Uranium Madhouse Blog

As everybody knows, widows are dangerously licentious creatures. Having once been exposed to “the marital act,” their blood runs hot in their veins as a constant inclination towards promiscuity overwhelms them… Okay, maybe “everybody” doesn’t know that, but a large percentage of Renaissance Europe did. The “lusty widow,” a stock character in English Renaissance drama, […]

Once upon a time (1490), in a land far away (Amalfi, Italy), a young princess (only twelve years old!) married the heir apparent to the dukedom of Amalfi, Alfonso Piccolomini. Piccolomini, by then the duke, succumbed to gout in 1498, leaving behind his young widow, Giovanna d’Aragona, and an unborn son, their young daughter having […]

Long ago and far away, in a land without Kindles, wikiquotes, or even the common paperback, Renaissance readers would keep commonplace books, blank books into which they would transcribe notes, poems, recipes, sermons, quotations, and anything else that caught their fancy for later use. Theirs was a culture that prized a prettily or wittily turned […]