I’d heard that cochineal either wasn’t a pre-17th century dyestuff, or suddenly appears in Europe in the 16th century. But here it is, described in Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494:
This city [Corfu] has an island a hundred miles long, and the said island produces grain, wines in perfection — such […]

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Bristol University students researching for a new display of Tudor portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery have uncovered a ghost figure which may be Shakespeare’s only known patron Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, which had been subsequently painted over with a portrait of Elizabeth Vernon, Southampton’s wife.

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The Meadows Museum, in Dallas, Texas, hosts Fernando Gallego and His Workshop: The Altarpiece from Ciudad Rodrigo through July 27, and Apocalypse: Images from the Book of Revelation through June 22.

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Olivier Vietti-Teppa is the first person to have safely completed a jump using a parachute designed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1485.

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The British Museum’s “A New World: England’s First View of America” exhibit (which I’d posted late last year, when it was in North Carolina) is on display through June 1 at Yale’s Center for British Art.

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First published in Latin in 1564, Charles Estienne’s essay on country life, “L’agriculture et maison rustique,” became a renaissance bestseller when it was translated first into French by the author’s son-in-law Jean Liebault, and later into Dutch, German, Italian, and several Scandinavian languages.

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A 9-year-old boy’s search for shrapnel on an old battlefield resulted in a huge find of medieval silver coins near the Lund in southern Sweden, local media reported Monday.

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It was Hairy Mary who got me wondering about medieval artists. She’s floating in ecstasy, at death’s door after 30 years as a penitent in the wilderness. The angels have brought her to the bishop to get her last communion. And she’s covered in long, brown, wavy hair.
Why is Mary Magdalene so hirsute?

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Tests of the bones of two Viking women found in a buried longboat have dispelled 100-year-old suspicions that one was a maid sacrificed to accompany her queen into the afterlife, experts said on Friday.
The bones indicated that a broken collarbone on the younger woman had been healing for several weeks — meaning the break was […]

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Illuminating the Medieval Hunt will be on display at The Morgan Library in New York through August 10.

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