https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/fear-and-fragility-the-glass-delusion-and-its-history * Home * Essays * Collections * Explore * Sources * Shop * Support PDR * About * Blog Search Search The Public Domain Review [ ][View All Results] The Public Domain Review The Public Domain Review PDRSupport PDR * Essays * Collections * Explore * Sources * Shop * About * Blog * * * * * * Essays Fear and Fragility The Glass Delusion and Its History By Tamara Sanderson In early modern Europe, around the time when lenses began to bring the world (and heavens) into newfound focus, patients started appearing in medical records with a particular ailment: a firm belief that they were made of glass. Tamara Sanderson investigates the source and manifestation of this delusion, and finds a psychological idiom that once carried the weight of what could otherwise not be said. Published March 19, 2026 A crowned figure lies ill in bed while a physician in a long blue robe holds a glass flask; several courtiers and a greyhound stand nearby.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Miniature of the bedridden Charles VI, from a 15th century manuscript of Jean Froissart's Chroniques (BnF FR 2646) -- Source. What's wrong? Well everywhere he's . . . made of glass, you see; The chairs will be the death of him, he trembles at the bed, Fearful the one will break his bum, the other smash his head . . . --Constantijn Huygens, "Costly Folly", 1642^1 Winter 1393: Paris has been cold for weeks. The Seine is not quite frozen but moves thickly, carrying ice in chunks that knock against the bridge piers and spin away. At the Hotel Saint-Pol, the king's residence, the corridors are damp despite the fires. And in a room near the eastern wall, a royal tailor is at work. This month, the king has requested iron rods sewn into the lining of his clothes. Not armor -- armor has its own craftsmen, its own logic. These were ordinary garments. His coat. His doublet. The rods were to run along the torso, brace the frame, hold the whole structure rigid. The king, at this point, had not left his chambers in weeks. Charles VI, "the Beloved", was twenty-four years old at the time. For a few years, he had successfully managed the legacy of his father: the court, the factions, the English, the perpetual problem of money. Then he began to believe his body was glass. Not as a figure of speech for fragility or for the burdens of rule. He thought his body literally could shatter, refract light. As Pope Pius II chronicled: "Sometimes he thought he was made of glass and would not let himself be touched. He had iron rods put into his clothing and protected himself in all sorts of ways so that he might not fall and break."^2 Weeks before the tailor's commission, in a room not far from where he now worked, this same building had been on fire. It broke out during a winter masquerade: Charles and five nobles dressed as wild men, their linen costumes soaked in pitch, black and tarry, and studded with flax to look like hair. A spark, from somewhere. The pitch caught; they blazed. Four nobles burned to death where they stood. Charles survived only because his aunt, the Duchess of Berry, threw her skirts over him and smothered the flames. He stood in the ruined hall, the smell of burned hair everywhere, his skin unmarked, shaking. The night was remembered as the Bal des Ardents: the Ball of the Burning Men.^3 Six figures in green leafy costumes dance in a court hall, several with flames visible on their garments, while richly robed spectators watch.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Miniature of the Bal des Ardents, from a manuscript of Jean Froissart's Chroniques (BL Harley 4380), ca. 1770-72 -- Source. Five months before the fire, Charles had ridden out of Paris at the head of an army. His friend and advisor had been attacked -- nearly killed -- and the man responsible had taken refuge in Brittany. Charles sought revenge. As they moved through the forest on a hot August morning, a barefoot leper in rags rushed from the trees and grabbed the king's bridle. "Turn back", he shouted. "You are betrayed." When the procession finally emerged from the trees, it was noon. A page drowsy from the heat dropped a lance. It struck a helmet and rang out down the line. Charles shuddered. He drew his sword and screamed: the traitors, the ones the barefoot man had warned him about, seemed to be here, all around him. His knights scattered. Some too slow. He killed four of them before the others could drag him from his horse. When they pulled him down he was rigid, eyes open, unreachable, still gripping the sword. By the time they reached Le Mans, he had gone limp. He did not remember any of it.^4 Violence, then fire, then glass -- as if the body needed to rehearse its vulnerability before settling on its final metaphor. And then the condition appeared in others. *** The patients "came in a variety of forms", writes the literary historian Gill Speak, whose 1990 study remains the most sustained account of the so-called glass delusion. "He might be a urinal, an oil lamp or other glass receptacle, or else he might himself be trapped within a glass bottle."