Did the codpiece come into vogue because a bunch of Italian counts were trying to conceal their fights against syphilis? An Australian doctor makes the case: The treatment of the disease was for the most part empirical with multiple agents applied locally, which along with the bulky dressings would give large frontal bulges, impossible to […]
Entries Tagged as 'Renaissance history'
The Battle and the Bulge
April 29th, 2010 · 5 Comments
Tags:codpieces·Italy·Larry Blackmon·medical history·music·Renaissance history
The Fog of Plague
August 6th, 2009 · 1 Comment
With the Chinese town of Ziketan locked down on account of pneumonic plague, it’s worth looking back at a similar incident from 15 years ago: the Surat plague of 1994. The Indian city ended up recording approximately 5,150 cases of pneumonic plague, which resulted in a shade under 60 fatalities—by no means a major epidemic, […]
Tags:bubonic plague·China·India·Italy·pneumonic plague·public health·Renaissance history·Surat plague
The Middle Ages Get a Bad Rap
July 7th, 2009 · 3 Comments
So you think Medieval knights were condemned to lug around unwieldy swords, while their Renaissance counterparts bounced around with mere wisps of metal weaponry? Dr. Timothy Dawson believes you’ve been grossly misinformed—a fact he expounds upon at length in one of Microkhan’s all-time favorite publications, the Journal of Western Martial Art: These results show that […]
Tags:history·Journal of Western Martial Arts·Medieval history·Renaissance history·weapons