In recognition of St Valentine’s Day, I thought I had better write about demon sex in the Middle Ages. And Church theologians thought this actually happened, where demons could appear to a woman and have sex with her, making her pregnant. The character Merlin from Medieval Arthurian legend, was born from a woman and […]
Incubus and Succubus Read More »
It’s _Beowulf_ day in my Early Medieval Europe class, which I absolutely never get sick of — the bloody wrestling match of Beowulf and Grendel, the heartbreaking moment when Beowulf puts on his armor for the last time knowing that the dragon will kill him, the poet’s anxiety about blood feuds wrecking societies while nonetheless
This extraordinary scene from a 348-long muslin painting called “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley” was done by an American artist named John J. Egan in 1850. Looking carefully at the details, you can see that white Americans are using their black slaves to open up an American Indian burial mound. The
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Malaria is, like COVID, a largely preventable death: so long as the patient gets the right treatment at the right time. Many still do not have access to good medical care. For instance, in 2019, 409,000 people in Africa — mostly babies and toddlers — died of this disease. But malaria is not a
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In the 6th century, a wandering monk from Ireland known as St Gall settled down at a monastery in Switzerland. The Medieval account of his life written about three hundred years later tells much of the saint’s holiness, which brought him the ability to do miracles (like – order a bear to put a log
The Ogham Alphabet Read More »
This place looks bucolic and peaceful, no? Hard to believe it’s in a place called hell. This warrants an explanation. What you see here is a photo of part of the Valley of Hinnom, which is located outside of modern Jerusalem. Translated into the Aramaic language, that reads “Gehenna,” which does in fact refer
The Carpathian Mountains in Western Ukraine are some of the traditional homelands of the Hutsul peoples. Although their roots extend back hundreds of years, the term “Hutsul” first appears in written sources in 1816, when it was used by outsiders — in fact, the term’s etymology, although uncertain, might derive from the critical words for
In 1980 nearly 200 square miles of subarctic meadow, forest, peat bogs, and mountains were set aside to form the Carpathian National Nature Park. Home for many plants and animals in its Alpine climate, the Carpathian National Nature Park is located in Western Ukraine. The park’s great beauty includes glacial lakes and waterfalls, trees like
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This painting, from Ukrainian artist “AveOko”, is called “Mofar (3)”, and is a modern rendition of a figure from the Hutsul culture. The Hutsuls, a mountain- and- forest- dwelling people in Western Ukraine, consider mofars to be a type of shamen, using herbalism and folk magic. Mofars are considered neither evil nor good per se,
Modern Rendition of The Hutsuls Read More »
If you’re looking at this on your phone, it’s worth a moment to zoom in for this photo, to check out the texture of this finely woven gown. It’s a rare and valuable sample of a type of cloth called “Dhaka muslin,” and in its heyday, sold for vast sums and was esteemed as the
Dhaka Muslin Dress Read More »
Is this the face of the Slavic pagan Goddess Mokosh? If so, it would be one of the only remaining images of the powerful fertility deity whose influence eroded with the arrival of Christianity among the Kievan or Kyivan Rus in the 10th century. Much about this period is unknown, but the Kievan/Kyivan Rus
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Last Tuesday, Shippensburg University’s Department of History was delighted to host Professor Andrew Rotter, the Charles A. Dana Historian at Colgate University, as the speaker for our annual World History Lecture. His talk, “Olfactory Empire: Smell and the Empire in India and the Philippines,” looked at how British people experienced smell in their colonies. His
Olfactory Empire: Smell and the Empire in India and the Philippines Read More »
Yesterday I got to visit this home — it is where one Jennie Wade was shot and killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. You can actually still see the bullet hole in the doorway, made by the .58 caliber that killed her. Jennie Wade was 20 years old and (remarkably) the only civilian killed at
You are looking at a tiny opening, maybe three feet wide and two feet high, that peers into a hidden room against a stairwell that served as one of the first stopping points of the northbound path of America’s Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad, of course, was the illegal highway that American enslaved people
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
When you were a kid, did you learn that the first humans in the Americas crossed over the Bering land bridge about 12,000 years ago? Scholars have overturned this chronology completely, but it held away for many years in part because of this type of spear- or knife- head technology featured here, which is the
Clovis Culture and Migration Read More »
Here are three close up images from one of the most famous Chinese ink paintings ever created, the _Nine Dragons_, by Chen Rong. Chen Rong produced this handscroll in 1244, and it is massive — over ten meters long! (32 feet) The aesthetic qualities are immediately grasped even if you don’t know a darn
Nine Dragons by Chen Rong Read More »
Let’s talk about apotheoses in domes in art, shall we? This term comes from Ancient Greek and means “to make into a God.” Some heroes of Classical myths ended up ascending into the heavens to be with the other Olympians, such as Hercules. In Ancient Rome, emperors beloved by the Senate could be given the
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This strange building, rendered by contemporary artist Yasen Stoilov, is the moveable homestead of the legendary Baba Yaga of Slavic origin. Her stories probably go back much farther in time than our written sources permit us to see, so scholars have argued about the meaning of her tales. Baba Yaga appears as an old
Here’s an Ancient Egyptian tomb warning for you, just in case you were thinking of violating the resting place of the dead any time soon! In fact, these sorts of warnings were a lot more banal than figure in the imagination — more like “no trespassing” signs and less “curse of the mummy.”.
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