She was Richard the Lionheart's queen for eight years, and never once set foot in England.In 1191, in the middle of the Third Crusade, Berengaria of Navarre married the most celebrated soldier of the age. She had crossed the Alps in winter and half the Mediterranean to reach him, and was crowned Queen of England on the island of Cyprus, a thousand miles from the kingdom she would never see. Within a few years Richard was away at his wars, then locked in a German pr...

A woman waits on a hill at the centre of an island, watching an army come to take her country. She will lose, and she knows it. She asks the invaders for one thing only: that whatever else they do, the land will keep her name.They give their word. The island is called Éire to this day, after the goddess Ériu who bargained for it, and her name is written into its constitution and printed inside every passport its people carry. Yet of the goddess herself almost nothing survives. A na...

Almost every sun god in human history has been male. Japan's is a woman.Amaterasu Ōmikami, the sun goddess at the heart of Shinto, is one of the very few female suns in world mythology, and the one whose worship still endures today. For more than a thousand years she has been honored as the divine ancestress of the Japanese imperial line, the world's oldest continuous monarchy.Her story runs from the eighth-century chronicles that first recorded it, through...

How a god became a goddess.She is called upon in storms at sea and in the silence of grief, in temples from Hangzhou to Los Angeles. Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, is one of the most worshipped figures on earth. Few of her devotees know that she began as a man: Avalokiteśvara, a male bodhisattva from India, whose transformation into a Chinese goddess has puzzled scholars for centuries.Kuan Yin: The Eternal Goddess of Compassion reconstructs that thousand-y...

Tara is the busiest goddess in Buddhism. She was born, so the story goes, from a god's tears, and she's been rushing to the rescue ever since.Her name means star. It also means the one who gets you across the river, which tells you the kind of trouble she was made for: the crossing you might not survive. For a thousand years she's been the deity you call when there's no time for the slow road to enlightenment.The book follows her a long way, and she keeps changing shape as ...

A claim has circulated for years: that ancient Celtic tradition preserved an unbroken inheritance stretching back to Vedic India — seven sacred seers, seven ruling planets, a celestial bear watching over a queen's throne in the North. It's been cited and repeated across popular Celtic mythology and Indo-European studies alike. It has rarely been checked against the primary sources.Seven Stars in the North checks it.Working from the earliest surviving Sanskrit, Lati...

Around 313 CE, a Sogdian trader sealed a letter that never reached home.Aurel Stein found it seventeen centuries later in a collapsed watchtower west of Dunhuang, one voice among the thousands who earned their living on the roads between China and the steppe. The World That Made the Silk Road is their book: the caravan brokers, the oasis gardeners, the horsemen of the grasslands, the scribes and envoys and garrison soldiers who turned a scatter of local tracks into...

Honey and beeswax survive. The hives that produced them do not.In the great cauldrons and drinking vessels of Iron Age Europe, archaeology has found traces of honey-rich drinks. Beeswax has been identified behind the silver plates of the Gundestrup cauldron. Centuries later, early Irish law could decide who owned a swarm, what a hive was worth, and how much honey the sick were owed.Yet no Iron Age hive from Celtic Europe has been excavated. No apiary has be...

A Bronze Age sword is dropped into the Thames as an offering to powers beneath the water. A Roman citizen scratches a curse onto lead and casts it into a sacred spring. A medieval monk copies a spell for summoning angels into the margins of a psalter. A seventeenth-century farmer buries a bottle of nails and urine beneath his hearth to break a witch's curse. A modern Druid raises her arms to greet the solstice sunrise at Stonehenge.Five moments separated by thousands of years. One ...

Honey and beeswax survive. The hives that produced them do not.In the great cauldrons and drinking vessels of Iron Age Europe, archaeology has found traces of honey-rich drinks. Beeswax has been identified behind the silver plates of the Gundestrup cauldron. Centuries later, early Irish law could decide who owned a swarm, what a hive was worth, and how much honey the sick were owed.Yet no Iron Age hive from Celtic Europe has been excavated. No apiary has be...

Ancient yet startlingly relevant, Artemis defies simple categorization. This groundbreaking exploration reveals why the virgin huntress has outlasted her Olympian counterparts in her appeal to the modern imagination.For the first time, this study bridges the divide between classical scholarship and contemporary relevance, tracing Artemis's evolution from prehistoric hunting cults through classical Greece, imperial Rome, and Renaissance Europe to her surprising resurgence in today's...

When archaeologists opened an early Anglo-Saxon grave at Oxborough in Norfolk, one skull stopped them. It belonged to a woman who had reached old age, and someone had cut a clean opening into the left side of her head. The bone had healed around it. She lived for years with a hole in her skull, and no one wrote down why it was made.Holes in the Head is about wounds like hers, found across early medieval Britain and Brittany between the end of Roman rule and the eleventh century. So...