For the last few years, when the vacation and holiday seasons come around and the news stories start to dry up, I've looked back in time to previous centuries to find something newsworthy. Today, please join me on a whistle stop tour 400 years back in time to the year 1609 ....

The Renaissance is in full swing. While Galileo demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers and Cornelius Drebbel invents the thermostat, Johannes Kepler is busy publishing his first two laws of planetary motion. Meanwhile Henry Hudson is off adventuring, becoming the first European to see Delaware Bay and the Hudson River. Not far away, seven ships arrive at the Jamestown colony reporting the sad demise of their flagship, the Sea Venture, wrecked off the coast of the uninhabited island of Bermuda. The survivors, including writer William Strachey, eventually reach Virginia ten months later in two small ships they built while marooned on the island. Strachey's account of the wreck is believed to be the inspiration for Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-11).

Talking of Shakespeare, the bard is in good voice in 1609, publishing two books of poetry: The Sonnets (mostly written before 1600) and A Lover's Complaint; and two plays: Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Troilus and Cressida. His contemporaries, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, are also busy publishing their own works. Elsewhere, in Naples, the outlawed (for killing a man in a brawl) painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Carravagio, completes at least four great works including The Raising of Lazarus, and Salome With The Head of John The Baptist. Carravagio dies the following year but his work will inspire some of the next generation of painters including Rubens and Rembrandt.

While Europe savors its first sips of tea courtesy of the Dutch East India Company, and the people of Strasbourg (Alsace) and Augsburg (Bavaria) enjoy the first regularly published newspapers in Europe, the Spanish Inquisition moves into high gear with the Basque witch trials. Meanwhile, somewhere in England, teenage songwriter Thomas Ravenscroft publishes a little ditty that, four hundred years later, I would hazard to guess, can be recited in its modern form by more people than any of Shakespeare's verses!

Three Blinde Mice,
Three Blinde Mice,
Dame Iulian,
Dame Iulian,
the Miller and his merry olde Wife,
shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife

Davina Morgan-Witts - BookBrowse Editor

More "This Year in History"

Many moons ago, in another country and a former century I worked in an advertising agency in London and "lorem ipsum" was a familiar part of my life.

This was a time, barely 20 years ago, when London's Fleet Street was still home to most of Britain's major newspapers and the typesetters worked feverishly to lay down the type for the next day's papers using a process not that far removed from that used by William Caxton's former apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde, when he set up shop in a lane close to Fleet Street almost 500 years earlier; and probably recognizable by the printers of The Daily Courant, London's first daily newspaper, that published its first issue in Fleet Street in March 1702.

But let me back track a moment for those of you not familiar with "lorem ipsum": Lorem ipsum .... is the beginning of a pseudo-Latin passage commonly used as placeholder text by graphic designers focused on the layout of the design rather than the detailed text. It's intended to show how the type will look in the context of a design, while keeping the viewer focused on looking at the design rather than reading the words. This piece of random Latin, sometimes incongruously known as 'greeking', has been the industry's standard dummy text for a long time - some believe as far back as the 1500s (who knows, maybe the delightfully named Wynkyn de Worde, née Jan van Wynkyn, came up with it himself), but until recently it seems that nobody gave a thought to where it came from, or rather perhaps they did, but concluded it was just garbled text.

That was until Richard McClintock, a Latin professor, now publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, set his mind to the question and found his answer by searching for citings of the rarely used word 'consectetur' in classical literature. He found a match:

Lorem ipsum is a garbled version of a section from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil), a treatise on the theory of ethics by Marcus Tullius Cicero written in 45 BC. - a work that apparently gained popularity during the Renaissance as Western Europe's educated classes rediscovered classic Greek and Latin works that had been all but lost in the decline of the Roman Empire and the subsequent 'Dark Ages'.

The 'classic' version of lorem ipsum, sold in cutable sheet form by Letraset from the 1960s onwards, reads as follows:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

And here is the first part in its original setting (section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum"):

"Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"

Some readers might be asking why a presumed 16th century typesetter chose to garble the Latin text rather than simply run in its original form? The answer is for the same reason that designers today continue to use 'lorem ipsum' - to make it unintelligible. As most reading this will know, although the Roman Empire collapsed a thousand years before, Latin retained its dominance as the international language of science and scholarship, and was the lingua franca of the educated classes, in Central and Western Europe until well into the 17th century - some would say almost up to the early 20th century. Even today, it is still the official language of The Vatican City (the smallest sovereign city-state in the world consisting of the 110 acre walled enclave in the center of Rome; population 900).

