NEW! The Medieval Magazine No. 108
Spring cleaning! The first issue of the Medieval Magazine with a fresh new face!
In this issue, we look at Norse seasons, medieval beliefs about luck, food and politics in Constantinople, Spanish Easter traditions, and the overlooked life of Catherine of Aragon.
A question of time or a question of theology: A study of the Easter controversy in the Insular Church
To date scholarly research has approached this topic from a medieval historical perspective. It has, however, never been approached from a purely theological stance. Questions regarding the Insular 84-year cycle have occupied scholars over the past one hundred years or so. A review of the literature reveals an advance in understanding the techniques of the computus of the Insular church.
The Byzantine communion chant for Easter in 14th-century manuscripts
It is only recently that the attention of musicologists has been directed to the study of Eastern church music as transmitted in 14th and 15th-century Byzantine manuscripts.
Early medieval science: the evidence of Bede
The Venerable Bede used observable proofs and mathematical calculations in his early 8th-century treatise De temporum ratione to teach the astronomical principles that inform the calculation of the date of Easter. This suggests that the seeds of the modern scientific method might be found before the 12th century in the educational practices of the early medieval monasteries.
The Visitatio Sepulchri in the Latin Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem
Holy Week commemorates the last days of Christ’s earthly presence, from his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to his crucifixion and resurrection.
The Late Birth of a Flat Earth
In his chronologies, Bede sought to order the events of Christian history, but the primary motive and purpose of his calculations centered on a different, and persistently vexatious, problem in ecclesiastical timing—the reckoning of Easter.