In Rome during the first and second centuries, explicit evidence abounds about heterosexual desire for women, such as in the story of Europa, featured here in this first-century fresco from Pompeii. Another appears in the novel __Leucippe and Clitophon_, which relays the repeated abductions of the heroine Leucippe, who successfully escapes and consumates her romance […]
Ancient Roman Female Homosexuality Read More »
Slavery in the Ancient Roman Empire was an entrenched and ubiquitous part of life. Around one of every seven people in the second century was enslaved, and that fact shaped the social lives of Romans in all sorts of ways, including how they thought about sex.This is a sketch of a fourth century CE slave
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The prevalence of slavery in Ancient Rome impacted the sex lives of Roman men, both free and slave. One of the ways it did was by how people thought about male-to-male sexual intercourse.In Classical Athens, there was a common practice of pederasty among men of different ages: an older man was a sort of tutor
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The Ancient Romans were not shy about generating erotic sex scenes in their art and literature. In the Late Empire of the second and third centuries, so much evidence surrounding the pleasures of sex abounded that it can be easy to imagine the Romans (well, the male citizen Romans) solely as pleasure-seeking sensualists.But we also
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Here is a picture of the Flemish artist Hans Memling’s _Allegory of Chastity_, and although it was done in the 15th century, it testifies to the long-term effects of Christianity’s radical sexual revolution that had begun a millennium and a half before.Here you see Chastity, besieged by the lions of sexual behavior that would threaten
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The Italian city of Ravenna boasts the highest concentration of mosaics from the Late Antique period of Roman history. And featured here you see one of the most famous — a scene from the Procession of the Virgins in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. Set against the tiled background of shimmering gold, these two women calmly march forward.
Portion of the Italian Mosaic “The Procession of the Virgins in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo” Read More »
Pennsylvania is known for its atypical religious history, but when you start to investigate, you begin to realize just how unusual this history is. For instance, there is a legacy of German Christian mysticism extending back to hermits who lived in the 1600s. In central Pennsylvania, this expression was dramatically marked by the foundation of
German Christian Mysticism – The Ephrata Cloister Read More »
My most favorite ghost stories these days come from historian Robin Fleming’s new book, _The Material Fall of Roman Britain_. Nothing captures the immediacy of the disappeared Empire in the hinterlands of Rome’s remote northwest like it. Practically none of the evidence from this time comes from written documents, so Fleming utilizes archaeology to tell
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Where I live in south-central Pennsylvania, farmers and outdoor enthusiasts are well aware of new invasive species posing a threat to our forests and crops, like the Emerald ash borer and the Spotted lanternfly. It is easy to be lured into a myopic idea that the migration of fauna and flora mostly affects humans today
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How you carry and cook your food and water has been the most important question of the day for most humans since Neolithic times. (A quick backpacking trip can serve to remind oneself of this truth.) So when containers change, it means your life does too, and this was certainly the case for the British
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Today’s post is about a single flower, a kind that no longer exists. But at one point, the “Semper Augustus” tulip swayed stock markets, comprised the fortunes of rich men, and exemplified the highest expression of commodified beauty.From 1600 to about 1720, the Dutch Republic commanded the highest per capita income in the world, garnered
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Renaissance Italy’s wealthiest groups competed for power in many ways, amongst them through women’s jewelry. It was a complex Game-of-Thrones-esque time, when many different ambitions came into play — the moralizing Franciscans who preached against conspicuous displays of wealth, the male merchants who often vied with the nobles for political control, and the elite women
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You probably recognize the bird in this 13th-century Medieval illumination as the legendary Phoenix, who lived for 500 years and then cast itself into flames in order to be reborn. Medieval people had never seen such beasts, of course, but loved to imagine that fantastical creatures lived far away in exotic lands — and the
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Lots of animals love to play — many of us mammals will forgo food and sleep just to take part in exploratory fun. Humans have excelled at a specific type of play that comes in the form of games.Games are more formal than most types of play. They involve rules and have uncertain outcomes .
Ancient Chinese Board Game “Go” Read More »
Most of us cherish the beauty of wilderness, and I venture that a lot of our feelings come from our knowledge that humans have put the environment in great danger — therefore, any non-human engineered landscapes we now consider especially precious.But people have not always looked at the non-human world in the same way: although
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Those of us who love travelling to new places enjoy the sensation of adventure and the way it makes us open to learning new things, but few of us today risk our lives for such experiences. However, Maria Sibylla Merian was different. In 1699, this affluent 52-year old divorced mother of two left her affluent
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King Arthur never actually lived, but stories about him were extremely popular in Medieval Europe. One of the most well known today is _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_. The poem survives in only one manuscript that dates to the late 14th century. The language is Middle English, but belongs to a conservative rural dialect
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This painted screen by American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing is representative of the Aesthetic movent in art that emerged out of the mid-19th century. Posing itself in opposition to repressive and overbearing strains of the Victorian culture of the age, Aesthetics valued sensuous and beautiful artwork. Conservative Victorians turned their noses up at Aestheticism, but
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This sweet painting by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from 1854 is called _Grandmother with Three Grandchildren_. In it , three cheery young girls surround a seated older woman, eyes gazing on some scrap of paper she is holding. All four females are comfortable with each other, and wear relaxed and happy expressions. The image of
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This is the title page for one of the most fascinating and popular books of the Italian Renaissance – _De rerum natura_, or, _On the Nature of Things_, by the Ancient Roman Lucretius. The expense of the artwork and skill of the miniaturist – the copier was an Augustinian friar for Pope Sixtus IV dating
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