For their first year module, Beliefs, Communities and Conflicts, 1400-1750, UoP history students are asked to do a practical activity and then write a report about it, reflecting reflecting critically about how it relates to the themes explored in the module. This, the first of two posts, looks at what students learned from trying to reconstruct early modern cosmetics. The tutors on this module were Dr Maria Cannon and Dr Fiona McCall. Rosie Wells chose to adapt the recipe for Rose Lip Balm from Italian doctor Giovanni Marinelli’s Gli ornamenti delle donne (The Ornament of Ladies) (1562) a manual on female beauty containing recipes at first purporting to be taken […]
Tag Archives | Renaissance
The misrepresentation of Catherine De’ Medici’s female rule
For her third-year dissertation UoP history student Sadie White looked into representations of the French Queen Catherine de’ Medici, one of several late-sixteenth century female rulers famously denounced by John Knox in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). As Sadie describes, Catherine, foreign, from a family considered inferior in status to the French monarchy, no great looker, and barren for the first ten years of her marriage, has had a hard press over the years, both in her own time, and still today, as represented in contemporary TV and film drama. She is a salutary reminder of how female rule continues to be […]
Material Culture – Adam and Eve Powder Flask, Austria ca. 1600
Tom Underwood, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog entry on the Adam and Eve Powder Flask for the Introduction to Historical Research module. Tom discusses the flask’s importance as a marker of social standing in the Renaissance period. The module is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth. In the Abrahamic religions Adam and Eve are the symbol of life, the creation of humankind, the genesis of man. Firearms, on the other hand, are representative of quite the opposite, death, destruction and a complete collapse of humanity that would not look entirely out of place in […]