Witchcraft: Did you mean...?

For the Greeks magic (mageia or goeteia) was a wide-ranging topic which involved spells and evil prayers (epoidai), curse tablets (katadesmoi), enhancing drugs and deadly poisons (pharmaka), amulets (periapta) and powerful...

Dogs were highly valued in ancient Rome, as they were in other cultures, and the Roman dog served many of the same purposes as it did in, say, Egypt and Persia - as hunters, guardians, and companions - but with...

Women in the Byzantine Empire (4th to 15th century CE) were, amongst the upper classes, largely expected to supervise the family home and raise children while those who had to work for a living did so in most of the...

Physicians in ancient Rome manufactured a wide variety of pharmaceuticals used to treat health concerns. Roman medicine was highly sophisticated, and Roman medical literature describes early antiseptics, narcotics...

Daily life in the Byzantine Empire, like almost everywhere else before or since, largely depended on one's birth and the social circumstances of one's parents. There were some opportunities for advancement based...

Dogs in ancient Greece are regularly depicted in art, on ceramics, in literature, and other written works as loyal companions, guardians, hunters, and even as great intuitive thinkers; all of these expressing...

From 985 until sometime in the 1400s, Greenland was the farthest, most isolated outpost of medieval Scandinavian society. For nearly 500 years, the Norse Greenlanders built churches, kept livestock...

Racialized chattel slavery developed in the English colonies of North America between 1640-1660 and was fully institutionalized by 1700. Although slavery was practiced in the New England...

Award-winning writer Madeline Miller's newest novel, Circe, tells the story of a sorceress who was once the onetime lover of the wily Odysseus. The heart of the novel is, nonetheless, that of a woman's yearning...

The literary works of William Shakespeare (l. c. 1564-1616) are often regarded as some of the most important in the English language. Alongside his famous plays, he also wrote poems, including 154 sonnets...