M.J. Rose

Beautiful!

Vatican Library Making 4,000 Ancient Manuscripts Available Online For Free

By Mary-Ann Russon

“The Vatican Apostolic Library is now digitising its valuable ancient religious manuscripts and putting them online via its website, available for the public to view for free, as well as turning to crowdfunding to help it complete its work.

The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 AD and holds over 80,000 manuscripts, prints, drawings, plates and incunabula (books printed prior to 1500 AD) written throughout history by people of different faiths from across the world…”

For the rest (and GORGEOUS images!), click here.

Behold, the story behind the first fully realized vampire story in English, John William Polidori’s 1819 story, “The Vampyre.”

(P.S. Lord Byron’s infamy knows no end!)

The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire

(The Public Domain Review)

“From that famed night of ghost-stories in a Lake Geneva villa in 1816, as well as Frankenstein’s monster, there arose that other great figure of 19th-century gothic fiction – the vampire – a creation of Lord Byron’s personal physician John Polidori. Andrew McConnell Stott explores how a fractious relationship between Polidori and his poet employer lies behind the tale, with Byron himself providing a model for the blood-sucking aristocratic figure of the legend we are familiar with today…”

For the complete (and irresistible) piece, click here.

Our imaginations run wild with the thought that quite a bit of the ship’s cargo is still preserved beneath the sediment….

Archaeologists Make Stunning Discoveries at the Antikythera Shipwreck

(io9.com)

“The international team of divers and archaeologists who are investigating the site of an ancient Greek ship that sank more than 2,000 years ago off the remote island of Antikythera have not been disappointed. Not only is the site bigger than they thought, it also contains a treasure trove of artifacts.

First, an explanation for that awesome image you see above. The ship, a luxury cargo vessel carrying Greek treasures from the coast of Asia Minor west to Rome, sank in bad water around 70 to 60 BC in some rather deep water. The ship is located at a depth unsafe for human divers — 55 meters (180 feet) — so the team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) utilized a diving exosuit. It uses rebreather technology in which carbon dioxide is scrubbed from the exhaled air while oxygen is introduced and recirculated. This allowed the divers to explore the site for up to three hours at a time…”

For the complete piece and some incredible photos, please click here.