Till Death Do Us Part

A guest post, by RM and AR Renouf

RM Renouf:

The old ball and chain, his other half, his better half… In Spanish the word for wife, ‘esposa’, is also the word for handcuff. What, then, is it to be married in the twenty-first century when so many couples either forgo ‘getting the piece of paper’ or end up divorced. Six months ago I got married at the age of twenty-five. My husband is intelligent and articulate but unfortunately he was not house-trained. 

A few dusty old considerations...

An alternative method for sociology

"I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral." 

John Burroughs

 

The Tradescants might have found it surprising, to say the least, if they had been told that their collection would become part of one of the museums of Oxford, visited by more than a million people very year. The collection of John Tradescant the Elder, expanded by his son, John the Younger, was donated to the University of Oxford by Ashmole and has become the core of the museum’s collection. The Tradescants had already made their collection available to the public in London in the “Ark”, so that the artefacts might tell their tales. It is interesting, really, how we regularly associate history to museums but how seldom we associate museums to history, when in fact that is one of their most fascinating stories.