^5 The men came from the Netherlands, from France, from Spain -- documented in medical literature across four centuries, each arriving with a precise and terrible self-diagnosis. The Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, treated a patient who was rational and highly functional in every respect save one: the absolute conviction that his buttocks were formed from the same stuff as windowpanes. The physicians Andre Du Laurens and Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz independently documented a nobleman who believed himself to be shaped specifically like a glass pitcher. Not merely made of glass, but also contained by it: he slept buried in straw, terrified that he might tip in the night and pour himself out across the floor. (Du Laurens also recorded a patient who believed his feet were glass and who refused to walk.) In The Optick Glasse of Humors (1607), cleric Thomas Walkington remembers a Venetian agoraphobic who feared that his "crackling hinderparts" would be salvaged by a glazier "to make the lights in a latticed window".^6 And the Renaissance polymath Tommaso Garzoni documented a man who tried to throw himself into a glazier's furnace and emerge as an inghistara, a long-necked jug without a handle.^7 Most other cases were about surviving as glass; this one was about becoming it.^8 A glazier stands in an elaborate orange and green costume holding a large framed glass pane and multiple glass-cutting tools, wearing a towering tiered hat.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Martin Engelbrecht, Un vitrier (glassmaker), ca. 1730 -- Source. A figure stands wearing a costume constructed entirely from glass panes and glazier's tools, holding a straightedge and other implements, with a conical glass-panel hat.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Nicolas de Larmessin, Habit de vitrier (Glassmaker's uniform), ca. 1680-1700 -- Source. The cases had accumulated across the medical literature -- noted by one physician, cited by the next, appearing in treatises from Leiden to Paris, Amsterdam to Lyon. The glass man also caught the imagination of writers across Europe; in particular, a novelist from Spain and a philosopher in the Netherlands -- each reaching for the same figure, each finding something different inside of it. In 1613, at the height of his fame -- Don Quixote already published, its sequel underway -- Miguel de Cervantes turned to a collection of twelve short stories. He called them exemplary novels: moral examinations of contemporary Spain, each one a different kind of problem. The eleventh was "El licenciado Vidriera": the glass graduate. It told the story of Tomas Rodaja, a law student at Salamanca, brilliant and poor, working his way through on wit and borrowed scholarship. A woman falls in love with him. He doesn't return her feelings. She slips a love potion into a quince and Tomas eats it. When he finally surfaces from the fever that follows, he sits up and makes an announcement: "he was a man of glass and not of flesh and bones, since glass, being a substance of more delicate subtlety, permits the soul to act with more promptitude and efficacy than it can be expected to do in the heavier body formed of mere earth."^9 In Cervantes' hands, the delusion becomes a kind of freedom. Consumed with protecting his body, Tomas stops mincing his words. His speech is transparent, unfiltered. He critiques men with dyed beards; he tells off a bookseller for overcharging customers. A man asks how to stop envying others. "Go to sleep", Tomas replies. "While you sleep you will be equal of him who you envy."^10 Cervantes was writing in a Spain shaped by a century of Inquisition -- a society in which the gap between public performance and private life was not merely a social nicety but a matter of survival. The Inquisition had first demanded conversion. Then came the watching, for generations, to make sure the conversion was genuine. And in that world, a man with nothing to conceal, nothing to perform, nothing left to hide, occupies a position that is at once the most dangerous and the most free. A man seated on a donkey raises a staff while a crowd of figures surround and harass him on a cobblestone street, as two onlookers watch from the left.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Preparatory drawing by Luis Paret y Alcazar for a print by Manuel Albuerne of Tomas Rodaja from Miguel de Cervantes' "El licenciado Vidriera", ca. 1790-95 -- Source. A few decades later, Rene Descartes set out to dismantle everything he thought he knew. His project: doubt everything that could be doubted, until something couldn't be. But he needed to make one thing clear before he began. His doubts were philosophical -- carefully chosen, methodically applied. They were not the doubts of a broken mind. To make the distinction, he reached for examples already circulating in the medical literature: a man who thinks he is a king when he is a pauper; a man who thinks his head is made of earthenware; a man who thinks his body is glass. "How can I doubt that these hands or this whole body are mine? To doubt such things I would have to liken myself to brain-damaged madmen who are convinced they are kings when really they are paupers, or say they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass. Such people are insane."