This is a section of a 13th-century copy of an Ancient Roman map from about 400 CE. Called the _Tabula Peutingeriana_, it depicts the intricate system of roads and passages that made up the official courier service connecting the Empire. This infrastructure was known as the _Cursus Publicus_, and lasted for centuries as the primary […]
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This is Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel-prize-winning architect of the famed equation with his name — along with silhouettes of his famous alive-and-dead cats. Born in Austria on 1887, Erwin’s chronic struggles with tuberculosis had him confined in a sanitorium in the 1920’s: it was during his stay that he developed his famous wave equation. Many conclusions
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The term “swan song” comes from an Ancient notion that swans are mute throughout their lives, but sing a beautiful last melody as they are about to die. As far back as the Roman Pliny the Elder (in 77 CE), people have known this is not the case, but regardless, a swan song refers to
This is one of the many stellar views at Hawk Mountain Preserve in eastern Pennsylvania, one of the best places in the northern United States to watch many native hawk species in their migrations and habitats. This beautiful wildlife sanctuary was made possible because of two people in particular. First, the ornithologist Robert Pough —
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Scientific genome analysis has shaped history once again with a recent study published in the science journal _Nature Communications_. This painting of death strangling a victim of the plague gets at the horror caused by the infamous Black Death, a pandemic that wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. By studying
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The leader of all the Gods in Norse mythology, Odin, was routinely accompanied by his ravens named Huginn (“thought”) and Muninn (“mind”), appearing together in visual records as early as the sixth century The names of these birds called attention to Odin’s vast knowledge — the medieval Icelandic sources have Odin’s ravens fly all over
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I adore Early Modern Science! Through no fault of their own — since genes hadn’t been discovered but everyone in Europe knew about horrible parasitic body worms — some biologists thought of sex and propagation in very different ways than we do now. For instance, _preformationists_ thought that there were very small people inside either
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Sometimes Medieval art gets weirder the more you look at it. For instance, take these scenes of an animal fleeing from a hunter: the creature isn’t just turning his head back — he is actually biting off his testicles to throw them to his pursuer. Medieval people thought that beavers regularly did this (I know:
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In the background you are hearing the 15th-century English Christmas “Boar’s-Head Carol,” and looking at a closeup of a boar hunt from the month of December in the lavishly illustrated _Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry_ (circa 1440). In my home state of Pennsylvania, deer rifle season is heralded by hunters as an important
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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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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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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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In the Middle Ages, the lens of Christianity permeated the world view to a degree unimaginable today. We can see this with the descriptions and illustrations of animals like the lion, whom many authors considered king of the beasts. And, since they thought that God/Christ ruled over the universe, lions were compared symbolically to the
This little beauty is an artist’s rendition of a Placoderm – an extinct fish from close to 500 million years ago which had a significant feature that has played out into the lives of all humans today. Early fishes from this geological period had jaws, and evolutionary scientists have recognized jawed vertebrate fish as the
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The COVID outbreaks in American meat-packing warehouses have recently cast attention to the frankly horrifying working conditions in these plants. Like coal-mining and cesspool-cleaning, the practice of animal slaughter and butchery has a long history being considered an undesirable profession — it is one that most of society benefits from, even as the general population
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Pesky flies torment this poor dog in a Medieval manuscript from the early 1300s. Then and now, we have seen these insect vermin as an annoyance. In the Middle Ages, however, flies were associated with something far more sinister — demons.So it was that in the fourteenth century, a poor woman called Ermine de Reims
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This sculpture by Paul Lancz from 2014 is one of the many public works of art always on display in the city of Montreal. Entitled “La Tendresse/ Tenderness,” it captures a ubiquitous display of affection between mother and child. This physical gesture of a mother kissing her baby has been a hallmark of affection uniting
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Along a particularly rocky portion of the Tuscarora Trail in Perry County, Pennsylvania, is situated a 3,037-acre wildlife sanctuary established by Florence W. Erdman in memory of her mother. The F.J. Reineman Wildlife Sanctuary dates from 1966, and the trust establishing this land gave it to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which is just near
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Since the year 2000, the Audubon Society has been involved with the site shown here called Hawk Watch. Located at Waggoner’s Gap along the Kittatinny Ridge just north of the town Carlisle in south-central Pennsylvania, Hawk Watch has a legacy of being a major corridor for thousands of hawks, eagles, and falcons who traverse across
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Here come two points about human evolution – the first is one that I imagine is not surprising to you, but the second may be, and might make you wince.First, the animal in this photo is not an ancestor of us Homo Sapiens. We did not evolve from apes but share a common progenitor that
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