Where the Middle Ages Begin
Tours. They can be great, or they can be cringeworthy and rife with misinformation. A great tour guide knows how to add a flourish or two to a story to keep the audience engaged and the history interesting. A bad tour guide invents things and hopes there isn’t a historian in the audience dismayed by the falsehoods they’re spreading to unwitting listeners…
Over the holiday season, Southwark Playhouse is presenting their reinterpretation of The Ballad of Robin Hood.
Robert II, King of Scots and grandson of Robert the Bruce was a handsome, charming man who had many descendants. He not only had two wives who had numerous children but many mistresses who had babies as well.
‘If those who wound felt the pain of those who are wounded, they could not often wound with pleasure.’
On November 15, 1315, an Austrian army of at least a few thousand men marched along the shores of Lake Ägeri in central Switzerland. It was here that they were ambushed by over a thousand Swiss farmers.
Emperor Charles IV reveals in his autobiography what happened to him one night at Prague Castle, and how he saw a huge swarm of locusts.
Books delight us, when prosperity smiles upon us; they comfort us inseparably when stormy fortune frowns on us.
In the early fourteenth century, the diocese of Sodor, or Sudreyjar meaning Southern Isles in old Norse, encompassed the Isle of Man and the Hebrides.
It ranks as one of the most fascinating stories from the 14th century, one that chroniclers of that time relished in telling and historians have ever since recounted.
The year 1346 is remembered in England mostly for the Battle of Crecy, where King Edward III defeated the French forces in one of the most important battles of the Hundred Years War. That year also saw another major battle, this one fought on English soil.
This thesis challenges the orthodox view that the years 1360 to 1399 witnessed a period of martial decline for the English.
This essay examines the use of forced hair cutting in the late fourteenth‐century alliterative romance, Morte Arthure, to show how it is used to develop characters that reflect the tension surrounding the English king Richard II and the tyranny that characterized the final years of his reign.
Between 2011 and 2014, a new search for the site of the Battle of Bannockburn took place, spurred on by the 700th anniversary of the battle and the National Trust for Scotland’s new state-of-the-art Bannockburn Battlefield Centre.
Just like their modern day counterparts, medieval cities had to deal with their own criminal underworlds – the sex trade, gambling, and violence taking place within their walls. At the International Medieval Congress, held earlier this month at the University of Leeds, these issues were explored as part of session #706: Perceiving and Regulating Vices.
What was it like to be a physician in the Middle Ages? A poem by a 14th-century physician sheds a little light on the challenges of practicing medicine in his own time.
We are very proud to offer our first ebook: Pearl, translated by Sophie Jewett.
Very little is known of her actual life, not even her real name. We do know she wrote two texts in English on her visions and their meaning
This battle, fought on August 26, 1346, was one of the most important victories for England during the Hundred Years War. New research about the battle has revealed how much confusion existed about who actually died during the battle.
Magna Carta just celebrated its 800th birthday this past Monday. In honour of this incredible milestone, King’s College London, and the Magna Carta Project, hosted a 3 day conference dedicated to this historic document.
Historians have tended to give more weight to sources such as governmental and legal records than to chronicles, not least because so many survive. They open up areas of history impossible to access through chronicles alone, and they also provide a much more precise and detailed political narrative.
Its narrative of cross-dressing, male prostitution, gay sex, clerical promiscuity and the like seems to offer a rare window onto late medieval sexuality and sexual mores.
Three fantastic papers on Prosopography from #KZOO2015.
By examining the frequency and types of infractions for which women were cited at court and, additionally, the complaints women brought in the first half of the fourteenth century, this essay aims to explore the legal and cultural implications of women’s representation in the borough courts.
A piece of Byzantine hagiography from the fourteenth century which, in spite of its religious character, is a valuable source for the history of the Catalan Grand Company, Roger de Flor’s famous band of Spanish mercenaries hired by the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282-1328) to fight the Turks in Anatolia.
Signed and dated in 1313 by its illuminator, Colin Chadewe, this manuscript is a one-of-a-kind creation. It contains a cycle of illustrations (one of the most extensive ones) that is unprecedented in its richness and eccentric iconography, designed exclusively to suit the demands of its patron.
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