George Elliot, among other British women writers, embraced German culture because her own culture was unwelcoming for female writers. George Elliot (then Mary Ann Evans) grew as a writer after she eloped with George Henry Lewes to Weimar. Having had no training in Greco-Roman traditions prevalent in Britain, Elliot found her literary foundation in the German literary canon. She was not shunned for being a woman in a non-standard relationship in polite German society, and she was free to hone her talents and branch out of translating German literature. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
