Monday 8 October 2012

Talk on 'A History of Dog-headed Men' regrettably cancelled



Update (23/10/12): This event has now been CANCELLED. The demographic of people who are (a) interested in dog-headed men (b) not doing anything over Halloween and (c) living in and around St Albans is regettably an unfeasibly small one, it seems.


I will be giving a talk on 'A history of dog-headed men' at Verulamium Museum, St Albans, on Friday 26 October. (Half an hour by train from St Pancras.) This is part of their "Superstitious" season which is why it's around Halloween.

What's the connection between St Albans and dog-headed men? It turns out that John Mandeville, author of influential pre-printing bestseller travelogue The Travels, which features dog-headed-men, was a St Albans local boy.

For background on dog-headed men, see here. This will be an update, as there's a lot more where that came from!

I last went to the Verulamium Museum on a school trip when I was about seven. All I can remember was the impressive packed lunch in a strong paper bag with a handle, and some broken pillars in a field. It's possible I mis-remembered. They say our memories aren't really our memories of the event itself, but our memory of the most recent occasion on which we remembered it again.

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