Creative History

  A few weeks before Easter in the year 1512 alarming reports began to reach Pope Julius II in Rome.  Reports of a strange and monstrous creature--a true demon (it was said) brought to life--near the Adriatic coast in the historic and holy city of Ravenna, only about two-hundred miles as the crow flies, north of the Vatican. This creature, what Vatican officials labelled as the spawn of Satan, was said to have been the illicit offspring of a secret sexual liaison between a nun and a monk.  In reality, if that was the case, then the so-called “Monster of Ravenna” never stood a chance of acceptance into Renaissance Italian society no matter what it looked like from the moment that it was born. This “monstrous” being would have been banished to the wilderness from infancy, shunned and pushed away to the margins of Renaissance society, only able to sustain a subsistence life if it were lucky, merely for having been the product of such a sinful sexual encounter. When Pop...

History first recorded the existence of the Indian state of Kerala in the third century BCE.  The name originally appeared, chiseled in stone, on an inscription left to posterity by the great Mauryan emperor Ashoka.  Ashoka reigned for more than two decades and in his lifetime he presided over an empire that encompassed nearly the entire Indian subcontinent. Before the birth of Christ in the last century BCE the Roman historian Pliny the Elder as well as many other ancient travelers made note of Kerala as the Roman world’s leading exporter of spices.   Located on the west coast of India, Kerala or the place that westerners once referred to as the Malabar Coast after it was “discovered” by Portuguese explorers looking for a quicker passage to the Spice Islands of the east in the late 15th century CE is today one of India’s wealthiest provinces.  It is a province that contains lush verdant tropical jungles, as well as some of the most beautiful beaches in the wo...