The Public Domain Review

Jon Crabb on the witch-craze of Early Modern Europe, and how the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone — complete with cauldron and cats — so familiar today.

A remarkable short, most likely staged, showing a stable on fire with horses being rescued and humans fleeing.

CONJECTURES #4 — Carla Nappi conjures a dreamscape from four archival fragments — four oblique references to women named “Elizabeth” who lived on the watershed of the 16th-to-17th century.

Collection of the major public domain texts featuring in the novel Compass by French writer Mathias Enard — including Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Joseph-Charles Mardrus.

Cataleptic trances, enormous appetites, and giggling fits aside, W. B. O'Shaughnessy's investigations at a Calcutta hospital into the potential of medical marijuana — the first such trials in modern medicine — were largely positive. Sujaan Mukherjee explores the intricacies of this pioneering research and what it can tell us more generally about the production of knowledge in colonial science.

Lovely aquatint print depicting four composite portraits for the professions of florist, writer, musician, and barber — their features made up entirely from the tools of their trades.

17th-century Dutch engraving showing a team of pigs spinning cotton, while in the corner a woman — who'd normally be associated with the work — sleeps.

Recording made for Colombia Records in which the legendary actor Joseph Jefferson plays the part of Rip Van Winkle.

James Hogg's masterpiece — part-gothic novel, part-psychological mystery, part-metafiction, part-satire, part-case study of totalitarian thought.

Alicia Puglionesi explores a curious case of supposed dream telepathy at the end of the US Civil War, in which old ideas about the prophetic nature of dreaming collided with loss, longing, and new possibilities of communication at a distance.