Early Modern
Kepler’s Mother: A Scary Story for Halloween
The seventeenth century was a period of scientific revolution. Astronomers, like Galileo, worked out the motions of the planets and stars in the sky, and overturned the concept that the earth stood at the center of the cosmos.* Galileo, Newton and others created a new science of mechanics that applied the laws of mathematics to…
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Bess of Hardwick–Merry Widow?
As I mentioned recently, I’ve been thinking about widows in the context of writing about women warriors. As a result, I took a little side trip through the concept of the merry widow*–which brought me to someone I haven’t thought about in a long time, Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury. (Or more formally,…
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And speaking of Queens Isabella…
My last blog post was about a queen named Isabella that you probably had never heard of.* Today I thought I’d talk a bit about an Isabella who you probably think you know a lot about: Isabella of Castile. Isabella is best known to American school children–and consequently to American adults–as the woman who funded…
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