Alexander Bevilacqua

Some time​ in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where frescoes of the Christian martyrs Cosmas and Damian had been painted on the wall. ‘Leaning on her faith as upon a stick’, she dug her fingernails into the plaster, then dissolved...

David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next. In the wake of Martin Luther’s censure of the...

Under​ what circumstances would you eat your pet? For Jean de Léry, a 16th-century French missionary, this wasn’t a hypothetical question. During a treacherous Atlantic crossing from Brazil to Europe, with supplies running low, some of his fellow passengers killed and ate their monkeys and parrots when hunger struck. Others waited until they had almost starved before putting...

‘To devote our life to authorship,’ Isaac D’Israeli wrote, ‘is not the true means of improving our happiness or our fortune.’ In Calamities of Authors (1812), he chronicled the lives of writers he considered at once ‘the most honoured, and the least remunerated’. Some of these men of letters were ‘driven to madness by indigence and...