Coupled columns in French architecture and the reaction to their use from the Renaissance up to the classical rationalism of the early twentieth century hinged on the debates regarding the relation- ship between structural stability and visual delight, over the backdrop of the search for a national classical tradition. This architectural motif was…[Read more]

Het Latijn heeft geen lidwoord zoals bijvoorbeeld het Nederlands (de, het) of het Oudgrieks (ho, hē, tó), en dat vond de 16de-eeuwse humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger prima. De grootse taal van Rome kon het makkelijk stellen zonder dat pietluttige woordje. Toegegeven, het kan soms nuttig zijn om aan te geven dat je een specifiek object op het oog h…[Read more]

Het Latijn, de taal van de Romeinen, heeft lange tijd zijn stempel gedrukt op de taalkunde en taalbeschrijving, niet alleen in de oudheid, maar ook in de middeleeuwen en de Renaissance, wanneer men de talige diversiteit van de wereld gestaag ontdekte. De meest uiteenlopende talen werden met wisselend succes gegoten in de mal van het Latijnse…[Read more]

Met de wereld op stelten is het tegenwoordig niet evident om van de mediterrane zon te genieten, al moet het weer in de Lage Landen de laatste jaren niet veel meer onderdoen. Mocht je toch snakken naar een zweempje Griekenland deze zomer, dan biedt de dichter van Gentse origine Daniël Heinsius (1580–1655) misschien een tegengif.

Exact 398 jaar geleden ontsnapte de beroemde Nederlandse jurist, filoloog en diplomaat Hugo Grotius (de Groot, 1583–1645) op spectaculaire wijze uit Slot Loevestein in een kist, geholpen door zijn vrouw en zijn dienstmeid. Grotius zat daar een levenslange straf uit vanwege zijn remonstrantse sympathieën. Het regime was er evenwel nogal losjes: Gr…[Read more]

1492 was a momentous year for Spain. The Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, leading to the continent’s largescale colonization by Europeans. Columbus did so by order of the so-called Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, while actually trying to discover a new travel r…[Read more]

In the new “Ad fontes” feature of Adendros, I want to offer English translations of short source texts or text excerpts from the history of (Greek) language studies which struck me as particularly interesting, enlightening, or enticing.

Today: part two of a grammar dispute between Philipp Nicodemus Frischlin and Martin Crusius, two six…[Read more]

Vandaag is het exact 500 jaar geleden dat Hadrianus Amerotius’ (ca. 1495-1560) Compendium Graecae grammatices te Leuven verscheen in het atelier van Dirk Martens.

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

This article analyzes representations of cities in two pictures created around 1600: Theodor de Bry’s engraving of Macao, and the views of Kyoto attributed to Iwasa Katsumochi Matabei. The relationship between fragmented and total forms of repre- sentation is studied in both pictures. The European engraving depicts urban space as a whole, while t…[Read more]

This is the PowerPoint presentation to accompany my comments for the Theoretical Foundations of Victorian Studies roundtable on January 7, 2021.

This chapter discusses two early anarchist conceptions of utopianism, a romantic conception associated with Gustav Landauer and a rationalist ideal linked to Peter Kropotkin. I argue that the differences have been exaggerated. Landauer and Kropotkin followed different paths, but they formulated their responses to utopianism in the same context,…[Read more]

This article examines William Morris’s idea of Englishness, considered through a critique of his concept of fellowship or community. It looks at the charge
that Morris wrongly neglected the importance of nationality as a focus for organization in socialism, preferring instead an internationalist ideal, based on an
unworkable model of s…[Read more]

This paper examines the politics of Morris’s understanding of art in socialism. At the centre of the analysis is the claim Morris makes for art’s democratisation and his commitment to the transformation of labour – into productive leisure – through art. The conditions for this transformation, namely, the abolition of commerce and the realisa…[Read more]

This chapter discusses William Morris’s rejection of anarchist communism as individualistic. The first discusses his treatment of anarchist communism as a generic form. It
examines his motivations for advancing the critique and sets out the key concepts on which he later relied to develop his analysis of decision-making. The relationship between…[Read more]

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax’s interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax’s understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution’s legacy,…[Read more]

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]

The first Aswan Dam was built at the dawn of the twentieth century and celebrated as a triumph of imperial engineering. Five years after its completion, workers returned to extend the dam. Photographer D. S. George recorded both the building and extension projects for the Egyptian Public Works Department in a series of images that give a unique…[Read more]

Projects that bridge the humanities and sciences often attract attention from journalists, but evoke dismay from humanists who feel that their subjects of expertise have been misinterpreted. For the humanities to reclaim a place of pride in public conversation, humanists themselves need to embrace interdisciplinarity and take the lead in this…[Read more]