Erin Maglaque

Soundscapes of the Silenced

In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.

Wings of Desire

A gullible new book raises the question of how we should interpret the history of the supernatural in early modernity.

Politics in the Classroom

An Overabundance of Virtue

The scholar James Hankins has argued that the revival of ancient virtues was a central concern of Renaissance humanists. But can those virtues also be revived in modern America?

Unwanted Thoughts

Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory.

Magpie from the Met

“It’s so very important to remain alive to the unusual, and to strenuously resist any urge to explain strangeness away.”

Rome Was His Laboratory

By the time of his death in 1729, the astronomer, historian, and archaeologist Francesco Bianchini had been an aide to three popes and confidant to one Polish princess and an exiled king.

‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?

A new feminist history asks us to reconsider early modern queenship.