A Nowadays Passion Play

For those of you who are not aware, the city of Manchester, England decided to take a page from the playbook of tradition by staging a passion play--a theatrical performance of the last days of the life of Jesus. But this one was decidedly site- and sound-specific, featuring Mancunians covering well-known British bands.

Music and Brains

Fiona Apple - Every Single Night

Chance the Rapper - Brain Cells

Let's talk about sex

From Montaigne, Essays, III, ch. 5 (trans. George B. Ivez, Harvard University Press, 1925)

Cited in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, ch. 5

The same chapter in Bakhtin mentions phallic bell towers and redesigning Paris with pudenda.

Oh good, Lady Pills

From the History of Medicine Collections at Duke University

Modern Votives

And another great post from Morbid Anatomy on Anatomical Votives:

Mappy Things

New Yorker article on The Allure of the Map, in literature and as a concept.

A blog appropriately called Strange Maps (like NY Times infographics, but, you know, maps, and some historical and fictional ones as well)

A map of England sharting on France:

More to come...

Who's on First? I mean Top?

from Carolyn Walker Bynum, "The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages," Fragments of a HIstory of the Human Body, vol. 1.

Show Me Your Liver

Bronze sheep's liver with writing, known as the Liver of Piacenza. It was likely used by haruspex to read omens.

Take Another Little Piece

From Lapham's Quarterly

And if you are interested in the crazy adventures of Descartes' mortal vessel (and don't mind some major back history of Enlightenment philosophy) I recommend reading Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto.

Thanks for the link, NS!

Deader than Dead

A Short Article on Holbein's Dead Christ in the Guardian is really simple, but if you want a more nuanced yet exciting and beautifully written article on the subject, look no further than Julia Kristeva's "Holbein's Dead Christ" in Fragments for a History of the Human Body vol. 1.

This blogger at Left Traces gives a little summary of her article and also connects it to a contemporary work of art playing on Dead Christ: