Ben Breen
I'm a history Ph.D. student at UT Austin with a special interest in seventeenth century science, medicine and print culture, as well as environmental and global history. Res Obscura is where I put images and texts I come across while researching a dissertation on the drug trade in the Portuguese and British empires.
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
Drugs Seventeenth Century History of Science Print Culture Medicine Twentieth Century Visual Culture Alchemy
Res Obscura has moved to Substack
14 September 2023
Hello readers! After 13 years, I've decided to turn the Res Obscura blog into the Res Obscura Substack newsletter. Very little is changing, excerpt for the fact that I've returned to...
1950s Smart Homes and the Longevity of Design
13 December 2019
Aesthetic modes can be surprisingly persistent, even as technologies change.Electric light strips automatically illuminate as the young couple approach the house's front steps.They...
Enlightenment-era Ghosts and the History of Technology
30 October 2019
A detail of one of Etienne Gaspard Robertson's "phantasmagoria."Ghosts were in the air in eighteenth-century London. Few knew this better than James Boswell, the friend and biographer...
The Most Wonderful Map in the World: Urbano Monte's Planisphere of 1587
29 March 2019
At some point in 1589, a Milanese cartographer named Urbano Monte made up his mind: his self-portrait needed updating.Monte carefully crouched over the section of his map that bore...