Death: Did you mean...?

People in the Middle Ages have acquired something of a bad reputation when it comes to cleanliness, especially the peasantry. However, despite the general lack of running water and other modern amenities, there were common expectations of...

Medieval European Manorialism (Manorial System) was the system where rural society was arranged around a manor house or castle on an estate. The smallest units of these estates were called manors. Free and unfree labourers here worked the...

St. Anthony's Fire (SAF) is an illness brought on by the ingestion of fungus-contaminated rye grain causing ergot poisoning (ergotism). The disease's common name derives from the medieval Benedictine monks dedicated to that saint who offered...

The River Ganges, also known as the Ganga, flows 2,700 km from the Himalaya mountains to the Bay of Bengal in northern India and Bangladesh. Regarded as sacred by Hindus, the river is personified as the goddess Ganga in ancient texts and...

Unlike the rich corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, no such “guidebooks” from Mesopotamia detail the afterlife and the soul's fate after death. Instead, ancient Mesopotamian views of the afterlife must be pieced together...

The Black Death was a truly devastating plague that ravaged Medieval Europe between 1347 and 1352, killing somewhere between twenty-five and thirty million people. The bubonic plague causes swelling of lymph nodes in the groin and the armpits...

Throughout history, epidemics and pandemics of plague and other diseases have caused widespread panic and social disorder even, in some instances, when the people of one region were aware of a pervasive infection elsewhere. In the case of...

Historian Barry Strauss, author of 'The Death of Caesar,' explores the political, military, and social motivations behind history's most famous murder.

A public lecture by Robert Ritner, professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute in Breasted Hall. Dr. Ritner is a world-renowned expert on Egyptian religion and mythology, and his lecture focused on the enduring power and appeal of...

Disease has been a part of the human condition since the beginning of recorded history – and no doubt earlier – decimating populations and causing widespread social upheaval. Among the worst infections recorded is the plague which...