“William found a remarkable hill, a fragment of a mountain” and “called it Myzithras because they shouted it thus, and he made it into a glorious castle.” Ch...

In 1860 the chairman of the Select Committee on the British Museum, questioning Sir Anthony Panizzi, the museum’s principal librarian, prompted: “You have al...

In the late third century Diocletian sent his colleague Maximian to Gaul to subdue the “country folk and bandits whom the inhabitants call the Bagaudae”. The...

Whenever the eunuch is invoked, it’s almost always in the sense that he is a distortion or perversion of nature that only a people as dastardly as the Byzant...

Reading a church can be a daunting prospect. Weird Latinate or Greek-based terms are deployed to outline liturgical functions with even odder names in a trai...