The Public Domain Review

In the late nineteenth century, visitors to Maine observed something strange: French-Canadian lumberjacks who, at the slightest stimulus, seemed to jump, strike out with their limbs, or mimic languages they could not speak. Ross Bullen introduces us to these so-called “Jumping Frenchmen” and to their greatest investigator, George M. Beard, who saw a link in their behavior bet...

Postcards that summon medieval grotesques and brightly coloured folk art, but also feel distinctly modern.

A history of the Evil One, from the earliest times to the present.

Carl Jung’s copy of an alchemical hoax, purporting to detail the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone.

Erasmus called them “little moons” and George Puttenham praised them as “figures of tolerable disorder” (if used not too often “nor too thick”). For Philip Sidney, they were simply indispensable. Florence Hazrat introduces us to the uncontested early modern king of brackets and to his romance Arcadia, which abruptly ends, like its author’s life, hanging on a parenthesi...