Placemaking with Plants
Lindi Masur puts seeds under the microscope to find new evidence for indigenous food production and landscape management
Homer, Euripides, and Mount Athos
Costas Constantinides catalogues a rare manuscript collection ranging from medieval textbooks to works by classical poets and orators
Bringing Heaven Into the Church
Warren Woodfin presents six centuries of cross-referencing Orthodox ritual and heavenly iconography
Trees That Heal and Fly
Thomas Arentzen searches for Byzantine trees that interacted with humans and the divine
Biography of a Cultural Route
Eurydice Georganteli reveals the crucial importance of the Via Egnatia to European and world heritage
Behind the Scenes: Finding Food in Rare Books
Folger Before “Farm to Table” team visits the Plant Humanities Initiative
Of Landscape and Lawsuits
Philip Gant studies legal implications of the Buddhist temple as critical infrastructure
Picturesque Public Parks in Paris
Ann Komara digs deep into a celebrated nineteenth-century park transformed from a quarry site
Angels, Demons, and Narrative Conflict
Brad Boswell on how a fifth-century treatise out-narrates a rival
Hunting for Butterflies
Lewis Hyde talks butterflies, Buddhism, and the problem of the unforgettable
Digging into the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library: Spotlight on “Allegories of the Odyssey”
Zeus is destiny (and other keys to understanding Homer)
Surveying the Borderland
Patrick Mullins sees diversity, conflict, politics, and coca in an ancient frontier landscape
Tracking Ancient Immigration through Teeth
Gina Buckley looks for skeletal traces of elite and working-class immigration at Teotihuacan
Behind the Scenes: Time-Traveling to Seventeenth-Century Holland
Dutch Golden Age masterpiece loaned to Dumbarton Oaks
Peripheral Lands, Contested Histories
Zeynep Kezer studies Elazığ, Tunceli, and the making of modern Turkey from the margins
Eastern Knowledge, Latin Letters
John Mulhall finds medieval translators who sought to remedy Latin deficiency with Greek and Arabic texts
From Paradise to Pompeii
Annette Giesecke finds Near Eastern inspiration for luxurious ancient Roman gardens
Digging into the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library: Spotlight on Ælfric’s “Old English Lives of Saints”
From cross-dressing monks to the walking dead, everything old is new again
Encore from an Early-Career Musician in Residence
Robyn Bollinger reflects on researching the history of musical dessert
The Park as Evolutionary Art
Heidi Hohmann charts 150 years of parkways, playground instructors, and change in Minneapolis
The Bishop versus the Emperor
Matthew Crawford works on the first English translation of a surprising treatise from late antique Alexandria
The Pope’s Ghostwriter
Evangelos Chrysos describes how a ninth-century papal advisor used the world’s largest forgery to fuel a culture clash