Writing in Before & After, a desktop publishing magazine (volume 4 number 2), McClintock says, "What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged."

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Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past .....

Literary highlights (from a modern perspective) published in 1908, one hundred years ago, include The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; War of the Classes and The Iron Heel by Jack London; Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery; The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck by Beatrix Potter; A Modern Utopia and The War in the Air by H G Wells; My Double Life by Sarah Bernhardt; The Man Who Was Thursday and All Things Considered by G K Chesterton;  A Room With a View by E M Forster; Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum; and the births of Ian Fleming and Louis L'Amour.  The Nobel Prize for Literature was won by German philosopher Rudolf Christoph Eucken.

Meanwhile, on the wider stage:

In the USA, a ball signifying New Year's Day dropped in Times Square for the first time; Harvard University established the Harvard Business School; Robert Perry set off for the North Pole; Henry Ford produced his first Model T automobile; the Office of the Chief Examiner (forerunner to the FBI) was established; and Mother's Day was observed for the first time in a Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Not to be confused with Mothering Sunday in the UK, Mother's Day was intended as day of memorial and a call to unite women against war. The first service in 1908, and the 1914 Presidential proclamation, were the result of social activist Julia Ward Howe's 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation.

In Europe: A long-distance radio message was sent from the Eiffel Tower for the first time; Frenchman Henri Farman piloted the first passenger flight; Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first woman in England to be elected mayor; British suffragettes began a campaign for female suffrage; Englishman Robert Baden-Powell began the Boy Scout movement; the Young Turk Revolution began in the Ottoman Empire; and the Bosnian Crisis began after the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Elsewhere, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were reported killed in Bolivia; Andrew Fisher became 5th Prime Minister of Australia; Emperor Pu Yi ascended the Chinese throne at age 2; and Leopold II of Belgium was forced to make reforms in the Congo, his personal colony.

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past. This time we travel to 1808:

In the USA, the Theatre St Philip opened in New Orleans.  In Germany, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published the first part of Faust. In Britain, the first Royal Opera House in Covent Garden was destroyed by fire and Sir Walter Scott published Marmion, an epic poem about the Battle of Flodden Field.  In France, Francois Marie Charles Fourier (credited by modern scholars with originating the word feminisme) argued in his Theory of the Four Movements that the extension of the liberty of women was the general principle of all social progress, though he disdained 'equal rights'. Followers of Fourier would go on to establish about 30 socialist colonies based on his principles in various parts of the USA.

Meanwhile, on the wider stage: The US Congress prohibited the importation of slaves; Sierra Leone became a British colony; the Spanish rose up against the French occupation in Madrid; Napoleon annexed Tuscany; James Madison was elected president of the USA, and a future US president, Andrew Johnson, was born.

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past .....

1708 was a rather dull year for literature, at least from the perspective of modern-day readers looking for works by authors still well known today, but it was an important year for three historians who used their retirement to produce notable works:

The first volume of Theologian Joseph Bingham's 10 volume Antiquities of the Christian Church was published; on its completion in 1722 it provided an exhaustive and methodical account of the antiquities of the Christian Church.

Theater critic and theologian Jeremy Collier published the first volume of his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain - which, while controversial, became widely used.

Theater prompter John Downes published his history of the Restoration stage, Roscius Anglicanus, which is still considered a valuable resource.

Meanwhile, on the wider stage, Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs, sat on the throne of the newly formed Great Britain (England and Scotland having been joined by the Acts of Union the previous year); the allies, led by John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, won a decisive victory in the War of the Spanish Succession at the Battle of Oudenaarde (in what is now Belgium); Johann Sebastian Bach was appointed a chamber musician and organist at the German court; and a native American attack in Massachusetts killed 16 settlers.

This year in history for '08 can be found by clicking the tag at the top of this entry. This year in history for '07 is stored in BookBrowse's "News" section. For example, 1707.