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A Medieval Treasure in the Heart of Paris
To say that there are an unlimited number of fun things to do in Paris is quite the understatement. But for most people who visit, you only have a limited time and you want to see as much as possible. With limited time and for most of us, limited budgets, you have to make sure…
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The Historic Churches of Kitchener, Ontario
After my last trip to Paris, I have been inspired to spend more time enjoying and appreciating the place where I actually live. For the past decade or so, I have called Kitchener home. It’s a great place to live and with a bit of an adventurous spirit, it is really easy to find all…
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Five Patisseries You Need to Visit in Paris
This past April, I spent a week in my beloved Paris. I first came to the city years ago when I was doing research for my PhD and I fell instantly in love with the place. One of the things that I fell in love with was of course the food, and in particular, the…
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Thoughts on the Staff Cuts at Laurier
Even people with a slight familiarity with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan are of course aware of his aphorism that life is nasty, brutish and short, accurately describing the life of those who work at Wilfrid Laurier University. And yet there is so much more to his work than just slogan that fits on a bumper sticker.…
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A Book Review Francois de Belleforest’s Le Cinquiesme Tome des Histoires Tragiques
Hervé-Thomas Campagne must be commended on this volume. Published under the auspices of Librairie Droz’s Textes Littéraires Français, this is the first modern critical edition of the French historian and cosmographer François de Belleforest, and it does not disappoint. Campagne’s introduction, which goes on for more than a hundred pages, presents a comprehensive and highly…
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A Discontented Winter
One of my absolute favourite pieces of literature is Shakespeare’s Richard III. I think it is one of his gretest plays, notwithstanding Hamlet’s invention of the human (to borrow from Harold Bloom). The play works on so many levels; in the person of Richard we have a character so gleefully free of any bindings of…
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There are no wars more brutal than family wars. Gergory of Tours’ History of the Franks
As I mentioned in last week’s post, I am teaching a course on how medieval and early modern historians used history to create a national identities. This poses many questions surrounding the claims of authenticity, for example. Another question that arises concerns itself with how does one define history and what exactly is a historian.…
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A Broken Oak: Andre Thevet’s Rehabilitation of the Valois monarchs
In last Thursday’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins wrote a piece on the possibility of the country of Yorkshire being afforded “European minority status” and what that might mean for a future independence movement in the north of England(http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/08/mighty-yorkshire-minority-cornwall-london-payback). To be fair, the Yorkshire dales have a long history of sticking it to London’s centralizing efforts (just…
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Here’s the Obligatory Welcome to my Blog
It’s a commonplace for people to say past writers and thinkers were the first to use per-electronic social media. And while these claims tend to be a bit much, there is some truth to the idea. For example, one of my favourite writers and thinker is the French philosopher and thinker Michel de Montaingne. A…