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 »
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
Studies on Hysteria Read More »
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
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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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These digitally reconstructed faces attempt to regain the lost stories of 17 humans, whose skeletons were found in a well in Norwich England, but these images are robotic and not very convincing. A recent DNA analysis, however, has revealed a particularly sad and horrifying aspect of their deaths. After the bodies were uncovered by archaeologists
Medieval Anti-Semitism Read More »
The year was 1457, and the place the town of Sévigny in France. A five-year-old boy had been brutally killed, mauled to death, and the community sought justice. Turning to the legal system, a civil case was brought against the killer, and despite the horrific nature of the death of young Jehan Martin, court officials
This wizened figure looks like a saggy Santa Claus, but in fact was one of the most ambitious Popes in the history of the Catholic Church. And “ambitious” isn’t a good adjective for the religious leaders of Christendom. But this guy had an even more secular moniker: he was Julius II, the”warrior Pope”. He picked
Flick through these three images, dear readers, and you will observe something that scholars have been looking for for over 2,000 years — finally brought to light via a student class project, the COVID lockdowns, and state-of-the-art multispectral imaging. It is the oldest star map of the universe. The manuscript you see is the _Codex
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London’s East Smithfield Cemetery made news this week because of a recent study suggesting that the Medieval Black Death provided impetus for human evolution in a way that shapes many of our genomes today. With the advent of technology that allows for whole genome analysis of the dead, scientists and historians decided to exhume skeletons
The Black Death and Genetics Read More »
This musical score is the 15th-century “Agincourt Carol,” and it celebrated the English victory at the eponymously named battle. The English have Agincourt as a celebrated place in their history, because the battle came to stand as an example of triumph against overwhelming odds. Also Shakespeare loved it. And it was fought 607 years ago
By the time Gaius Appuleius Diocles retired from chariot-racing at age 42, he had amassed the equivalent of $15 billion, becoming the highest-paid athlete of all time. This third-century mosaic shows a charioteer from the white team: Diocles, who lived in the second century, spent most of his career racing for the red team. Sources:
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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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Here are four rats rowing a tiny boat, painted in a 14th-century French book. Such an image calls to mind the rats that spread the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis during the worst pandemic in human history: the Black Death. The theory goes that rats carrying the infected fleas spread the bubonic plague that ended up
This past September of 2022, the planet Jupiter was both in opposition (opposite the sun relative to earth) and at its closest position to earth (known as perigee), and the planet is still very bright in our evening skies. Medieval people had a great deal of lore surrounding each of the planets, and Jupiter’s was
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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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 Medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” survived from a single manuscript which has three other poems, probably all by the same author. Scholars have long attempted to guess at who this writer might have been, but his written work certainly far surpassed the childlike illustrations in British Library Cotton Nero A x.
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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
Viking Women, Weaving, and Power Read More »
In the northern mountains of Spain in the region of Aragon lies the tiny Medieval village of Trasmoz. Once it held 10,000 people, but now there are fewer than 100: except for June, when a festival called “Feria de Brujeria” celebrates the fact that the town is known for its history of witches and being
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This lead Viking-era pendant of Norse God Thor’s hammer was unearthed this past summer of 2023 near the Swedish town of Ysby. Similar to others such as the 10th-Ödeshög pendant shown in the second image, it speaks to a continuity of the Norse religion in an area where Christianity was steadily encroaching. Like the crucifixes
