Erin Maglaque

Critics​ have struggled to define Dante’s first book, Vita Nuova, written in the early 1290s when he was in his late twenties.* Here are some of the possibilities: an autobiography (spiritual and/or poetic); a religious conversion narrative; a treatise on poetry for poets, or a treatise on love for lovers; a Künstlerroman before the invention of the novel; a Bible of Love, or a...

Poor Emma Bovary​, nourished on stories of ‘love affairs, lovers, mistresses, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely country houses … dark forests, palpitating hearts, vows, sobs, tears and kisses … gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs’, fancied her husband-to-be a ‘white-plumed rider on a black horse’. He turned out to be dull as dishwater....

It was good​ to be a butcher in Antwerp. The Butchers’ Guild was one of the oldest in the city and membership was hereditary: the names of the 62 old butchering families were inscribed in the guild’s Lineage Book. Turned out in blood-red tunics, the butchers spent the morning trading cattle at the Ossenmarkt, or selling sausages and offal in the Vleeshuis, the butchers’...

According​ to Jeremias Drexel, who published a guide to notetaking in 1641, reading well was as effortful as goldmining – and potentially as enriching. His book, the Aurifodina, was illustrated with a frontispiece showing two kinds of work. On the left, miners raise picks high over their heads, chipping gold from the rock. On the right, a scholar bends over his desk, carefully...

The​ pro-choice case for abortion rights rests partly on the possessive pronoun. My body, my choice. Keep your rosaries off my ovaries. These slogans are predicated on the idea that a woman owns her internal organs, and that this ownership is what entitles her to make decisions about them. I once accepted this idea without much thought. Then I had an abortion. It was my abdomen under the...