A neopagan visual archive meant to rival the iconic power of the Christian West.

When the Bristol Channel flooded in 1607, it was not just one of the worst natural disasters in British history, it was also a sign, for many, that they had strayed from the path of God. Erik Crnkovich examines the overlap of miraculous weather and the early modern printing industry, which cultivated a thirst for all things occult, exotic, and odd.

The design for a difficult-to-interpret monument that was never intended to be built.

A book more or less responsible for the revival of Flat Earth theories in the modern period.

Indian images that grapple with the unbearable fact that lover and beloved are not one.

In the late nineteenth century, visitors to Maine observed something strange: French-Canadian lumberjacks who, at the slightest stimulus, seemed to jump, strike out with their limbs, or mimic languages they could not speak. Ross Bullen introduces us to these so-called "Jumping Frenchmen" and to their greatest investigator, George M. Beard, who saw a link in their behavior between religious frenzy and neurasthenia.

Postcards that summon medieval grotesques and brightly coloured folk art, but also feel distinctly modern.

A history of the Evil One, from the earliest times to the present.

Carl Jung's copy of an alchemical hoax, purporting to detail the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone.

Erasmus called them "little moons" and George Puttenham praised them as "figures of tolerable disorder" (if used not too often "nor too thick"). For Philip Sidney, they were simply indispensable. Florence Hazrat introduces us to the uncontested early modern king of brackets and to his romance Arcadia, which abruptly ends, like its author's life, hanging on a parenthesis.

Choice excerpts from Leaves of Grass that speak to Whitman's conception of immortality.

Early surgical diagrams that present patients prying themselves open for our anatomical gaze.

An illuminated Persian manuscript about customs, culture, and caste, written by an enigmatic figure of the early British Raj.

"Oh, if I could only pray", Luther once said of his dog Tölpel, "the way this dog watches the meat". Attending to attentive canine figures in half a dozen paintings by Paolo Veronese, Thomas W. Laqueur explores the work of an artist whose love of dogs landed him in hot water with the Inquisition.

"A Cat-astrophe" came on the tail end of an odd 1918 boom in cat-themed music.

By manipulating paper flaps, the child could turn Adam into Eve into a mermaid, a lion into a griffin into an eagle — all while learning about the inevitability of death.

Vibrant textiles from the dazzling Timurid metropolis of Bukhara.

Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users.

Photographs from when Atlantic City beaches featured artists ornately sculpting sand.

A Zoroastrian text about serpents translated by the President of the Bombay Anthropological Society.

Circular maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness.

Pompous know-it-alls were once a mainstay of mockery on the Italian stage. Arnoud Visser investigates this stock character of the pedant and his association with individual superiority, social distinction, and sexual transgression, finding a form of satire that took aim at the Renaissance humanist's erudition and lofty ideals.

Cover designs for José Carlos Mariátegui's radical Lima-based magazine.

Selections from a peculiar British journal that focus on the peculiarities of British monarchs.

Diagrams from a lost Urdu manuscript illustrating the propitious days and directions for travel.

Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, Louis Pope Gratacap's The New Northland (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting. Richard Fallon explores this "lost world" novel, finding a work as interested in cutting-edge science as it was in paying dues to its generic precursors.

69 images of kite flying from across 5 centuries and some 10 countries.

Paintings from an era when Venetians brawled on bridges.

A philosophical system and a practical guide for the cultivation of dramatic genius.

Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Soil.

Legal infographics that reflect a Turkish nation in flux.

In the Middle Ages, rumours spread across Europe of a strange hybrid creature, half-animal, half-plant, known as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. A hoax based on fern rhizomes? A euphemism for culled fetal lambs? Or perhaps a medieval misapprehension of cotton? Thom Sliwowski traces the roots of this fabled zoophyte.

Photographs of flowers by an advocate of California's beauty.

Historical predictions from the Scottish Nostradamus.

Photographs and films of a forgotten pastime.

Before Linotype revolutionised typesetting in the 1880s, compositors set texts by hand — and they set them fast. Alex Wright rediscovers the thrilling world of typesetting races, which drew crowds in the thousands, offered huge cash prizes, and helped women "Swifts" fight for workplace equity.

A Dutch physician's encounter with acupuncture.

A treatise on a powder that can cure wounds at a distance.

The working class undergirds everything in this cartoon of capitalist society.

What allowed occultism to blossom in the United States at the turn of the 20th century? Linotype machines, cheap pulp paper, and newly improved postal networks. Allan Johnson investigates the forgotten history and (still living) world of mail-order magic.

Lantern slide of man battling bug.

An early contribution to drug literature, in which a man came to be fashioned out of wood.

Announcing an exciting new book series!

A modernist adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe. One of the first avant-garde films from America.

The creator of WNYC's Public Song Project on creativity, copyright, and the public domain.

As populations flocked to city centres in the 19th century, church cemeteries began to overflow with the dead. Roger Luckhurst exhumes the history of this period, when anatomists fuelled a body-snatching trade led by "resurrection men" and reformers sought alternatives to the toxic urban graveyards and their pestilent fumes.

Marvels, wonders, and monstrosities: something between a medieval bestiary and a scientific treatise on birth defects.

One of the most elaborate works of literary insult ever written.

Moneymaking caricatures by a teenage Monet, before he turned to Impressionism.

In early modern Europe, around the time when lenses began to bring the world (and heavens) into newfound focus, patients started appearing in medical records with a particular ailment: a firm belief that they were made of glass. Tamara Sanderson investigates the source and manifestation of this delusion, and finds a psychological idiom that once carried the weight of what could otherwise not be said.