Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

…not the Loch by sceptics and they may have a point. Any other medieval accounts of beasties from the fringes of Europe? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com 30 April 2011:…

…and there are several striking examples of head-hunting in Europe well into historic times. Then, of course, if you cross the Atlantic there is scalping: a sport Beach examined on…

…apparently wandered from North Western Europe and ended up half a world away on the Silk Road to China. The evidence is admittedly not all that it could be. In…

***This is an image post, but as the image involves three dead people it is hidden below*** Germans led the suicide stakes in Second-World-War Europe. Whether it be Captain Langsdorff…

…wrong turn and blundered into the street where GP was despondently walking (with a pistol in his pocket) that the foundations of Europe started shaking. Princip was nineteen when he…

…continued. “I see, so your country must be situated in Asia?” “No, Hungary is part of Central Europe.” “I know that there is a war going on in Central Europe….

Why were witches, in the early modern period, women? The simple answer is that they were not. In all parts of Europe there were male witches and in some part…

…“Gender and Authority of Oral Witnesses in Europe (800-1300)” in _Transactions of the Royal Historical Society_ 6th Series Vol. 9 (1999), pp. 201-220, which (pp. 206-207) cites a land-grant to…

…have some kind of link with medieval European fairy beliefs? To make this problem as clear as possible, let’s take a parallel. Modern witches follow rituals and acts of magic…

…found through much of Europe. Most scholars were impressed, rather despite themselves, by Ginzburg’s brilliant analysis of the Benandanti (literally ‘the good goers’), while smirking at this theory of a…

…these institutions. In European history the dowry has been, of course, by far the most important. Traces of the dowry can be found in the Europe’s seeding bed: the Fertile…

Eastern Europe is full of unexpected populations. But few are as fun as the Gagauz, a proud and ancient people, based in what is today southern Moldova. Of course, most…

…worst western European conflicts were border skirmishes somewhere below the equator. Humanity had certainly come a long way from the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 when the young Winston Churchill…

…though, in a very real sense, Islam created Europe. However, would Europeans have been so successful had they felt unable to resist the transcendent wonder of a single all-conquering God?…

…it were discovered the bones of a man, and a little above it, as the body had been buried, a skull. The discovery was made on October 11th, 1833. The…