This is a post about two Irish songs that deal with memory. 1994 was the release date of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” and Sinead O’Connor’s “Famine,” and both emerged out of The Troubles, a period of about thirty years (late 1960s to 1998), when tension in Northern Ireland between forces that favored independence and those who […]
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“Worked up to desperation, he applied the wires of the battery and put the apparatus in motion, whilst a demonic laugh of derision appeared to ring in his ears, and the surrounding mummies seemed starting from their places and dancing in unearthly merriment . . . .” These are the first words in English to
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This is one of my favorite illustrations from Medieval history, from _The Book of the Queen_, and shows Christine de Pizan (1364-1431) — the first woman professional writer in French — standing in a celestial sphere surrounded by the sun, moon, and stars. The miniature features a scene from an allegorical tale by de Pizan
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This Ancient scientist was championed by intellectuals across time, and by the 1600s was known in Europe as one of the most important alchemists of Ancient history: Cleopatra “Chrysopoeia” the Alchemist (aka not the Pharaoh). Thought to have been active in the third century BCE, Cleopatra was praised in the early 1600s as being one
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Happy Halloween, yunz’ all! In honor of the day, I thought it appropriate to do a post about the Bloody Mary apparition, which terrified many pubescent girls in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s.Trying to see if you could summon Bloody Mary was a genuine folk tradition. Because it was spread by word
Some cultural icons reflect cutting-edge trends, and others cause them to be. This is a photo of the legendary Patti Smith, and she falls into the second category.The list of “firsts” Smith represented is lengthy. As music critic Nick Dohney writes, “She’s called the godmother of punk. _Horses_, her iconic first album, came out in
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One of the biggest questions about our universe had long been just how big it is. Of course the stars we see are far away, but just how far was unknown for most of human history. Figuring out the answer to this question was an enormous challenge: it isn’t the case that the brightest stars
Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the “Standard Candle” Read More »
Here you see an illustration showing the happy and regal-looking figure of an Inca princess named Zilia. Captured from her homeland and torn from her fiancé, Zilia was rescued by a French captain and taken to Europe, where she was exposed to a culture that imagined itself enlightened, but which Zilia found repressive. Zilia
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This post is three days past the memorial day of the person featured here, Saint Agatha of Sicily. She’s one of my favorite regulars in the history of Christian artwork — right along the arrows all over St Sebastian and St Lucy with her eyeballs or Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel or John with
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This lovely ship was one sight you’d not want to have been privy to if you were a French person from the 14th century. The black hulls and the red sails were the mark of ships belonging to Jeanne de Clisson, aka “the Lioness of Brittany,” a noblewoman who became a pirate in the name
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This is a late 12th-century illustration of “the Witch of Endor,” a prophetess from the Bible who could raise the spirits of the dead and talk to them. Artists have enjoyed illustrating her almost as much as religious people have enjoyed debating about her powers. In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament First Book of Samuel
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Japanese artists before the 20th century were mostly men, and so the painter and calligrapher Tokuyama Gyokuran (aka Ike Gyokuran) was a wonderfully talented anomaly. Living during the last age of the Shogun in the 18th-century Edo period, Gyokuran really departed from traditional women’s roles — she didn’t even shave her eyebrows, like married women
This reconstruction of a Swedish woman from 7,000 years ago (using DNA as well as bone and archaeological burial remains) tells us she died when she was between 30-40 years old. Despite this relatively young age by modern standards, it is likely the female members of her community were healthier than many of her global
In the late 1600s, a young wealthy Englishwoman decided to lead a very different life than her aristocratic sisters: this was one Celia Finnes (1662-1741), who decided not to marry and instead to travel all over the countryside on horseback — for over two decades. Celia Finnes had a couple servants who joined her, but
This is the face of Queen Nanny of the Maroons, a hero so important to Jamaican history that she earned her visage on the $500 Jamaican bill. Living from indeterminate dates from the 1600s to 1700s, accounts of Queen Nanny largely come from oral histories and are difficult to pin down with certainty. She probably
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Miracle stories from the early Middle Ages include some accounts of saints who could successfully induce abortions. One such legend is from a seventh-century book of the life and miracles of the Irish St. Brigid of Kildare, who was said to have died around 525 CE. In the story, a woman had sex for pleasure
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This is Hertha Ayerton, a British Engineer whose discoveries unveiled mysteries about the behavior of electricity and helped develop technology to protect soldiers in the trenches of the First World War from poisonous gasses. Sarah Phoebe Banks was born in 1854 to a family of eight children, her father dying when she was just eight.
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
The title here “A brief discourse of a disease called the Suffocation of the Mother” is really misleading. Not a tract about matricide, instead it was the first English publication (1603) on hysteria — thought to be a disease that only infected women. And it’s pretty messed up from every angle. For instance, the intent
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The woman you see in this 15th-c illumination is mounted on a warhorse, and leading a surprise attack upon her enemies — this is Joanna of Flanders (c. 1295-1374), and so famed were her military ventures that philosopher David Hume called her “the most extraordinary woman of the age”. Joanna, born into the nobility of
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