The tradition of gift-giving in human history resonates deeply this time of year, and although we usually think of this custom as a joyful one celebrating bonds of affection, love, and friendship, anthropologists have studied it in other contexts. Shown here in this 15th-century engraving by Northern Renaissance artist Martin Schongauer is a legend famous […]
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Here is a rare painting of Frau Minne, the Goddess-Allegory of Love popular among German-speaking Europeans in the Middle Ages. Her actions radically contradict the ways we often think women were expected to behave: Minne is forceful and violent, and she is always victorious. Here in this 14th-century coffer she is about to pierce the
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Merry Christmas! Krampus traditions linking a perhaps pre-Christian hairy goat-demon with Santa got revived in Eastern European countries by the early 1900s. Krampus played the bad cop to Santa’s good guy, beating bad children with birch switches and dragging them down to hell with chains. Some traditions are best left in the past. . .
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One of the best things about your day today is not waking up to ergot poisoning. Unfortunately, this condition caused great suffering to many throughout history. In the Middle Ages, people called it “St Anthony’s Fire,” after a 4th-century saint who was said to have endured hallucinations and burning sensations — two of the many
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Although this photo doesn’t do the view justice, it does show the railroad tracks (if you squint, in the lower right foreground) that made the portmanteau village of Pen Mar possible. Now a virtual ghost town straddling the Pennsylvania and Maryland border and adjacent to the Appalachian Trail, Pen Mar got its start in 1877
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It’s a common joke that the human genitalia have their own minds that act like second brains, but some Early Modern scientists evidently thought the opposite was also true. The seventeenth- and sixteenth century anatomists Thomas Willis, Matteo Realdo Columbo, Isbrand van Diemerbroeck, and Thomas Bartholin named different parts of the body’s seat of intelligence
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The Ancient Roman deity Janus appears as a two-headed God. With one face looking backwards in time and the other forward, he was appropriately worshipped at the start of the New Year. Janus was invoked for good luck in all new undertakings, and today many of us continue a long tradition when we set out
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It’s almost New Year’s Eve, a time when many people gather for celebrations throughout the night and into the wee hours of the morning. Rationally we know that nothing really changes when the clock rolls from 11:59 to midnight – The new calendar year is a human invention, and yet we are conditioned to feel
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You are looking at a sixteenth-century Japanese scroll showing pictures of “tsukumogami:” discarded household items that become angry at their lack of use and turn into animated demons. My favorite story from this genre of folk tales comes from another sixteenth-century work known as the Sufuku-ji scrolls. It begins with a haunting warning about how
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I hope you’re not too hungry as you read this, because it’s time to talk about cannibalism. Dear readers, although we might recoil now at the thought of consuming human flesh, it turns out that this practice is extremely ancient: cases among Homo Neanderthalis, another early human species called Homo Antecessor, and Homo Sapiens have
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This is Michaelangelo’s portrait of the Biblical prophet Moses, designed for the tomb of the powerful and controlling patron of the great artist, Pope Julius II. Completed in 1545, Michelangelo’s sculpture immediately causes viewers pause: Moses has horns protruding from his head. The bestial qualities of a horned animal long resonated among European Christians as
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Two years ago, researchers published findings concerning DNA samples taken from the Early Medieval York Gospels. Manuscripts from this era are extremely rare: it was written around 990 and lavishly illustrated. By taking a simple eraser, scholars used a technique called “eZooMS,” which allowed them to sample DNA from the pages without damaging them. A
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You are looking at Pinchot Lake, the defining geographical feature of the Gifford Pinchot State Park. A short drive south from the Harrisburg state capital, this recreational area is named after America’s famed environmental conservationist. Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) worked with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and female conservationist Mira Lloyd Dock to promote the
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Parents of kids besotted by the Disney channel might roll their eyes at how successfully the movies have mesmerized their children. But the practice of telling fanciful stories featuring youths who must navigate magic and non-human creatures is quite old. The genre owes its name, _Les Contes des Fees_, “Fairy Tales” to one Madame d’Aulnoy,
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This illustration from the late 12th century shows a woman spinning, taking the wool from her distaff and winding it around the spindle. Not shown here is a baby in a cradle at her feet. Multi-tasking like this has been part and parcel for women throughout history: we have led busy lives. While much women’s
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Flu season is upon us, and I still need to get my flu shot. If the unfortunate happens and I do get sick, _The Distaff Gospels_ has some words of healing advice for me.Readers of yesterday’s post will recall that the _Distaff Gospels_ is a book of women’s lore from the 15th century, and has
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Check out this early selfie: it’s a first-century CE Ancient Roman fresco showing a woman looking at herself in a mirror. The image is a rare subject in early art, largely attributable to the fact that mirrors were extremely expensive throughout most of human history. Often, they were made of polished stone, like obsidian, or
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On a lovely January morning, I walked the LeTorte trail, which runs along the eponymous nature preserve. LeTorte’s name comes from an early 18th-century French-Swiss explorer who built cabins in the area after receiving the land from William Penn. James and his wife Ann fought with the American Indians (probably Shawnee) in 1720, but
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This is the most famous Loch Ness Monster photo in existence. Taken in 1934, it wasn’t officially shown to be a hoax for another sixty years. Turns out, someone purchased a toy submarine and added a putty head to create this image. Much evidence has been put forth to suggest that there is not a
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Today at Shippensburg University I attended a fascinating talk by scholar Dr. Joshua Eyler, who presented on his new book _How Humans Learn_ (you can see him on the second photo). Eyler spoke about the ways science and evolution can help us best understand ways to obtain new knowledge.The aristocratic clergy writing books at the
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