Source: Wikipedia
Medieval chronicles contain a great deal of material that is obviously not literal. Portents, marvels, signs and wonders appear regularly, and historians read them as they were meant —…
There is a specific social awkwardness that everybody has encountered from one side and nobody from both.
Visiting an unfamiliar house, you register its smell immediately — not unpleasant necessarily,…
The useful question about any symmetrical thing is not why somebody made it that way but what process would produce that arrangement without anybody deciding. Here are sixteen answers.
1.…
Source: Wikipedia
Most archaeological finds are objects. Something survives, it is recovered, and it can be examined, measured and displayed.
Occasionally the significant find is not an object at all but…
Source: Wikipedia
There is an assumption that pre-modern financial systems were crude, and it is worth testing against an example.
The English Exchequer — the department handling royal revenue — kept…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a category of historical decision that turns out correct for reasons nobody involved understood, and this is the clearest example in the history of public works.
A…