The Rohonc Codex: Hungary’s Mysterious Manuscript That No One Can Read

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Image by Klaus Schmeh, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Mag­yar, which is spo­ken and writ­ten in Hun­gary, ranks among the hard­est Euro­pean lan­guages to learn. (The U.S. For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute puts it in the sec­ond-to-high­est lev­el, accom­pa­nied by the dread­ed aster­isk label­ing it as “usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult than oth­er lan­guages in the same cat­e­go­ry.”)…

Cats in Medieval Manuscripts & Paintings

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Renais­sance artist Albrecht Dür­er  (1471–1528) nev­er saw a rhi­no him­self, but by rely­ing on eye­wit­ness descrip­tions of the one King Manuel I of Por­tu­gal intend­ed as a gift to the Pope, he man­aged to ren­der a fair­ly real­is­tic one, all things con­sid­ered.

Medieval artists’ ren­der­ings of cats so often fell short of…

How the Beatles Wrote Their Songs: From Early Demos to Final Recordings

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More than a few of us can claim, with some con­fi­dence, to know every Bea­t­les song. And indeed it may be true, in that we’ve heard every track of all their stu­dio albums. But as decade after decade of Bea­t­les schol­ar­ship has demon­strat­ed, there’s know­ing their songs, and then there’s know­ing their songs. Musi­cian and…

The First American Cookbook: Sample Recipes from American Cookery (1796)

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Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

On the off chance Lin-Manuel Miran­da is cast­ing around for source mate­r­i­al for his next Amer­i­can his­to­ry-based block­buster musi­cal, may we sug­gest Amer­i­can Cook­ery by “poor soli­tary orphan” Amelia Sim­mons?

First pub­lished in 1796, at 47 pages (near­ly three of them are ded­i­cat­ed to dress­ing a tur­tle), it’s…

The Samurai Who Became A Roman Citizen

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Last year, we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture the sto­ry of how a samu­rai end­ed up in the unlike­ly set­ting of sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Venice. But as com­pelling­ly told as it was in video essay form by Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, it end­ed just as things were get­ting inter­est­ing. We last left…