^11 These men shared one thing: absolute certainty about something completely wrong. That, Descartes wrote, was madness -- and he would be thought equally mad to reason from their example. Descartes considered his doubts to be tools: methodical, deliberate, pointed toward a conclusion. He would doubt his senses, the external world, whether a demon might be fabricating all of reality -- all to see what could not be doubted. He would even doubt whether he was awake, since dreams feel as real as waking life while you are inside them. But he would not become a madman in the process. The glass man, Descartes presumed, could not do this work: his mind was not solid enough to distinguish fact from fiction. Three centuries later, Foucault argued that Descartes hadn't just excluded the glass man from his rationality -- he had employed him. "The man who imagines he is made of glass is not mad", Foucault writes, "for any sleeper can have this image in a dream; but he is mad if, believing he is made of glass, he thereby concludes that he is fragile, that he is in danger of breaking, that he must touch no object which might be too resistant, that he must in fact remain motionless, and so on."^12 To declare the glass man's thinking invalid was to establish, for the first time, what valid thinking looked like: "Madness is expelled, rejected, denounced in its very impossibility from the very interiority of thought itself."^13 Jacques Derrida would counter that Descartes had actually done the opposite -- by admitting that the dreamer is indistinguishable from the madman, Descartes had made the madman's condition that of rational life: "reason is madder than madness."^14 Both Foucault and Descartes agreed, implicitly, that the glass man Descartes had tried to discredit had become the hinge on which their debate turned. But neither Cervantes nor Descartes (nor Foucault and Derrida, for that matter) wrote in detail about the historical occasion of the delusion itself. Why glass? Why this material, this century, these sufferers? Several workers operate a large domed glass-blowing furnace inside a wooden workshop, with additional workers outside handling frames and materials, letter labels marking key elements.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Coloured woodcut of glassworkers and their furnace, from a manuscript of Georg Agricola, De re metallica, ca. 1580 -- Source. A bearded man in a blue robe and round cap reads from an orange book, wearing large red circular spectacles; a second pair of spectacles rests on the table.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Coloured woodcut of a man wearing spectacles from Georg Bartisch's Ophthalmodouleia (1583), the first Renaissance manuscript on ophthalmic disorders and eye surgery -- Source. Two workers tend a brick-arched kiln packed with rows of glowing glass bottles; one sorts colored fragments into a basket while the other stands at the furnace with a rod.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Coloured engraving of glassmakers from Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, ca. latter 18th century -- Source. Scholars have generally offered two explanations.^15 The first was material. In the sixteenth century, something new was happening to human sight. Lenses were restoring vision to aging scholars. Telescopes were pulling Jupiter's moons into view. Microscopes were revealing a universe invisible to the naked eye. These were not merely new instruments. They were overturning what had been certain -- about the heavens, about the body, about the limits of what could be known. The instrument behind all of it was the same: glass, and specifically a new kind of glass, developed in Venice on the island of Murano, so clear it was nearly invisible. The second explanation was social: copycat delusions spread by social contagion. The cases clustered among literate men -- scholars, nobles, physicians -- exactly the people reading the medical case literature, encountering Cervantes, aware of what had happened to the king of France. Gill Speak presented these as two separate explanations. But they may be two descriptions of the same thing. The material explanation tells you what made the delusion possible -- glass was everywhere, strange, and available as a metaphor for a mind under pressure. The social explanation tells you how it traveled -- through the same literate men who read the case notes, used the lenses, and already had a language for this kind of suffering. Take either explanation alone and something is missing. Before the delusion faded out across the modern era, it produced one final prominent case. For the first time in the surviving literature, the sufferer was a woman. Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria was born in 1826 at Schloss Johannisburg in Aschaffenburg, though it was at Nymphenburg Palace outside Munich -- the Wittelsbach family's primary residence -- that she would spend her adult life and die. Her father commissioned her portrait for his Gallery of Beauties: a collection of the most beautiful women in Munich. She grew up to be a serious person: a poet, a translator, an essayist whose published works ranged from Roman antiquities to the Merovingian dynasty.^16 A young woman with dark curly hair adorned with a green leaf wreath poses in a white off-the-shoulder lace dress against a soft blue-gray background.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Replica of Joseph Karl Stieler's portrait of Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria for the Gallery of Beauties in Nymphenburg Palace, 1845 after 1838 original -- Source. Somewhere around her twenty-third year -- shortly after her father, King Ludwig I, was forced to abdicate in the scandal surrounding his mistress Lola Montez -- Alexandra developed the conviction that she had swallowed a grand piano made entirely of glass. Not that her body was glass, but rather that she contained it: the piano fully intact, its strings and hammers and frame preserved somewhere in her torso. In nineteenth-century Bavarian court culture, the grand piano was a central object around which a woman's worth was organized: her accomplishment, her marriageability, her social legibility. Every young woman of her station was expected to play. Alexandra would live at Nymphenburg for the rest of her life -- and its gilded double doors, wide enough that two people could simultaneously pass through without acknowledging each other, became the defining obstacle of her daily life. She would approach each one, stop, turn sideways, and pass through, making doubly sure not to let her piano-containing torso touch the frame. Then she would continue across the marble with the slow, carefully placed steps of a woman who must not be jostled. The change was recorded not in a physician's casebook, as with the cases that came before, but in the memoirs and chronicles of the Wittelsbach court. No psychiatrist was summoned. She was a princess, her condition managed within the domestic sphere. The court simply watched her move. Alexandra kept writing. The woman who could not pass through a doorway without turning sideways wrote essays about the pyramids of Giza and the ancient inhabitants of France. A woman in a full-length dark silk gown with wide ruffled sleeves stands on a patterned carpet in a studio portrait, her gaze directed upward to the left.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Portrait of Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria, 1872 -- Source. In searching for a mechanism beneath the symptom, we might find ourselves returning to the piano. Alexandra did not develop a delusion that she was glass. She developed a delusion that she contained a glass piano -- the object her culture organized much of her worth around, lodged near where that same culture expected her to carry a child. The delusion exempted her from every feminine demand: she never married, never played, never became the ornament her father's gallery had already made her. She died at Nymphenburg in 1875. She had been turning sideways through those doors for twenty-five years. *** The glass delusion largely disappeared from medical literature by the mid-nineteenth century. It was never common as a form of suffering -- but glass, for a certain period of history, became culturally loaded enough to carry the weight of what could not otherwise be said. The medical anthropologist Mark Nichter, building on Arthur Kleinman's work, proposed that distress finds culturally available idioms: ways of expressing suffering in a language the surrounding world will recognize.^17 The glass delusion was one such idiom -- and a particularly useful one. A body made of glass cannot be sent to war, cannot be married off, cannot be held to the ordinary demands of a courtly life. The delusion did real work. When glass stopped being strange enough to carry that weight, the idiom lost its power -- not all at once, but slowly, the last cases petering out in a psychiatric hospital in Leiden in the 1930s, patients still afraid of shattering while the rest of the world stopped noticing glass as a novelty. But the terror didn't evaporate. It found a new medium. Four women in white blouses and dark skirts carry pairs of large glass cylinders outside a brick factory wall.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Postcard showing Belgian glassworkers from Charleroi transporting glass cylinders, from the series "La Belgique au travail", ca. 1910 -- Source. The industrial age gave it the telegraph: nerves reimagined as copper wires, the body as a machine running out of current. Then came invisible rays. In the 1890s, physicists discovered that electromagnetic waves could pass through solid matter -- X-rays photographed the interior of a living body without touching it, Guglielmo Marconi transmitted invisible signals through the air across miles of open ocean. The body was suddenly penetrable by forces it couldn't see or stop. And then that generation went to war and learned the same lesson in a different register: artillery shells that arrived before their own sound, poison gas that drifted toward you, colorless and odorless, until your lungs dissolved. By 1919, the invisible forces that had once been a scientific curiosity now spoke to a collective trauma. In the postwar era, when the suffering mind needed a language for violation and loss of bodily sovereignty, it reached for what the era had made thinkable. Viktor Tausk documented patients who believed unseen machines were beaming signals into their skulls, reading their private thoughts, controlling their movements from a distance. The delusion was shell shock in the idiom of the age.