You are looking at the cover of one of the very first science-fiction novels. Written by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1608 (but published posthumously), _Somnium_ (“the dream”) tells the story of a youth named Duracotcus who undertakes a journey to study with the astronomer Tycho Brahe. When Duracotus returns home, his mother explains to […]
“Somnium” By Johannes Kepler Read More »
Tycho Brahe (d. 1601), arguably one of the best naked-eye astronomers in history, also had one of the most famous noses in history. Mostly remembered for his accurate and detailed observations on the locations of stars and planets, twenty-year-old Tycho got into a drunken argument with a distant cousin about who was the better mathematician.
Although my posts for the next few weeks are mostly going to be repeats as the website gets built, I couldn’t help but write up this story about willow tree bark and aspirin. Dear reader, you, like me, may have been under the impression that for millennia, people in different parts of the world relied
Willow Bark Medicine Read More »
Just in time for the fall season, *and* Halloween, comes the news of a recent discovery in Poland of a 17th-century “Vampire” burial. An archaeological team led by Dariusz Polinsky of the Nicholas Copernicus University was conducting excavations around an Early Modern graveyard near Bydgoszcz when they unearthed the skeleton shown here. It belonged to
What the heck. So this is an illustration of a pope (Innocent X, to be exact), who is having his testicles examined by a cardinal to make darn tootin’ certain that the newly-selected leader of Christendom is a man. Made in 1645, this print testifies to a long-lasting legend that all popes had to undergo
Papal Testicle Examination Read More »
This African mask from the 1500s is on display this fall of 2022 at the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an exhibit on the African origins of civilization. Exquisitely carved from precious ivory, it provides testimony to one of Africa’s more recent civilizations, the Kingdom of Benin. The capital city of Benin
The Kingdom of Benin Read More »
#what-I-didn’t-see-on-my-way-to-work-this-morning Here is a detail from a 15th-century manuscript showing a mermaid playing music. She’s got two instruments and only two arms, so she is obviously quite the bard. Mermaids were widely believed to be real creatures in the Middle Ages. In fact, women/sea-creature hybrids have been fabulous legends across many civilizations, but they end
Since it is almost Halloween, what could be more fitting than a horror story featuring a mythical creature? Gather ’round ye old phone screen for the tale of the Warsaw Basilisk. This story has been examined by many scholars — not for its veracity, but to establish that the account did indeed occur in the
Finding a more arcane and mysterious text than the Voynich Manuscript would be difficult. Written in 1420, the script has thwarted the world’s best cryptogrographers – linguists have failed alongside computer A.I specialists to decode the 200-page book. Just yesterday a story broke that a British linguist has solved the code – he claims the
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The two pictures in this post seem to have nothing to do with each other, but they are connected by a surprising history: “white gold,” aka guano, i.e. bird excrement. This stuff once drove human cultures in these now depopulated areas. The first image shows the Atacama Desert of Chile, the driest non-polar desert in
The face inside this cowl might look unsettling to us today — the light skin peers out from the dark clothes in a startling way, and those eyes hold a distant focus that might seem creepy. But in late 15th-century Italy, this man was an extremely popular religious leader that practically controlled Florence — the
Girolamo Savonarola Read More »
Everyone knows about the great witch-hunts of the Early Modern period in Europe, when up to 45,000 people were executed for crimes of using magic and consorting with devils — most of these alleged witches were women, and one of the areas most affected were German-speaking lands. The old woman riding backwards on a goat
Christina Rauscher, the Witch Read More »
Scene: a British coffeehouse from the late seventeenth century. Fact: to us, this cafe likely would have smelled far better than London’s streets, with their crowds and lack of sewage treatment. However – what we consider a pleasant aroma has changed over time. As historian of smell Mark S. R. Jenner writes, “in 1657 a
Late 17th Century British Coffeehouse Read More »
Between 1582 to 1589, the British occultists John Dee and Edward Kelly claimed to have received multiple messages from angels. Writing these transmissions up, they formed the basis of the Enochian magical system, which was re-discovered and popularized over 300 years later by Alistair Crowley, a controversial (and free-love promoting) spiritualist. Pictured here is a
Look carefully and you might find that one of these Commandments gives very different directions than the usual . . . . This is a photograph from the so-called “Wicked Bible” – published in 1631 in London – which exhorted readers to commit adultery in one of the most notorious typos in history. When King
“Wicked Bible” Excerpt Read More »
If you look carefully, you will see a corpse dressed in white lying in a coffin in this illustration of the Laws of Hamburg from 1497. This painting shows the Medieval practice of _cruentation_, a type of jurisprudence where someone convicted of murder would put their hands on their alleged victim – the idea was
Syphilis caused widespread suffering in Early Modern Europe – this portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn of a sufferer from about 1665 illustrates the facial deformities that occurred as the disease progressed. Scientists still debate where the disease originated, but one idea is that strains of the bacteria causing syphilis had developed independently Europe and in
Syphilis Outbreak in Europe Read More »
One thing about history is that it can make you grateful for present times, and here to bring you an example of that is this painting from 1765 by John Singleton Copley, _A Boy with a Flying Squirrel_. Note the chain attaching the tiny neck of the squirrel to the boy’s hand. Folks, I bring
So it’s Christmas Eve, and in the U.S., the green Grinch monster invented by “Dr. Seuss” is a well-known figure who tries to destroy Christmas. But in the 1640s, there was an actual Grinch-movement to ban the holiday. Most British people put the blame for this unpopular episode on the English military leader-cum-religious zealot Oliver
Werewolf stories existed in Europe as long ago as Ancient Roman times, but the ways people imagined them changed. Whereas for much of the Middle Ages, werewolves retained some of their sympathetic human nature, by the late 15th century they began to figure as evil servants of the devil. Some men were even executed for
