Alexander Bevilacqua teaches history at Williams College. The Republic of Arabic Letters was published in 2018.
Under what circumstances would you eat your pet? For Jean de Léry, a 16th-century French missionary, this wasn’t a hypothetical question. During a treacherous Atlantic crossing from Brazil to Europe, with supplies running low, some of his fellow passengers killed and ate their monkeys and parrots when hunger struck. Others waited until they had almost starved before putting...
‘To devote our life to authorship,’ Isaac D’Israeli wrote, ‘is not the true means of improving our happiness or our fortune.’ In Calamities of Authors (1812), he chronicled the lives of writers he considered at once ‘the most honoured, and the least remunerated’. Some of these men of letters were ‘driven to madness by indigence and...
‘Oriental history,’ the German philologist Johann Jakob Reiske wrote in 1747, ‘is very worthy of the study of an honest mind, and does not deserve any less than European...
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