Archive

We wrote back in October 2019 about the subject of ‘dressed’ prints. We had just one then, but our new list of recent acquisitions features a whole group. There wasn’t space in the list itself to illustrate all of them, so I thought I would do so here:

Kaspar Hauser (d.1833) was a foundling who became legendary in early nineteenth-century Europe; ‘the enigma of [his] origin, childhood, and early youth, and the known facts have aroused sustained interest … on the purely human, psychological, and social, as well as political, level’ ever since (Oxford Companion to German Literature). The author of this book, […]

As it’s St Patrick’s Day today, I thought I’d write about an interesting Irish book I’ve been working on recently: This is the first edition of an important Irish book, written by Andrew Donlevy (1680–1746), a Catholic priest who most likely trained in Ireland before leaving for France in about 1710, where he entered the […]

Last year, a former lecturer of mine in the Russian department at the University of Exeter, Peter Scorer (1942–2020), sadly died. As well as teaching Russian, Peter was also the University’s Orthodox chaplain, being for many years a deacon in the Russian Orthodox Church.  You may recognise his name from the Corydon Singers (follow the […]

Trying to promote one’s music during a global pandemic is not the easiest thing in the world: choirs are mostly not functioning, and choral directors have been on furlough, or are busy trying to work out how best to proceed in line with current restrictions. So I was excited to receive the following e-mail this […]

Years ago, in my final year as a undergraduate, I took a course on the medieval German epic. I was attracted by the idea of reading old German texts–Tristan and Isolde, Wolfram von Eschenbach‘s Parzival, the Nibelungenlied–although I soon wondered whether the choice was such a good idea when I realised quite how long they […]