In 1851, a journalist named Henry Mayhew set out to document the lives of London’s working poor. What he found was astonishing. In the richest city in the world, thousands of people made their living by picking through other people’s trash. There were the bone-grubbers, who scavenged bones from gutters Read more
Yule logs, dried orange slices strung across your windows, decorated trees and simmer pots – all the marks of a neopagan holiday season! Wait, that’s Christmas, you say? Well, can’t it be both? A brief history of modern witchcraft, just in time for the winter solstice celebration. Orange Slices, Simmer Read more
In 1220 CE, St. Francis of Assisi tamed a ferocious werewolf terrorizing Gubbio, Italy—transforming “Brother Wolf” from savage beast to peaceful townsperson. But why did Christianity need to conquer the wolf? For millennia, werewolves have stalked the boundaries between civilization and savagery, humanity and monstrosity. From ancient Mesopotamian curses to Read more
How would you expect the Spanish Inquisition to treat a confessed witch? Does the suggestion conjure visions of fire, torture, and lots of murdered women? You aren’t alone – but this is a history we definitely need to unpack. Transcript for: Suffer a Witch to Live? Religious Conflict and Witchcraft Read more
Whispers and Wives’ Tales: A History of Women & Gossip in Premodern Society Written by Marissa Rhodes, PhD Recorded by Marissa Rhodes, PhD and Averill Earls, PhD Marissa: On September 9, 1838, a humble woman named Mary Grout descended the stairs outside of her cramped apartment on Rich-street in the Read more
Today, we’re telling the story of Anne Lister’s life in her own words with a special emphasis on her search for a “great love.” But along the way, we’ll also try to give you some examples of why her diaries have been deemed the most important documents in LGBTQ+ history. Read more
Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, colloquially known as the Ladies of Llangollen, lived together in North Wales for 51 years in a cottage that they renovated and designed to suit their tastes, on an estate where they built gravel footpaths wending through perfectly lush gardens planted with all manner of Read more
How and when scientists, doctors, and society started conceiving of the physical and emotional components of same-sex desire as a psychiatric condition of the mind? This was neither an ancient belief nor a postmodern (aka, post-1950) one, and it wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon either. Rather, the classification of same-sex Read more
The modern history of the body is marked by the coinciding pathologization of fatness AND the elevation of a new thin ideal. But one can make the argument that even after fatness was pathologized (deemed medically or psychologically abnormal), it was not necessarily stigmatized in any systematic way UNTIL its Read more
Historian Thomas Lacquer’s 1992 Making Sex argues that the one sex model dominated ancient and medieval medicine and popular ideas of sex, until, approximately, the Enlightenment, which gradually dispelled the one sex model in favor of the two-sex model–the strict dimorphic binary of sex, male and female, that most people Read more