As someone who nourishes active interests in both the arts and the sciences, particularly natural philosophy, and the literature and history of early modern England, I could scarcely believe my good fortune to have been made aware of “Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance.”
Titled in reference to, and honor of, Phillip Henry Gosse’s classic 1861 book The Romance of Natural History , Dr. Lynn Merrill’s The Romance of Victorian Natural History presents an examination of not only Mr. Gosse’s own writings but those of his Nineteenth Century fellow amateur natural history practitioners as well. Yet even if this […]
While in our present time pigs are primarily only found penned on a farm or less commonly roaming deep in the wilds, in the European Middle Ages they occupied a significantly wider range of spaces and interacted with people in many more ways than they now do. Prof. Dolly Jørgensen’s new book “The Medieval Pig” presents and overview of their history during this period.
B.B.’s novel “The Little Grey Men,” originally published in 1942, as it was the recipient of the Carnegie Medal that same year and was later adapted into a television series in 1975, is most likely to be his most popularly known amongst his many books. It recounts the story – as directly received from one with personal knowledge of it, as he tells it – of the last four gnomes in England who live inside an old oak tree beside Folly Brook in Warwickshire.