Blog - Page 2 of 2 - Galileo's Revenge

18th July 2019

The Poisons of Ambroise Paré

Ambroise Paré (c.1510 – 90) was an innovative barber-surgeon, who became chief surgeon to the kings of France. His collected works, first published in 1582, discuss a wide range of surgical and medical problems, including poisons.

11th July 2019

Fynes Moryson’s ‘Itinerary’: a rough guide to Shakespeare’s Europe.

Fynes Moryson (1566-1630) was an Elizabethan gentleman, a couple of years younger than Shakespeare and Galileo. As a young man, in the 1590s, he travelled widely in Europe, and to the Holy Land. This article is the first in a series of blogs recording his travels, especially through Galileo’s Italy.

15th June 2019

Orlando Furioso, a sixteenth-century Game of Thrones

Orlando Furioso – that is, Mad Orlando, or Orlando goes Mad – is a wonderful 33,000-line epic poem written in Italian by the poet and courtier Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1535).

Illustration to 'Orlando Furioso', canto 34

3rd June 2019

Orlando Furioso: Journey to the Moon

In Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso, the noble knight Orlando is driven mad by jealousy. Eventually, his friend, the English knight Duke Astolfo, travels to the Moon to recover Orlando’s lost wits.

24th May 2019

Galileo’s guru: Archimedes of Syracuse

Galileo was a huge admirer of the ancient Greek mathematician and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287-212BC). In his earliest published work, La bilancetta (1586), Galileo says that anyone ‘who has read and understood the very subtle inventions of this divine man in his own writings…

7th May 2019

Orlando Furioso, 3: the tale of Rogero and Alcina

Rogero’s liberation from the clutches of the beautiful sorceress Alcina. The third of my posts about the 16th century ‘Game of Thrones’, Ariosto’s epic poem ‘Orlando Furioso’

8th October 2016

Galileo in a Nutshell

Birth and family. Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy, on 16th February 1564. From an Anglo-centric point-of-view, that was the sixth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. William Shakespeare was born a couple of months later, on or about 23rd April.