Are there any descendants of William Shakespeare today? The answer is no. It is known that the family endures through another line, that of his younger sister Joan, but the famous playwright’s line has died out. This is because, despite having three children with his wife Anne Hathaway, two were girls and thus took their […]
Literature
Posted inCulture
Books from the Library of the Brothers Grimm Discovered in Poland May Provide Clues to their Method of Selecting Fairy Tales
The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are known for their fairy tales, which have entered the literary canon. However, they spent almost their entire lives developing Germanic philology. New discoveries of previously lost books from their private library may help in investigating their work. Twenty-seven books, believed to have been lost after World War II, […]
Posted inModern Era
The Story of the Cullinan, the World’s Largest Diamond, whose Discovery was Anticipated by Jules Verne in his Novel ‘The Southern Star’
Jules Verne had an extraordinary visionary ability. “From the Earth to the Moon” anticipated the arrival on our satellite, while “Robur the Conqueror” prophesied Man’s conquest of the air, and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” depicted the electric submarine, among other astonishing literary prophecies. The one narrated in L’Étoile du sud (“The Southern Star” or […]
Posted inAncient Greece, Culture
Jørgensen’s Law or Why Mortal Characters in the Homeric Poems Cannot Distinguish Which Gods Intervene in Their Lives
Anyone who hasn’t read the Odyssey and the Iliad, the two great Greek epics attributed to Homer that form the basis of Western literature, doesn’t know what they’re missing out on. And those who have read them may have missed, undoubtedly, a curious detail: despite the constant interference of the gods in the characters’ lives, […]
Posted inCulture
An Antarctic Mystery: How Jules Verne wrote the Sequel to an Edgar Allan Poe Novel
Along with Journey to the Center of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, and some others, An Antarctic Mystery has always been one of my favorite novels by Jules Verne; partly because of the work itself and partly due to the magnificent comic book adaptation by artist José Duarte Minarro in 1973 for that […]
Posted inAncient Rome, Culture, Middle Ages
When the Codex Overtook the Scroll as the Format for Books
Recently, following the article we published about the origins of the books in the Library of Alexandria, a somewhat finicky (and indeed quite mistaken) reader confronted us on a social media platform, asserting that those were not books but rather handwritten scrolls. What he evidently didn’t know is that scrolls are simply one form of […]
Posted inAncient Rome, Culture
The oldest surviving text of Latin prose is a manual of agriculture and recipes, including the placenta cake
As we mentioned in a previous article, only one percent of all the literature produced by the Romans in Antiquity has survived to our days. The oldest surviving text in Latin is a hymn recited by the priests of Mars during their annual festival, which was found inscribed on a stone in Rome in 1777. […]
Posted inCulture
Delia Bacon, the writer who proposed the first theory about Shakespeare’s true identity
The debate about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works is not recent; it began about a century and a half after his death, when Herbert Lawrence suggested it in 1771, and it has continued ever since, with people like the famous poets John Milton and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the historian J. Thomas Looney or the journalist […]
Posted inCulture
5 literary works, lost in the last 5 centuries, which could have been exceptional
In many articles we have mentioned lost works of antiquity, only known today by the fragments cited by later authors. This is the case of the works of Onesycritus, Megasthenes or Euhemerus of Messina, but also some works of Aristotle, Diodorus of Sicily, Archimedes, Julius Caesar, Eratosthenes, Titus Livius, Pliny the Elder or Suetonius, among […]
Posted inMiddle Ages
Christine de Pizan, the first professional female writer in the Late Middle Ages and a forerunner of feminism
The honor of being a pioneer, of paving the way to something, is usually much disputed. Today we are going to see a female case, that of the considered first female professional writer in the western world, an honour that tradition bestows on the Venetian Christine de Pizan. Her legacy would have a considerable influence […]