^18 *** In the winter of 1393, the tailor finishes his work, his thread pulling through heavy fabric, the rods solid and real in his hands. The seams hold. Soon the king will put it on -- and he will survive another day inside a body that was never glass, protected by iron from a fragility that existed nowhere but in his own mind. He had killed men he could not remember killing. He had watched four courtiers burn alive at a party he had organized. He had been the King of France since he was eleven years old. If that had happened to me, I think I would have also believed I was made of glass. NotesShow Notes 1. Constantijn Huygens, Satyra. Dat is't Costelick Mal (1622), lines 103-108, in De Gedichten van Constantijn Huygens, ed. J. A. Worp, 9 vols (Groningen, 1892-99), I, 246. Quoted in Gill Speak, "El Licenciado Vidriera and the Glass Men of Early Modern Europe", The Modern Language Review 85, no. 4 (October 1990), 850-51. 2. The Commentaries of Pius II, trans. Florence Alden Gragg, ed. Leona C. Gabel (Northampton, MA: Smith College Studies in History, 1937-57). 3. The Bal des Ardents took place on January 28, 1393 at the Hotel Saint-Pol. The principal sources are Jean Froissart, Chroniques, Book IV, and the chronicle of Michel Pintoin (the Religieux de Saint-Denis), ed. Bellaguet. See also Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Knopf, 1978), ch. 24. 4. The forest episode is recorded in the chronicle of Michel Pintoin, ed. Bellaguet, vol. II, 86-88. See R. C. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392-1420 (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 1-8. Froissart also records the episode in Book IV of his Chronicles. 5. Gill Speak, "An Odd Kind of Melancholy: Reflections on the Glass Delusion in Europe (1440-1680)", History of Psychiatry 1, no. 2 (1990): 192-93. 6. Quoted in Speak, "El Licenciado Vidriera and the Glass Men of Early Modern Europe", 851. 7. Tommaso Garzoni, L'Hospidale de' pazzi incurabili (Venice, 1586). 8. The principal primary sources for the glass delusion case literature are: Levinus Lemnius, De Miraculis Occultis Naturae (Antwerp, 1559); Andre Du Laurens [Andreas Laurentius], Discours de la conservation de la veue: des maladies melancholiques (Paris, 1597); Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz, Dignotio et cura affectuum melancholicorum (Madrid, 1622). Note: Andre Du Laurens and "Andreas Laurentius" are the same person -- the French physician (1558-1609) rendered in French and Latin respectively. Many cases are discussed in Gill Speak, "An Odd Kind of Melancholy". Others can be found in Alfred Garvin Engstrom, "The Man Who Thought Himself Made of Glass, and Certain Related Images", Studies in Philology 67, no. 3 (July 1970): 390-405. 9. The Exemplary Novels of Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Walter K. Kelly (London: George Bell and Sons, 1881), 117. 10. Ibid., 105. 11. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge University Press), available here. 12. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 94. 13. Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness", in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 47. 14. Ibid., 62. 15. See, for example, Speak, "An Odd Kind of Melancholy", and Engstrom, "The Man Who Thought Himself Made of Glass". 16. For Alexandra's biography, the primary court source is Luise von Kobell, Unter den vier ersten Konigen Bayerns (Munich, 1894). The glass piano delusion was dramatized in Deborah Levy's BBC Radio 3 production The Glass Piano (2010). 17. Mark Nichter, "Idioms of Distress: Alternatives in the Expression of Psychosocial Distress: A Case Study from South India", Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 5, no. 4 (1981): 379-408, which builds on Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 18. Viktor Tausk, "Uber die Entstehung des 'Beeinflussungsapparates' in der Schizophrenie", Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse 5 (1919): 1-33. English translation: "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia", Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): 519-56. Public Domain Works * Meditations on First Philosophy Rene Descartes 1639 + Marxists Internet Archive Texts * The Optick Glasse of Humors Thomas Walkington 1607 + Internet Archive + Early English Books Online Texts * De miraculis occultis naturae Levinus Lemnius 1574 + Staatliche Bibliothek Regensburg Texts * Discours de la conservation de la veue: des maladies melancholiques Andre Du Laurens 1597 + Internet Archive + Google Books Texts * L'Hospidale de' pazzi incurabili Tomaso Garzoni 1594 + Internet Archive + Google Books Texts * The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes 1881 + Internet Archive + Project Gutenberg Texts Further Reading * The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives By Brian Dillon The Hypochondriacs is a book about fear and hope, illness and imagination, despair and creativity. