Locations of events.

How do you survive a plague? Right, by fleeing the locus of the epidemic outbreak as fast as you can. Which is exactly what the rich and beautiful in Boccaccio’s Decameron do. And to pass the time, the take turns telling each other stories.

In the age of Wikipedia, with thousands of people contributing from all over the world, it is hard to imagine how someone could single-handedly compile 20-volume lexicons. Leus Swiss Lexicon is just that: a giant effort to write the biggest, most comprehensive lexicon of its time.

How can you teach people to good and kind to each other? Perhaps best by showing negative examples for a deterrent effect. That’s exactly what an 18th-century satirical etiquette book did presenting rules on how (not!) to treat other people.

If you’ve read 1984, you know how easy it is to falsify the past. But this knowledge is nothing new. For centuries, rulers paid historians (and some still do) to create an embellished version of the past and the relevant sources, until the Maurists got wise to them.

In 1581, the Froschauer publishing house in Zurich created a complete edition of all works written by Huldrych Zwingli. And there was a good reason for it – which was directly linked to the circumstances of the death of the Zurich reformer in 1531.