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Oregon, United States
loves: you win if you guessed "pets" and "museums". Also books, art history, travel, British punk, Korean kimchi, bindis, martinis, and other things TBD. I will always make it very clear if a post is sponsored in any way. Drop me a line at thepetmuseum AT gmail.com !

Thursday, May 07, 2015

a cat of wonders and portents?

thanks wikimedia commons (PD:US)
In 1557 the Alsatian humanist Conrad Lycosthenes composed a work called Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon, quae praeter naturae ordinem, et in superioribus et his inferioribus mundi regionibus, ab exordio mundi usque ad haec nostra tempora acciderunt. My Latin being rusty (= nonexistent), I ran this through a translator and came up with:
Wonders and portents, chronicon (??), which are outside the order of nature, and then the upper and lower regions of the world from the beginning of the world to come to pass down to our day.
I wonder in which region of the world they found this spiffy, curlicued guy, who's an illustration from the book.  Not knowing will not stop me picking this as my new favorite xylograph (or woodengraving).

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