Jackson’s Wars: pre-order!

You can now pre-order Jackson's Wars, scheduled for May 2022 publication, at a 20 percent discount! So why wouldn't you? Note that pre-orders must be done using the telephone number or the email address, using the discount code MQFA. Online orders can only be made once the book is released. Call 1-800-565-9523 or email utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca

Vasari’s words o’ wisdom

I've been re-reading Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but this time the abridged E.L. Seeley translation of the main biographies in what was a three-volume mid-sixteenth-century work. You can read along too, thanks to the digitized edition at archive.org. Vasari is a standard reference for art historians, and...

So…what was a late 15th-century English coin doing in the ruins of an early 17th-century English settlement in Newfoundland?

An example of a half-groat silver coin, minted at Canterbury during the reign of Henry VII from 1493 to 1499. By The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54926198 There's been a bit of archaeological buzz over the recently announced discovery of probably the oldest English coin ever found...

“Uninvited”: by whom, and to what?

The exhibition catalogue for Uninvited There's a big exhibition now open to the public at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Movement runs until January 16, 2022. If you're at all interested in what Canadian artists period were producing, mainly in the between-war years, I would...

A summer of wreck-hunting in review

My 2021 boating season may have been shortened by covid-19 (restrictions meant my boat wasn't in the water until mid-June), but I managed some interesting, novel diversions, in looking for shipwrecks on Georgian Bay.

The Norse beat the Portuguese to the Azores by seven centuries

The Azores group, in Google Maps. The article's authors say the discoveries of "fecal biomarkers" in lake sediments at Corvo in the northwest around 850 CE and Pico in the central group around 700 CE, given chronological uncertainties, indicate that colonization across the archipelago at an early medieval date was "near simultaneous." PNAS (Proceedings of...