My account of this trip of last November to London ends rather anticlimactically with a brief account of a trip to the British Museum. I saw the following exhibits:
1. The one on Egyptian mummies that uses exciting new techniques to look inside mummies; it was interesting but having been to Egypt myself I feel like I have probably seen all the mummies I will ever need to in my life.
2. The one on the apogee of Ming Dynasty China. I particularly liked the picture of the chubby fun-loving emperor being carried on a palanquin by some over-worked servants.
3. The one on Germany through the ages that largely ignored the most famous bit of German history. I particularly liked the portraits of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora; while I have seen these pictures before in reproduction, in the flesh they exhibited a carnality you do not normally expect from religious leaders.
4. An exhibition on depictions of witchcraft in printed materials in early modern Europe. This reinforced my sense that witch hunts were not a routine feature of the mediaeval past but rather something that flourished as society began to transform into something like our own.
Pandas
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