The Public Domain Review

A chemistry treatise that weds the hard sciences with theosophical insight, making a microscope of the psychic mind.

From the mid-sixteenth century, broadsheets depicting wondrous, celestial events circulated widely across the Holy Roman Empire against the backdrop of Reformation.

A fantasia of travellers and archipelago dwellers, illustrated in a chimerical fashion by the author.

Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy.

By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, ​​Octavian Esanu asks, playfully and tenderly, if we can see pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art?

A guide to Italian landscape architecture by Edith Wharton, written to accompany colourful images of villas by Maxfield Parrish.

A Passion series in which ornamental motifs invade the Christ’s narrative.

A form of WWI trench art in which soldiers carved names and images into leaves.

Of all the caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte, representations of the French emperor as a miniscule megalomaniac continue to haunt the historical imagination to an unparalleled degree. Peter W. Walker searches for the origins of “Little Boney” in the early 19th-century caricatures of James Gillray, the English illustrator who took Napoleon down a peg by diminishing his reputation and scale to the point of absurdity.

An uncanny collection of folk tales written and illustrated by Sigmund Freud’s niece.