John Crowley's Aegypt Quartet asks the question, "What if there was more than one history of the world?"; David Walton's Quintessence, on the other hand, actually explores one of these alternate histories. It is set in a world that follows the rules of known science in the sixteenth century--which means the world is flat and …
Tag: Renaissance
Are there Canadian Dragons?
Are there Canadian dragons? And if there are, what are they like? Canada is far too young a country to have ever had a population that naively believed in dragons of the European variety. By the time Europeans settled the land, dragons were known to be myths, creatures of the imagination. Besides, leathery wings and …
Love & Sleep by John Crowley
The sequel to John Crowley's Aegypt (The Solitudes), Love & Sleep continues the story of Pierce Moffet's quest to write his history of histories, a book that in which he will propose that there is more than one history of the world. He must decide what to do with the posthumous, unfinished manuscript of historical …
Ember Nights in Guy Gavriel Kay and John Crowley
In Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana and John Crowley's Love and Sleep,part of his Aegypt sequence, characters born with cauls are summoned in the middle of the night to walk among the dead. Kay calls these individuals Night Walkers. Their story stretches back to real-world superstitions about children born with a membrane around their heads. This …
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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 …
Venetian Dragon
Today I will share a set of images I drew and painted of a Venetian dragon. This is part of my series on Renaissance dragons in urban settings. I will, as in my post on Florentine Dragon, take you through the process of painting it. I'm still practicing my skill, but that's how you improve. …
Aegypt: The Solitudes by John Crowley
Pierce Moffet wants to find a compelling book idea for a nonfiction history book. He discovers that the reason we think gypsies can tell fortunes is not because they came from Egypt (or even India for that matter), but because our ancestors thought gypsies came from Aegypt, a dream-Egypt sprung from the European imagination. In …
Reflections on Reading and Writing in the Digital Era
Last Friday I attended a talk given by Bob Stein, who develop the first ebooks in 1992. You read that date right. It was 22 years ago, but the craze only began to catch fire with Kindle in 2007. During his presentation Mr. Stein said that he has always been 15 years ahead of tends …
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Was the Renaissance “Swerve” a historical fantasy?
In the novel I am presently reading, Aegypt: The Solitudes by John Crowley, the main character, a historian academic named Pierce Moffet, comes across the realization that "there is more than one history of the world." Furthermore, the "world is not the same as it once was." This radical change in human history supposedly occurred …
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7 Ways in which Saruman is like John Dee
The Vinciolo Journal turns 1 year old January 5th, two days after J.R.R. Tolkien's Birthday, so in celebration of both events, I am making a series of Tolkien-related posts. This is the first of several ... 7 ways Saruman resembles Queen Elizabeth's court astrologer and geographer John Dee. . In comparing these two figures (the …
Matthew Rettino 