In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth ..read more

A chemistry treatise that weds the hard sciences with theosophical insight, making a microscope of the psychic mind ..read more

From the mid-sixteenth century, broadsheets depicting wondrous, celestial events circulated widely across the Holy Roman Empire against the backdrop of Reformation ..read more

A fantasia of travellers and archipelago dwellers, illustrated in a chimerical fashion by the author ..read more

Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy ..read more

By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, Octavian Esanu asks, playfully and tenderly, if we can see pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art ..read more

A guide to Italian landscape architecture by Edith Wharton, written to accompany colourful images of villas by Maxfield Parrish ..read more

A Passion series in which ornamental motifs invade the Christ’s narrative ..read more

A form of WWI trench art in which soldiers carved names and images into leaves ..read more

Of all the caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte, representations of the French emperor as a miniscule megalomaniac continue to haunt the historical imagination to an unparalleled degree. Peter W. Walker searches for the origins of “Little Boney” in the early 19th-century caricatures of James Gillray, the English illustrator who took Napoleon down a peg by diminishing his reputation and scale to the point of absurdity ..read more