Literary Forgeries
After the Turks took Constantinople, when the learned Greeks were scattered all over Southern Europe, when many genuine classical manuscripts were recovered by the zeal of scholars, it was natural that literary forgery should thrive. As yet scholars were eager rather than critical; they were collecting and unearthing, rather than minutely examining the remains of classic literature. They had found so much, and every year were finding so much more, that no discovery seemed impossible. The lost books of Livy and Cicero, the songs of Sappho, the perished plays of Sophocles and Æschylus might any day be brought to light. This was the very moment for the literary forger.
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“Theire Soe Admirable Herbe” or, How the English Found Cannabis
In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machilipatnam to the scientific circles of London.
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The Revolutionary Colossus
As the French Revolution evolved, there emerged in print a recurring figure, the collective power of the people expressed as a single gigantic body — a king-eating Colossus. Explore the lineage of this nouveau Hercules, from Erasmus Darwin’s Bastille-breaking giant to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
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Woodcuts and Witches: The Folkloric Image of the Crone
Explore how the witch craze of early modern Europe, along with the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut, helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone — complete with cauldron and cats.
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Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816
It's now 200 years since "The Year Without a Summer", when a volcanic sun-obscuring ash cloud caused temperatures to plummet. Explore how it offers an alternative lens through which to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a book begun in its midst.
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Lofty Only in Sound: Crossed Wires and Community in 19th-Century Dreams
A curious case of supposed dream telepathy at the end of the US Civil War, in which old ideas about the prophetic nature of dreaming collided with loss, longing, and new possibilities of communication at a distance.
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Divining the Witch of York: Propaganda and Prophecy
Said to be spawn of the devil and possessed with prophetic insight, Mother Shipton was Yorkshire's answer to Nostradamus. She wielded power for centuries — from the Tudor courts, through civil war, to the spectre of Victorian apocalypse.
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