John Wilmot, The Second Earl of Rochester, was an English libertine poet, freethinker and a wit of King Charles II’s reformation court. In the best known portrait of the Earl of Rochester, a pet monkey proffers a tattered page ripped from one of his master’s books. The Earl, resplendent in silks, coolly awards the beast a laurel crown.

“Were I…,” Rochester wrote,

“a spirit free, to choose for my own share

what sort of flesh and blood I pleas’d to wear,

I’d be a dog, a monkey or a bear,

Or any thing but that vain animal

Who is so proud of being rational.”

Rochester’s Monkey is a blog that aims to follow in the freethinking tradition: vaguely anti-establishment and very mistrusting of those who believe that humans are even vaguely rational. It is deliberately political but also contrarian and anti-arrogance wherever it’s revealed.

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