Mis conversaciones con Joseph T. Snow, nuestro querido Pepe Nieves, como él mismo nos insta a llamarlo desde el contacto inicial, generalmente tienen lugar en la cafetería de la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, un insólito locus amoenus en el cual el más habitual inquilino del pupitre 99 de la Sala María Moliner ejerce con bondad y simpatía su papel…[Read more]

This study identified the icon of Virgin Moscovita and the icon of the Holy Mandylion, described in Konstantinos Dapontes’ writings, with the icon of the Virgin and the icon of the Holy Mandylion preserved in his family monastery Evangelistria in Skopelos island. We can now retrace the “biography”of these two artefacts, the history of their creat…[Read more]

La découverte d’une inscription slavonne dans le narthex de l’église du monastère de Râmeț (comté d’Alba) en 1966, sa relecture avec des moyens techniques spéciaux en 1978 et sa publication officielle en 1985 ont porté à l’attention des historiens le nom du peintre (Mihul du Criș-Blanc), le nom de l’évêque fondateur (archevêque Gélase),…[Read more]

Correspondences can be identified between (on the one hand) androcentric cosmogonies, ancestral misogyny and tribal blood rituals, and (on the other) the classical paradigm of vampirism, especially in its literary and on-screen flowering. Specifically, the initiatory culture-hero and the archetypal vampire both confer a haematologically-mediated…[Read more]

This blog post tells the story of an embroidered silk postcard sent by an Australian soldier to his sister Millie in Camden, NSW, for Christmas 1916.
The post gives a short account of the history of postcards and, in particular, the millions of embroidered silk postcards made in France between 1915 and 1919.

This blog post tells the story of an embroidered silk handkerchief sent to an Australian soldier on the frontline in 1916 at Christmas.

This newspaper article tells the story of a First World War patriotic fund, the Princess Mary Christmas Fund, launched in 1914. Princess Mary, the daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, aimed to raise enough funds to ensure that ‘every Sailor afloat and every Soldier at the front’ received a Christmas present in the form of a small keepsake…[Read more]

This blog post details two public artworks at the Camden Civic Centre that won awards at the Camden Art Prize.
The artworks are ‘Crossroads’ by Diego Latella (1977) and ‘Space’ by Irene Carroll (1994)

This blog post tells the story behind the Camden Teamsters Memorial in John Street, Camden, NSW.
The memorial is a tribute to the teamsters, bullockies and carriage drivers who travelled the Yerranderie Road between the mining town of Yerranderie and Camden through the Burragorang Valley.
The memorial has a rear wheel from a flat-top wagon, a…[Read more]

This paper surveys potential counterparts of the ancient Egyptian concept of mAat (maat) from other cultures and summarises such cross-cultural studies as have already been completed. Its scope ranges from antiquity to the present day and across Europe, Africa, the Near East, India, China, Australia and the Americas. Paradigms that appear to…[Read more]

Essay on the NiCHE-Canada website: https://niche-canada.org/2023/10/30/what-is-a-heritage-river/

This article discusses four pictograph sites in the Lake of the Woods where the images were interpreted by several Indigenous peoples.

This text consists of the ‘lectio praecursoria’ given at the defense of my doctoral dissertation “The Good Noblemen Who Conquered the Kingdom: Islam, Historiography, and Aristocratic Legitimation in Late-Medieval Portugal”. This dissertation deals with aristocratic historiography and political legitimation in late-medieval Portugal (late…[Read more]

This article investigates several discussions of “chemistry,” understood as an analysts’ category referring to theories and practices dealing with the structure and transformation of matter. By reading these texts (a treatise defending kīmiyāʾ by al-Fārābī, the famous passage from Ibn Sīnā’s Shifāʾ on transmutation, Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwā…[Read more]

article + 6 photographs from the Manuscriptistan Project

This blog post gives an overview of the Camden Material and Colour Guide. The guide provides property owners of heritage buildings in the Camden Heritage Conservation Area with tips and hints on restoration and conservation of their houses. The guide provides colour schemes on building exteriors and interiors by housing styles between 1840 and…[Read more]

The term “alchemy,” born out of early modern professional polemics among chemists, is problematic as a historical category. The present article shifts away from asking what pre-modern alchemy “really” was, to asking how medieval scholars writing in Greek and Arabic thought about the practice of treating and combining naturally occurring substan…[Read more]

This blog post is about a spring festival in Camden, NSW, called Celebrate Camden.
The brainchild of Vicki Sutherland from the Camden Chamber of Commerce, it aimed to promote Camden as a viable tourist and shopping destination.
The festival had mixed success and was held in 1994 and 1995, to be replaced by the Cowpastures Bicentennial.

All around the community in the Macarthur region are cultural artefacts that are representations of the settler-colonial narrative of the Cowpastures, which was variously a colonial frontier, a government reserve, and a formal region.
Today, the material culture of the Cowpastures is hidden in plain sight and appears to have been ‘forgotten’ by…[Read more]