Erin Maglaque

Many fairy tales​ begin something like this: a woman is alone in a garden, or under a tree, or bathing in a pond. She longs for a child and prays. She might carve an apple, spill a few drops of blood onto the snow or speak to a frog. Her wish comes true, and she gives birth to a child. But the story doesn’t end with the baby, because her prayer isn’t really a prayer but a...

What​ is it about the body that resists plain description? When we discuss our bodies, we evoke other things: the body as machine, possibly malfunctioning; the body as computer, infinitely programmable. The body as input-output system, or stardust. The electrical wires of the nerves, the mainframe of the brain. We start young: my train-obsessed three-year-old thinks of his digestive tract as...

In his book​ 16 ottobre 1943, Giacomo Debenedetti describes the deportation of Rome’s Jews to the death camps. When the soldiers came in the early evening, everyone in the neighbourhood was at home.

The Jews of the Regola quarter were still in the habit of going to sleep early. Shortly after dark they were all in their homes. Perhaps the memory of an ancient curfew is still in their...

Aldus Manutius​ is the bibliophile’s bibliophile. Between 1495 and his death in 1515, Aldus issued from his Venice press more first editions of classical texts than had ever been published before, and more than anyone has published since. With his punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, he designed an elegant new typeface for printing in Greek (a serious technical challenge) as well as the...

Before​ the invention of forceps in the early 18th century, a midwife presented with an irredeemably obstructed birth would insert a hook into the foetus’s skull to pull it out, or dismember it and remove its body in pieces. The foetus would – obviously – die, but the labouring woman might survive. The oaths women swore in labour were concerned with this problem of parting...