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johnmkuhn.bsky.social
English prof. 17th century stuff. Prairie son. Working on a cultural and material history of the birchbark canoe in the early modern Americas.
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At long last, “A24’s Academic Style; or, Coming of Age in an Era of Student Debt” is now out with @jcmsjournal.bsky.social quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/i...

submitted 3 hours ago • 1 comment

Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses, That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it? -Brecht

submitted 6 hours ago • 2 comments

What I would GIVE to take a class taught by a Biblical scholar on the Book of Daniel’s original contexts and later uses. Such a catnip intertext for many later nerds, perhaps no surprise given that its main moral is basically “If you are a powerful person who ignores a nerd, God will kill you”

submitted 12 hours ago • 1 comment

struck tonight by the similarity between some of the tropes of now, that smugly suggest people making bad political choices deserve bad outcomes(FAFO+leopards/faces), & one of Milton's go-to & least-retrospectively-likeable tropes: ppl who make bad political decisions DESERVE THE TYRANT'S YOKE

submitted 13 hours ago • 0 comments

while I'm #regicideposting: a riveting detail (which I learned from Keith Wrightson long ago). On the way to the scaffold, Charles had to walk under the Rubens painting "The Apotheosis of James I," depicting his dad getting crowned by angels. How'd that absolutist divine right work out, buddy?

submitted 14 hours ago • 1 comment

lovely bit of Herbert from convo today: he condemns people who get too anxious/involved in their work, "carking, and caring" too much. Carking, to burden oneself with anxiety, is ultimately from the Latin carrico, carricare "to load" (as in a cart; same root as cargo). Don't be your own cart, ppl!

submitted 14 hours ago • 0 comments

just discovered that historians still don't know (and probably will never know) who swung the actual axe at Charles I's execution. All kinds of crazy reasoning/evidence in the scholarship, including the fact that the clean, single decapitatory cut alone rules out most people.

submitted 14 hours ago • 2 comments

in case my insane posting spree hasn't made this obvious, every few years I fall in love with John Milton all over again (and it's always the prose that gets me!!!!!)

submitted 14 hours ago • 1 comment

I could *totally* have written Eikonoklastes, he mused, writing his little milquetoast political posts about SNAP defunding

submitted 14 hours ago • 1 comment

extremely telling Rorschach test: asking early modernists to list Milton's three most important works. Obviously Paradise Lost is the universal #1, but answers vary a lot beyond that(reflecting all manner of visions of not just why JM is important but also why the English Civil War is important)

submitted 14 hours ago • 0 comments

this reread of Milton's Readie and Easie Way is hitting unexpectedly hard, given it is entirely a warning to a public who decided "basely and besottedly to run their necks again into the yoke which they have broken." Thank God Barbara Lewalski is dead and never lived to see this lol

submitted 14 hours ago • 0 comments

was feeling blue tonight, flipping through the Lewalski biography of Milton looking for something, and this bit always cheers me up. It just reminds me that the most badass thing about Milton is that so much of his best writing was in the darkness of total political defeat.

submitted 15 hours ago • 1 comment

This should be a much bigger story. Murder has *plunged* across the country—so much so that the U.S. may see the lowest murder rate *ever recorded.* That this is even possible after the 2020 murder spike is truly amazing.

submitted 16 hours ago • 19 comments

NYRB cover story idea for someone else: career retrospective of Jim Shapiro as public intellectual

submitted 16 hours ago • 0 comments

I'm just going to say it: old EEBO was better

submitted 20 hours ago • 1 comment

$1800 trip to the mechanic. I swear at this point it would be cheaper to keep a horse

submitted 21 hours ago • 0 comments

sometimes I think I should throw away all my projects and just write a book about ELEANOR DAVIES, my fave of the mid-17th-century Protestant prophets. Getting arrested for pouring tar on the altar in Lichfield Cathedral one minute, having an aristocratic NIMBY freakout at the Diggers the next

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

As an aside to this, I wonder if an unforeseen consequence of reliance on AI for translation is that it halts the spread of English around the globe - if there’s no incentive for English-speakers to learn other languages, that works the other way too. We all go back to our linguistic siloes

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments