While in our present time pigs are primarily only found penned on a farm or less commonly roaming deep in the wilds, in the European Middle Ages they occupied a significantly wider range of spaces and interacted with people in many more ways than they now do. Prof. Dolly Jørgensen’s new book “The Medieval Pig” presents and overview of their history during this period.
When the news reached me that Ray Reedman had written another book on the subject of the history of bird names, also, like his previous “Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks; The How and Why of Bird Names,” published by Pelagic Publishing, my pocket notebook was immediately deployed and a note duly made (as the motto of the journal Notes & Queries instructs us: “When found, make a note of”).
In his new book “Hearsay Is Not Excluded; A History of Natural History,” Prof. Michael R. Dove takes up the histories of four representative natural historians from the previous four centuries – Georg Eberhard Rumphius, Carl Linnaeus, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Harold C. Conklin – to examine how their own studies were undertaken in times and socio-cultural circumstances when crossing today’s more fortified disciplinary boundaries was not only allowed but expected.
I’m often moved to ranting whenever I’m presented with a reminder of one of the many extinctions our species has committed. A recent rant was inspired by a new book from Princeton University Press: Prof. Gísli Pálsson’s “The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction,” a gripping narrative history of the the extinction of the Great Auk.