Day: April 27, 2020

From Poison Peddlers to Civic Worthies: Apothecaries in Georgian England

Posted on by

Examining the slow transition whereby reputable practitioners differentiated themselves from ‘quacks’. Abstract Trust is not automatically granted to providers of professional services. The doctors of Georgian England were, by later standards, deficient in medical knowhow, particularly before the mid-nineteenth-century scientific understanding of antiseptics, and much satirised. Nonetheless, the emergence of a coherent medical profession indicates[…]

“Invisible Little Worms”: Athanasius Kircher’s 17th-Century Study of the Plague

Posted on by

Kircher’s investigation can be seen as an important early step to understanding contagion. This article, “Invisible Little Worms”: Athanasius Kircher’s Study of the Plague, was originally published in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it please see: https://publicdomainreview.org/legal/ Introduction Living through the devastating Italian plague of 1656, the[…]

From Pandemic Then Grew Rebellion: The 1381 Revolt of the English Peasantry

Posted on by

There was a brief moment in 1381 when a better world struggled to be born, but the promise of that moment was deferred. On July 13th in 1381, a garrison of rebelling peasants from Norfolk, Essex, and Kent marched into London, the gates of the city left open either out of sympathy for the cause of[…]

Effects of the Black Death on Europe

Posted on by

The Plague ushered in a new understanding which found expression in movements such as the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. Introduction The outbreak of plague in Europe between 1347-1352 CE – known as the Black Death – completely changed the world of medieval Europe. Severe depopulation upset the socio-economic feudal system of the time but[…]

Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ as Augustan Totalitarian Propaganda in Ancient Rome

Posted on by

The Aeneid was written to praise Augustus by drawing parallels between him and the protagonist, Aeneas. Introduction The Aeneid has been analyzed by scholars of several different generations and schools of thought to try to determine the political commentary that Virgil had hoped to portray. The major schools of thought include the overarching idea that[…]

Coronation of the Diadochi: Monarchic Division after Alexander the Great

Posted on by

The Hellenistic world which had had no monarch for half a decade after Alexander suddenly had a plethora of them. The year 310 B.C. witnessed the extinction of the Argead line. Cassander had ordered the murder of Young Alexander IV and his mother Roxane, widow of Alexander the Great. The kingdom of Macedonia was now[…]