Antonio Gascón Ricao: Es de sobras conocido que una de las habilidades más comunes de las brujas consiste en clavar agujas o cortar con unas tijeras un corazón, el hígado o los riñones de un animal, y así, el daño causado en dichos órganos animales se puede reproducir de igual forma en la persona a…
The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20…
Over at the new Barcelona historical almanac I’m slowly putting together I just posted the passage from José Sabau y Blanco’s update to Juan de Mariana’s Historia general de España (1822) dealing with the end of the Hapsburg rebellion in and around Barcelona, with massacres by both sides of villages and the lynching by the…
Just found in a cabinet in an uninhabited house in the central Pyrenees: a concealed drawer that doesn’t appear to have been touched since the 1960s. Contents: a will from 1818; pages dealing with testaments torn a reprint of a revised (1930s?) version of the Spanish 1888-9 Civil Code, including annotations detailing regional variations (in…
Foreign language tutors are quite common in lists of books banned by the Inquisition. Check for example this page in the 1844 Indice general de los libros prohibidos, which records the proscription in 1797 of a French-Spanish commercial correspondence course and of an English-Spanish conversation primer published in 1719 by the Anglican minister in Seville.…
Here are the maps created by French surveyors in the face of extreme weather, demolished triangulation points (church spires had a bad time) and bloodthirsty mobs in order to calculate, with what we now know was an extraordinary degree of accuracy, the physical length of the 1791 commission’s definition of the metre as one ten…
Today’s Libro verde item (13/7/1714 The troops of Felipe V enter by assault, with which ends the War of the Spanish Succession.) is surely a mistake. From a Barcelonan perspective the war ended on 11/9/1714, although Spain didn’t sign the peace treaty until 1720.
Someone just quoted me a bit of Clément Marot I didn’t know (OK, let’s be honest: I’d didn’t even know Marot): En tant qu’Ouy et Nenny se dira, Par l’univers le monde me lira. Which Leigh Hunt (The Companion, 1828) translates as: As long as Love says Yes and No, The universe shall read Marot.…
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