’s not just that we have access to more texts, books and written knowledge today than at any other point … More