Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Inglis, Panorama of the Thames Georgian England takes flight…  

We have previously visited a remarkable passage in Malleus Maleficarum (1485) where that work’s author, Heinrich Kramer, describes a penis theft: or rather a penis illusion, because Kramer claims the penis is still ‘there’ but hidden. That account was apparently based on a witness: this account sounds like folklore. Finally, what shall we think about […]

A subtitle like How Jesus Led to Moon Golf promises a swish historical read. Beach immediately, in fact, thought of some of Graeme Donald’s history writing and books like Mussolini’s Barber and other stories of the unknown players who made history happen. This proved naïve. Mussolini’s Barber offers some cute episodes from recent history and Graeme […]

Just struck by what an amazing writer a hybrid Hemingway/Dahl would have been…

I may be repeating myself here but I love it…

Apologies for this one. But there is so obviously a good Roald Dahl short story to be had here, the tale needs to be shared. A murder has just been committed at Fontchristiann, near Briancon, France, under very extraordinary circumstances. Two sisters, named Marie and Catherine Ollagnier, aged 45 and 47 respectively, lived together in […]

At the chancellery: Nazi medals on the ground.

It is a story still told in hushed voices by archaeologists and classicists. Here is a recent version by Ken Albala from his (very good) lecture series on the history of food. So there is this revealing story of this group of Egyptologists and they find this perfectly sealed jar of honey and they open […]

Love the beard pulling…

There is lots of enjoyable nonsense about the Welsh and the Romans. The medieval Welsh genealogies are full of supposed Welsh connections to Caesar and other luminaries of the Empire. If memory serves correctly Gerald of Wales claims that the Welsh of his time sported Roman hairstyles (or was it their clean beardless faces that […]

This is a fascinating case of a well attested nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon: the connection of bogeymen to new technologies and foreigners (particularly when foreigners had, as in colonial societies, a great deal of power) [1862] A very curious superstition agitates at present in an alarming manner the native population [in Batavia, the Dutch East […]

Pythagoras (c. 570-480 BC) is a shadowy figure who stands at the beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition: though we are not sure really whether he ‘did’ philosophy at all. He is also often sold as a kind of long-haired Greek guru: though others have argued that he had little interest in religious matters. Still […]

Sherwin, Japan’s WWII Legacy Fascinating subject, let’s hope he delivers…

When was the last occasion on which a western government burnt one of its citizens alive judicially? Well, there are several examples from elsewhere in the world, including a North Korean who was supposedly executed by flame thrower in 2014 and various ISIS murders. However, in a western country on the instructions of a judge? […]

Feiring, For the Love of Wine Georgia, of course. Always wanted to try Georgian wine…