LAABh Foundation

Piya Bose is a lawyer turned founder of a women’s travel club called “Girls On The Go”.

Q. Hello, it’s a pleasure to have you with us! Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your life at law school? What extra-curricular and co-curricular activities were you involved in?

I did my BSc.,LLB from NUJS, Kolkata. Though our schedule was hectic, I took time out for hobbies and creative activities. Keeping a balance between academics and hobbies is very necessary for a holistic development of students. My favourite subject was Law and Literature and I did a very interesting project on Legal Literature in Asterix comics.

Q. After Law School, you worked in the legal sector as a corporate lawyer. Now you’re running your own startup! Did you ever envision that you would shift careers outside the legal field while at law school or even right after…

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Garðar (Greenland)

Stained Glass Attitudes

So here I hurdle towards completing the second (and I’m pinning it to the wall as FINAL) global pandemic project of finding every medieval cathedral in the Latin Church. Here I combine the Balkans, central Europe, the Baltic, Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia as a frontier that stretches from the Dnieper to the Americas to tidy up (almost) the last ones outside of the traditional cathedral centres of France, England, Germany, Italy and Spain.

I have written a 65-page PDF of all of these buildings available for donation of moneys in case you have no idea what any of them are. But first: here is a taster of the extremities of these frontiers. The western, northern, north-eastern and south-easternmost cathedrals of the Latin Church.

Westernmost medieval cathedral

It is extremely little-known that the medieval Latin church founded a diocese, with an actual cathedral church with residential bishops, in the…

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Stained Glass Attitudes

In lockdown 2020, I came across a list of every monastery dissolved under the government of Henry VIII in 1535-40. My mission, which I chose to accept (because what else was I going to do) was to find the location and condition of every English monastery and its church. This. Is MonasteryQuest™.

It is reasonably well known that the dissolution of the monasteries completed in 1540 resulted in six new cathedrals in England. These were the first new dioceses since 1133 (when the Augustinian Priory at Carlisle was made a cathedral), and the last until 1836 (when Ripon Minster was elevated to finally officially take the burden off York for the rising industrial towns). These were Chester, Gloucester, Oxford (shifted site, see below), Peterborough, Bristol and (for a decade) Westminster. What is much less well-known is that around 1540 the Crown was contemplating converting some –…

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via MonasteryQuest™ Pt 2: The Tudor cathedrals that almost were

Stained Glass Attitudes

In lockdown 2020, I came across a list of every monastery dissolved under the government of Henry VIII in 1535-40. My mission, which I chose to accept (because what else was I going to do) was to find the location and condition of every English monastery and its church. This. Is MonasteryQuest™.

This is first installment of the write-up of my frankly silly partly performative live-tweet thread to find the archaeological knowledge for every monastic site in the 1534/5 survey of potential Crown revenue, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, after the Act of Supremacy was passed by parliament to make the English monarch head of the Church in his kingdom. The Valor is, incredibly, to my knowledge, not available complete online in any form (including scans), but I found a table of all the monasteries’ values, excluding mendicant friaries and obviously non-coventual granges (and mistakes on behalf of the original…

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via MonasteryQuest™ Pt 1: the twenty richest houses at the dissolution

via Bombay: Exploring the Jewish Urban Heritage by Dr. Shaul Sapir

via Looking For Nothing In Gwalior

Kevin Standage

Gwalior is rightly famous for its majestic cliff-top fort, the awe-inspiring Jain monuments that have been hewn from the hillside, and for the ancient temples of Sas Mabu and Teli Ka. Tourists flock to Gwalior in their thousands to see these monuments, probably unaware that it is also the home to a simple carving that is the oldest of its type in India, and is arguably the greatest conceptual leap in the history of mathematics…the zero.

Recently installed signposts now help tourists find this historic location. Halfway up the cobbled pathway on the eastern approach to the fort is the small and unassuming Chaturbhuj Temple.

The temple has been completely carved out of the rock face, and thanks to an inscription in the sanctum we know that it was constructed in the year 876 AD. It is this inscription that also contains one of the earliest known uses of the…

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