Man of Science, Man of God
In The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley parodied the dogmatic belief held by many in Victorian England that faith and reason are incompatible.
Shakespeare’s First Published Work
Celebrated for his plays, Shakespeare actually opened his writing career with a derivative poem.
Himmelsbriefe: Heaven-Sent Chain Letters
For more than a thousand years, people have used letters allegedly written by Christ as both doctrinal evidence and magical charms.
The Women Who Preached in Their Sleep
Was sleep-preaching an ingenious way for oppressed women to subvert the social order through somniloquy?
Chivalric Romance, Meet Gunpowder Reality
The manly knight wouldn't have lasted a day in sixteenth-century combat. So why was he so popular as a literary figure at the time?
“Beating the Bounds”
How did people find out where their local boundaries were before there were reliable maps?
America, Lost and Found at Wounded Knee
Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.