As long as humanity has had beliefs in a higher power, the use of magic, spells, curses, and incantations have featured widely across cultures. A number of influential texts or ‘grimoires’ (textbooks...
An incredibly significant medieval book of manuscripts has been returned to Ireland . The Book of Lismore is a collection of hand-written texts that was donated by an aristocratic English family to...
The thought of a lost library is a tantalizing one, as one can speculate and imagine the kind of knowledge it might provide to the person who finds it. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that there...
Archaeologists in England have unearthed in excess of 10,000 medieval artifacts in central Oxford and every single one of them is providing a clearer picture of day to day life at Oxford University,...
In an unprecedented incident in 2017, a group of unknown thieves rappelled down into a specially secured warehouse in Feltham, Middlesex in the early hours of January 30 th and made off with 160 rare...
The Maya were a powerful pre-Columbian civilization who thrived between AD 600 – AD 800. They were literate, had a complex language including pictograms, glyphs, and phonetic representations. They...
Pergamum, Anatolia, now the modern Turkish town of Bergama, was one of the most important cities in the Hellenistic Greek age. It was culturally rich, with an extensive library at its heart. The city...
Adding to the list of names among the greatest libraries of the past, the Bayt al-Hikmah (translated as ‘The House of Wisdom’) was established in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Empire, around...
Virgil, in his Aeneid , describes Deiphobe, better known as the Sibyl of Cumae, as coming from “a hundred perforations in the rock, a hundred mouths from which the many utterances rush” (43-5, 163)...
The ancient monastery of Mont Sainte-Odile in the French region of Alsace is steeped in mystery. From secret tunnels to the strange disappearance of more than 1,000 ancient books, it has many a story...
Iceland’s strong love of literature is a source of amazement to many people. In an era of declining book sales around the world, this small North Atlantic island continues to publish and sell more...
A collection of 13,000 occult and witchcraft books has been found recently in the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague. It belonged to Heinrich Himmler, a SS Nazi chief. The collection...
Throughout history a large number of books have been banned only because they contained various uncomfortable truths or tales. Such books have been systematically hunted down and destroyed by...
The discovery that won the latest Nobel Prize for Medicine wouldn’t have been much of a revelation to doctors in ancient China. Pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou established that the compound...
When Europeans arrived in the New World, they did not only kill people with war, slavery and disease, they also attempted to destroy the cultures of the native peoples. Among so many cultural...
Pseudomonarchia Daemonum , also known as the False Hierarchy of Demons , is a great compendium from the 16 th century dictating the names of sixty-nine demons. The title itself indicates that the...