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 is the childhood face of one of the most famous Ukrainians in history, the pro-Zionist, pro-labor, and former Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir. Born Golda Mabovitch in 1898 to a carpenter father in the city of Kyiv, which was then part of the Russian Empire, Golda’s Jewish ancestry put her in company
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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You’re looking at an 18th-century illustration from one Marie-Jeanne Valet, aka “the Amazon”, aka “the Maid of Gévandan”, showing her getting attacked by a monstrous creature. The 19- or 20- year old Marie got these creds for having successfully fought off the enormous and bloodthirsty animal, which was something that as many as 100 people
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This is the story of a famous Russian woman and author,, Anna Akhmatova. Here she is in 1924 at age 35, looking weary and seductive. By this time, Anna (neé Anna Andreyevna) had lived through fin-de-siecle Europe, the artsy cabaret scene in St Petersburg, the First World War, and the Communist Revolution. Well might she
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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
As a Medieval historian, one of the things I do is study saints of the Middle Ages — they were akin to our modern-day superheroes, and their special qualities give us a good lens for understanding the values of the distant past. The holy woman featured here today — Rita of Cascia, nee Margherita Ferri
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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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The game of _Monopoly_ has been played by millions for over a century: my own kids learned a bit about adding and subtracting large numbers in their heads from it, while I learned how to only let the game go on until all the properties were sold, so as to prevent in-game death by slow
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#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
This is one of the most fantastic pieces of pottery ever. Dating to about 1590, it depicts three women changing into geese, with the label “Winchester Geese” at the bottom of the platter. The shapes surrounding the geese might look like rounded diamonds, or alternatively, like vulvas. Give me a minute, and you’re probably going
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If ever you were to consider the history of fabric-making, you are unlikely to have associated it with horror. But that is just what this contemporary rendering of the Norse poem “Darratharljóth” conveys, and it’s really quite sick. In the poem, which appears in a 13th-century Icelandic saga, a man sees a vision of twelve
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