Love and the Longevity of Charms
By Laura Mitchell For a long time I have been interested in the endurance/longevity of charms and recipes over extended periods of time, a topic which Alun Withey addressed in a recent post. The major...
View ArticleA Post-Summer Solstice Round-Up of Blog Posts
This post does not fall within the strictest definition of “recipes”, but since it was just the summer solstice, the best time of year for magic and pagan celebrations, it seemed like an appropriate...
View ArticleA History of Science Spectacular in Manchester
By Laura Mitchell A few weeks ago I was fortunate to present a paper at the 24th International Congress on History of Science, Technology and Medicine (iCHSTM), which was held at the University of...
View ArticleThe Disappearance of Charms from a Fifteenth-Century Notebook
By Laura Mitchell Studying medieval charms can bring to light a lot of intriguing social practices and help us to understand what sorts of everyday worries occupied the mind of a medieval person. It...
View ArticleCharms on Twitter
By Laura Mitchell I decided to do something a little different for this post. Rather than write about what I find interesting about charms, I asked Twitter what people wanted to know about medieval...
View ArticleThe Medieval Invisible Man
By Laura Mitchell As I promised in my last post, today I want to touch on a magical recipe with ties to some interesting sources. One of the manuscripts I focused on for my dissertation research is...
View ArticleNew Resource for Late Medieval English Magic
By Laura Mitchell Late Medieval English Magic: English Manuscripts Containing 15th-century Magical Texts is a project born out of the dissertation research I conducted at the Centre for Medieval...
View ArticleThe Acceptance of Charms in the Fifteenth Century
By Laura Mitchell For a while now I’ve been very interested in medieval people’s relationships with magic texts. What drew them to copy down their particular texts? Did they delight in the absurdities...
View ArticleHistory Carnival #139
We are very pleased to be hosting History Carnival #139 at the Recipes Project this month! We have a wealth of interesting posts to show you this month. Education and the teaching of history has been a...
View ArticleAnimal Charms in the Later Middle Ages
By Laura Mitchell For some reason animal charms in the medieval record are a rare breed. Secrets literature, magical experiments, and natural magic abound with animals as the subject (texts on virtues...
View ArticleEditing the Recipes Project – 5 Years On
By Laura Mitchell I was invited to join the Recipes Project by Lisa Smith in 2012 when I was a freshly minted medieval studies PhD working part-time at the University of Saskatchewan. I was lucky...
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