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Nazarbayev University, Astana, Republic of Kazakhstan. Photo by Clare Griffin.
Historian of science. Language enthusiast. Mental health advocate. Only occasionally to be found holding an eagle.
Clare Griffin is a historian in search of the unusual. And breathing the rarified air of the twenty-first century, gazing back several centuries to the period between 1400 and 1800 - the early modern world - we seem to see many unusual things. In the early modern world, Egyptian mummies were ground up to be put in medicines, unicorn horns were gifts for kings, vampires stalked terrified villagers and - perhaps most curious of all - medical plants from the Spanish American colonies made it halfway across the world, to the Moscow Kremlin, by the 1600s. But wait. Wasn't pre-1700 Russia isolated from the rest of the globe? The Muscovites who bought and consumed American materia medica were certainly not acting as if they were isolated. What seems unusual to us was anything but to them. Clare Griffin spends her time trying to understand the unexpected mundanities of the early modern world, from remarkable connections to the problematic dead. And sometimes she also finds time to hold an eagle. Clare Griffin is Assistant Professor in the History, Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at Nazarbayev University, Astana, Republic of Kazakhstan. |
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