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And, in an intimate investigation of those lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Through witty, entertaining, and often moving examinations of the lives of these eminent hypochondriacs -- James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould, and Andy Warhol -- Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, the mind's aches and the body's ideas. More Info and Buy Bookshop.org (US) Amazon (US) undefined cover * A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse By Victoria Shepherd For centuries we've dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks -- they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas. In this groundbreaking history, Victoria Shepherd uncovers stories of delusions from medieval times to the present day and implores us to identify reason in apparent madness. More Info and Buy Publisher's Website Bookshop.org (US) Bookshop.org (UK) Amazon (US) undefined cover The Public Domain Review receives a small percentage commission from sales made via the links to Bookshop.org (10%) and Amazon (4.5%). Thanks for supporting the project! For more recommended books, see all our "Further Reading" books, and browse our dedicated Bookshop.org stores for US and UK readers. Indexed under... E * Experienceof being made of glass Tamara Sanderson is an MDiv candidate at Harvard Divinity School and a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She was signed by the Linda Chester Literary Agency in 2025 for fiction. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details. Enjoyed this piece? We need your help to keep publishing. The PDR is a non-profit project kept alive by reader donations - no ads, no paywalls, just the generosity of our community. It's a really exciting model, but we need your help to keep it thriving. Visit our support page to become a Friend and receive our themed postcard packs . Or give a one-off donation. Already a supporter? A huge thank you for making all this possible. Support PDR Subjects * Culture & History * Science & Medicine Tags mental illness6medicine25 If You Liked This... Hand holding envelope Get Our Newsletter Our latest content, your inbox, every fortnight Privacy Policy More Info [ ][ ] HP[ ] [Subscribe] Become a Friend of the PDRPostcardsJoin our community of supporters and receive our themed postcard packs, delivered to your door twice a year. Friends also enjoy 15% off all prints.Find Out More Ancient Courses print Shop Our Range of PrintsPremium prints using pigment-based archival inks (Giclee process) on high grade heavyweight art paper. Available as unframed or framed and ready to hang.Free Shipping to US, UK, EU, Canada, and Australia. The Public Domain Review The Public Domain Review is registered in the UK as a Community Interest Company (#11386184), a category of company which exists primarily to benefit a community or with a view to pursuing a social purpose, with all profits having to be used for this purpose. We rely on donations from readers. Please consider supporting the project and becoming a Friend of the PDR. * About * Masthead * Contact * Submissions * Explore * PDR Index * Sources * Further Reading * What is the Public Domain? * Rights Labelling * Reusing Material * Privacy Policy * Terms and Conditions * Essays * Collections * Conjectures * Curator's Choice * Blog * Shop * PDR Press * Prints * Shop FAQ * Returns Policy Subscribe to Our Newsletter * * * * * Pantagruel figures in a rowPantagruel figures in a row Pantagruel Sign Up for Our Newsletter! The latest wonders from the site to your inbox. Once every two weeks. [ ][ ] HP[ ] [Subscribe] Privacy Policy | More Info You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link in our emails. * * * * * I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions --------------------------------------------------------------------- {{ number }} {{ $localize("payment.title") }} {{ $localize('payment.no_payment') }} {{ $localize('payment.place_order') }} Pay by Credit Card --------------------------------------------------------------------- Pay with PayPal {{ $localize('cart.summary') }} {{ $localize('actions.edit') }} --------------------------------------------------------------------- Click for Delivery Estimates --------------------------------------------------------------------- Click for Delivery Estimates {{ $localize('cart.shipping_taxes_calculated_at_checkout')}} {{$localize ('errors.order_validation.custom_fields_validation.description')}} {{ $localize('actions.checkout') }} Sorry, we cannot ship to P.O. Boxes. Sorry, we cannot ship to P.O. Boxes.