Yaroslav the Wise: Did you mean...?

The Book of the Duchess is the first major work of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (l. c. 1343-1400 CE), best known for his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, composed in the last twelve years of his life and left unfinished at his death...

In ancient Egypt, if a woman were having difficulty conceiving a child, she might spend an evening in a Bes Chamber (also known as an incubation chamber) located within a temple. Bes was the god of childbirth, sexuality, fertility, among...

The Myth of Etana is the story of the Sumerian antediluvian King of Kish who ascends to heaven on an eagle to request the Plant of Birth from the gods so that he might have a son. Etana is named as the first king of Kish in the Sumerian King...

The First World War (1914-18) stimulated a great wave of literary output, not least in the field of poetry. In an era when photography and film were still in their infancy, poems, especially those written by direct participants, were regularly...

The Life and Death of Sweet Medicine is a Cheyenne tale of the great prophet and law-giver Sweet Medicine who received the sacred Four Arrows, structure of government, and rules of society from Maheo, the Wise One Above, and predicted the...

The Frog Princess is a Slavic folktale focusing on the importance of recognizing someone’s inner beauty, regardless of their outward appearance, as well as the possibility of redemption after failure. The tale has many variants and appears...

The Instructions of Shuruppag (circa 2500/2000 BCE) is the most famous work of the genre of Sumerian wisdom literature whose purpose was to encourage proper behavior in conformity with cultural values and standards. It is among the oldest...

The poem called The Lay of Greybeard (Old Norse: Hárbarðsljóð) is one story from Norse mythology that relates an intriguing verbal fight between two of its essential gods, Thor and Odin. The poem consists of 60 stanzas and is found complete...

Religion and superstition went hand in hand in Colonial America, and one’s belief in the first confirmed the validity of the second. The colonists' worldview was completely informed by religion and so everything that happened - good or bad...

Michael Sattler (l. 1490-1527) was a Roman Catholic monk who converted to the Anabaptist movement c. 1525 and contributed significantly to their Schleitheim Confession of faith. He is best known, however, for his trial and martyrdom in 1527...