I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me [...] (ln. 1-4)
Category: History
5 Reasons Why Christopher Marlowe is an Elizabethan Hipster Poet
Elizabethan England's most celebrated poet and playwright, in underground kind of way, was Christopher Marlowe, although he was soon eclipsed by Mr. Will Shakespeare, whose popular plays would define the mainstream for centuries to come. It was the 90s. The 1590s to be precise. Marlowe was at the height of his powers, writing the politically …
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Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Mystical Vision of the Franklin Expedition in “Terror and Erebus”
Canada has been celebrating the discovery of Captain Sir John Franklin's ill-fated ship, the Erebus, since early September. Along with the Terror, captained by Francis Crozier, this ship carried Franklin and his crew on their fatal quest for the Northwest Passage, which lasted three years (1845-1848). For most of that time, Franklin was stranded, a …
The Alchemist’s Quest
To create the animated stone, take the juice of a Saturnine herb to extract mercury and evaporate it to get the purest earth. Join this with its like in equal weight and dissolve both with a crude metallic humor. Putrify for forty days. You may also calcine the earth with fire alone, join it with …
King Arthur Conqueror of the Arctic? Historical Fantasy and Early British Imperialism
John Dee was Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer, mathematician, and geographer--and he might have become the first lord of the North American territory we now call Canada. Dee is known as a "Renaissance man" for the breadth of his knowledge and for his tendency towards the occult. On a trip to the Continent, he supposedly …
Behind Guy Fawkes: the History of Catholic Conspiracies
“But as a nation—continued he in his reveries—these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it.” -Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno." “The imaginary is part of history.” -Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun. “[A] good case could be made that the last unchallenged and most …
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Behind Guy Fawkes II: The Gunpowder Plot
"But 'The Gunpowder Plot'--there was a get-penny! I have presented that to an eighteen- or twenty-pence audience nine times in an afternoon. Your home-born projects prover ever the best; they are so easy and familiar. They put too much learning i'their things nowadays, and that, I fear, will be the spoil o' this." -Leatherhead, Bartholomew …
Machiavelli and the Problem of Memory in Tigana
"Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul." -Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana . Alessan's mantra for his beleaguered nation, erased from history by the tyrant sorcerer Brandin of Ygrath, forms a central node in the theme of exile and memory in Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. A novel set in the …
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The Battle of Culloden Part. 3: The Bonnie Prince Escapes!
After the disaster of Culloden, the Duke of Cumberland continued to repress the rebellion, to put it lightly. Really, he opened the way up for genocide. Having captured Lord George Murray's orders to the Jacobites, which had been issued the day before the battle, he supposedly found a line that revealed the Jacobites were to …
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The Battle of Culloden Part. 2: Jacobites V. Cumberland
Culloden Moor, which was once called Drumossie Moor, is a "boggy, heather-clad upland moor above Culloden House, south-east of Iverness, overlooking the broad waters of Moray Firth" (Magnusson 617). It is pretty good metaphor for the mire the Jacobites found themselves in on 16 April 1746, when the battle was fought... When the Jacobite army …
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Matthew Rettino 