Nineteenth Century Europe
Learning to Read Egypt: Hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone
As I believe I mentioned recently, European scholars at the time of the Renaissance rediscovered ancient Egypt in the writings of classical Greece.* Like the ancient Greeks before them, they believed Egypt was the source of art, religion, and science: a land of mystery and arcane knowledge. The belief in Egypt as a land of…
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The Year Without Summer: “Eighteen hundred and froze to death”
Historian William K. Klingaman and meteorologist Nicholas P. Klingaman combine forces in The Year Without Summer: 1816 And The Volcano That Darkened The World And Changed History. Working in a vein similar to Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, the Klingamans weave together modern scientific explanations, nineteenth-century scientific (and religious) speculations, and historical events into a…
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La Folie Baudelaire
In La Folie Baudelaire Roberto Calasso describes the life, work, and world of symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire in terms of an image borrowed from nineteenth century French critic Charles Saint-Beuve: the “highly decorated, highly tormented but graceful” architectural extravagance known as a garden folly. Saint-Beuve used the image to disparage Baudelaire’s work. In Calasso’s hands…
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