One of the reasons I’m a historian is that I find the strangeness of the past to be underrated. You can find something deeply, fascinatingly weird about virtually any aspect of any human culture prior to around the year 1880, provided you take the time to dig into it.Here’s an example for you: I stumbled on this image last week while reading the Wikipedia page for Terra Mariana, a medieval state which covered part of present day Latvia and Estonia. What strikes me about it is not just the incred...