Instead of bombarding everyone with a bunch of individual posts, here are three links that caught my eye in the past few days that I didn’t get a chance to post.
* From The Telegraph:
Rags to riches as tapestry masterpiece is restored to its former glory
A tapestry that has survived against the odds since the fifteenth century is to go on display for the first time in 20 years, following five years of restoration returning the masterpiece to its former glory.
* From The Guardian:
David Starkey on Henry VIII: Famous for 500 years
In this podcast, David Starkey asks why Henry continues to fascinate us in the 21st century, and how did a boy with such a conventional upbringing become such an unconventional king?
* From The BBC:
The map that changed the world
Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought – and indeed in the larger history of ideas.
Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.
