While working on a graduate school paper on the mystical powers of coral, gemologist Anna Rasche ventured deep into the archives of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's library. Coral is the most powerful material to ward off the evil eye-a belief Italians have held since ancient times. Romans often gifted newborns coral amulets to prevent sickness and bad luck.
Abū Nuwās's poetry is sheer joy: it never fails to delight, surprise, and excite. His diwan, his collected poems, encompasses the principal early Abbasid poetic genres: panegyrics ( madīḥ), renunciant poems ( zuhdiyyāt), lampoons ( hijāʾ), hunting poems ( ṭardiyyāt), wine poems ( khamriyyāt), love poems ( ghazaliyyāt) to males ( mudhakkarāt) and females ( muʾannathāt), and transgressive verse ( mujūn).
In this book of moons, I am writing for people for whom the medieval world and its literatures and arts may be unfamiliar. I hope that in telling the stories of medieval moons, I also introduce these readers to the wonderful, mesmerising realm of medieval texts and images. But I also hope that this book may be useful to those with greater familiarity with medieval languages, literatures, and arts.
This freak storm eventually became the catalyst for Norway's most infamous witch trials-some of the most intense in Europe. Known as the Finnmark witchcraft trials, the proceedings continued throughout the 17th century. By 1692, 111 women and 24 men had been prosecuted for practicing witchcraft; 91 of these individuals, the vast majority of them women, were sentenced to death-a figure that represents around one-third of those condemned for the crime of witchcraft in the entirety of Norway's history.