The Censored Witches’ Flying Potion (That Promised a “Lover”)

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“Rub this on your skin, get a lover.” That’s not clickbait. It’s a sixteenth-century recipe, written in all seriousness by the Italian natural philosopher Giambattista Della Porta. He recorded the formula for an ointment, said to be used by witches. The claim was that it could induce an extraordinary phenomenon: it would make the witch believe she was flying and …

The title page of the 1658 English translation of Magia Naturalis, which published the book's alarming recipes for faking virginity in full.

Fake Virginity: The Painful Renaissance ‘Cures’ They Sold Women

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CW: “Historical discussion of sexual coercion, blood & bodily harm” In Renaissance Europe, failing to bleed on your wedding night could cost a woman her dowry, her marriage – even her safety. So, of course, someone offered a solution. A 17th-century English translation of an Italian book called Magia Naturalis puts it like this: In case that wasn’t clear: the …

Before TikTok: History’s ORIGINAL Influencers

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Scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube… it feels like influencers are everywhere, a thoroughly modern invention, right? But what if I told you the original influencers weren’t crafting viral videos, but commanding royal courts, dazzling high society, and shaping empires centuries ago? And the recent Met Gala? It gave us a perfect glimpse into one fascinating branch of this long history …

The Yellow Wallpaper: Behind the ‘Madness’ in the Pattern

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Alone in her sick room in the late 19th century, a woman writes: What is going on? Still, she thinks:  The narrator of this story is being treated by her husband, John, who is a doctor. Victorian medicine had some rather peculiar ideas about women’s mental health. Take, for instance, the notion that intellectual stimulation could damage a woman’s reproductive …

Ephelia: Unmasking a Seventeenth-Century Feminist Voice

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Do you love women writers who write with humour and irony? Who criticise their society in a satirical, tongue-in-cheek way? Do you like a good literary mystery? Let me introduce you to the elusive Ephelia – yes, that’s Ephelia with an ‘E’, not Hamlet’s Ophelia with an ‘O’. Ephelia was a 17th-century poet & playwright whose identity has puzzled historians and …

The Medici-Tornabuoni Birth Tray.

Birth Trays in Renaissance Italy and Motherhood

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What if a seemingly ordinary wooden tray could tell the story of a society’s rebirth after one of the deadliest epidemics in history? “In the year of our Lord 1348, there happened at Florence, the finest city in all Italy, a most terrible plague…” So starts Boccaccio’s Decameron, one of the most celebrated texts in medieval literature. The Decameron tells us much about the …

Lucy in her vampire form from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, showing her dramatic transformation.

Dracula: Blood Transfusions and Control Over Women

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Content Warning: Blood, animal cruelty, sexual assault. ‘She wants blood, and blood she must have or die’ – this is one of my favourite passages from Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterpiece, Dracula. (And there are several!) So, let’s set the scene. After a series of sleepwalking episodes, Lucy, one of the main characters in the novel, is left mysteriously exsanguinated: she’s …

Renaissance women engaging in alchemical practices, showcasing their involvement in scientific endeavors.

Alchemy in the Renaissance: The Mysterious Isabella Cortese

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How do you become an alchemist? This is what a 16th-century book suggests: This advice is said to come from a woman; it’s from The Secrets of the Lady Isabella Cortese, published in Venice in 1561. But what does this book, and the mysterious writer to whom it is attributed, tell us about women, science, alchemy, authorship, authority and expertise …

Portrait of Caterina Sforza, attributed to Lorenzo di Credi.

Caterina Sforza: The Alchemy and Power of a Renaissance Icon

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Imagine you are the ruler of an Italian city in the Renaissance; your husband has been murdered and your children were taken hostage by your political enemies, who hope to take control of your fortress. Yet the people inside are still loyal to you and are not surrendering. So, leaving your children with your enemies, you go inside the castle, …