Posts Tagged ‘cross-cultural stuff’
From the Archives: The Fabric of Civilization
Another post from the past. This time from 2021. (I promise. New posts will be coming soon.) Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination: “What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric…
Read More
Two Poets, Eight Centuries, One Poetic Masterpiece
Save Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of those books that some scholars love to be snotty about. Literary critics of a certain stamp dismiss it as bad poetry, apparently on the grounds that people love it who don’t otherwise read poetry.* Persian linguists rightly point out that Fitzgerald’s translation…
Read More
This Isn’t a Blog Post.
It’s a link to a website I discovered when I was procrastinating on my Really Big Project.* Global Middle Ages is the home site for a group of projects that began with a teaching experiment at the University of Texas. The charge was “to see the world whole in a large swathe of time—as a…
Read More