In the ten years following the publication of the infamous Reports on the State of Education in Wales (1847) that had classified the Welsh population as a vice-ridden nation of working-class drunkards and promiscuous hoydens, the middle-classes in Wales strongly rejected this Anglo-centric condemnation at first in the press and, later on, in…[Read more]

In late Renaissance medicine, the example of digestion was frequently invoked to prove the elemental composition of the human body. Food was considered as being decomposed in its first elements by the stomach, and digested into a thick juice which is assimilated by the liver and the body parts. Such a process points to the structure of the human…[Read more]

In an article that exposes the roots of Brexit-era Germanophobia, Rita Singer details how Welsh press coverage and poetry about U-Boat attacks on Welsh ships evolved into racialised depictions of German U-Boat combatants as ‘Huns’, monsters, ghouls and Satanic fiends

This paper was presented as part of an online symposium titled “Research as a Radical Act of Creativity” organized by the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University. As a response to “radical creativity” – one of the current cross-cutting, strategic themes of Aalto University – the paper addresses the need to learn from dec…[Read more]

Over the last four decades of the 18th century, the image of Sparta began to include a few characteristic elements that later became an important point of reference for 19th-century writers, philosophers and historians. Issues of Spartan equality of citizens, fully responsible for their country, and also soldierly honour and Sparta’s military c…[Read more]

In the history of early modern science, the German physician Andreas Libavius (Halle, Saxony, c.1550–Coburg, Bavaria, 1616) is known for having promoted the institutionalization of alchemy in the academic sphere along with the creation of laboratories and instruments. Libavius was also remarkable for his extended network of scholarly friends and f…[Read more]