publicdomainreview.orgadded August 2026
Public Domain Reviewby Ross MacFarlane1d ago
“While the idea of God has received much attention from philosophers and progressive theologians, its counterpart, the dark figure of the Evil One, has been much neglected”.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit2d ago
The Mutus Liber — “Mute Book” — is a work of few words. Most appear on its first plate, where we are told that the book’s author, “Altus”, has created “hieroglyphic figures” to illustrate the...
Public Domain Reviewby Florence Hazrat8d ago
Erasmus called them “little moons” and George Puttenham praised them as “figures of tolerable disorder” (if used not too often “nor too thick”). For Philip Sidney, they were simply indispensable.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit8d ago
“There is Nothing but Immortality!”: Walt Whitman and The Book of Heavenly Death (1905) No one to bid where so much may be bought?You would not buy this man in his life — I thought you would buy...
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht9d ago
The English physician John of Arderne (1307–ca. 1380) is remembered as one of the founding figures of modern surgery.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit15d ago
In Company Style: Illustrations from James Skinner’s Kitāb-i tashrīḥ al-aqvām (1825) The only English text in the manuscript is on one of the opening leafs, where someone has added a looping pencil...
Public Domain Reviewby Thomas W Laqueur22d ago
“Oh, if I could only pray”, Luther once said of his dog Tölpel, “the way this dog watches the meat”. Attending to attentive canine figures in half a dozen paintings by Paolo Veronese, Thomas W.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit23d ago
The shrieks in the 1919 record “A Cat-astrophe” were probably not made by a real cat, but they will be intimately familiar to any cat owner who has accidentally stepped on their beloved’s tail.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit28d ago
Metamorphosis: Transformations in the Early Modern Flap Book (early 19th century) That we may not mislead our little readers, it is desired they would understand the Mermaid and Griffin to be only...
Public Domain Reviewby Erica X Eisen8 Sept 2026
In the world of textile production, artisans typically add color to their work in one of two ways: either while the piece is being woven — by switching out one color of yarn for another — or after...
Public Domain Reviewby Anne Lawrence-Mathers29 Jul 2026
Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning.
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht29 Jul 2026
New Jersey’s Atlantic City emerged as a booming Edwardian seaside destination in the 1870s. From its famed boardwalk (the first in the United States), tourists could reach hotels and restaurants...
Public Domain Reviewby Joobin Bekhrad28 Jul 2026
Addressing the Bombay Anthropological Society on the night of November 30, 1892, its then-president — George Waters, a British surgeon and lieutenant colonel — discussed a rather esoteric work: a...
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht14 Jul 2026
In the summer of 1956, the Beat writer Jack Kerouac ascended the North Cascade Mountains, climbing up through the glacial crests of Washington State to Desolation Peak, where he would assume a...
Public Domain Reviewby Arnoud S Q Visser8 Jul 2026
Pompous know-it-alls were once a mainstay of mockery on the Italian stage. Arnoud Visser investigates this stock character of the pedant and his association with individual superiority, social...
Public Domain Reviewby Erica X Eisen8 Jul 2026
“This magazine . . . does not represent a group. It represents, rather, a movement, a spirit” — or perhaps a “specter”?
Public Domain Reviewby Ross MacFarlane7 Jul 2026
George Eliot’s Middlemarch is famed for its well-rounded characters, yet the unfortunate Edward Casaubon, a pedantic clergyman more devoted to his research than his intelligent wife Dorothea...
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit30 Jun 2026
If you were a nineteenth-century merchant bringing diamonds from the Kollur Mine near Bezawada (now Vijayawada) to Golconda (now Hyderabad), going northwest along the Krishna River, your best bet...
Public Domain Reviewby Richard Fallon17 Jun 2026
Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting.
Public Domain Reviewby Hunter Dukes17 Jun 2026
Their capacity for flight is magical, almost animate, reflected in the names by which they are known around the world.
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