Witchcraft: Did you mean...?

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, and anti-inflammatory medicines...

Dogs have been a part of the history of human beings since before the written word. The ancient temple of Gobekli-Tepe in Turkey, dated to at least 12,000 years BCE, has provided archaeologists with evidence of domesticated dogs in the Middle...

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 industries of the period...

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 love potions (philtra...

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 and Middle colonies, and Massachusetts Bay Colony passed...

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, and wore the same clothes as their contemporaries...

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 the deep admiration the Greeks...

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 for self-discovery, purpose...

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. Included here are six of the best-known...

It was supposed to be just another masquerade. As daylight turned to dusk on 28 January 1393, servants rushed through the halls of the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris, making the final arrangements for what promised to be an evening of fun and revelry...