Where the Middle Ages Begin
The last twenty-five years have seen huge advances made in the way that battlefields can be recorded and understood through archaeological techniques, but these methods have only recently been accepted as a useful complement to traditional military history.
Maps do more than show us the way and identify major landmarks – rivers, towns, roads and hills. For centuries, they also offered a perspective on how societies viewed themselves in comparison to the rest of the world.
It has long been believed that the first people to inhabit Iceland were the Norse settlers who arrived around the year 874 AD. However, the discovery of Christian crosses carved into man-made caves in the southern part of the island is offering evidence that Celtic-speaking people from Scotland and Ireland had come to Iceland around the beginning the ninth century.
Norse colonists in Orkney contended not only with the islands’ existing occupants, but also with a foreign landscape filled with visible ancient monuments. This paper provides a brief synthesis of the results of research on the landscapes of Viking-Age and Late-Norse Orkney which explored the strategies undertaken by the Norse settlers to re-model their social identities in their adopted environment.
For the first time, the entire network of 549 caves underneath Nottingham has been fully surveyed, revealing new details about what lies under the surface of the English city.
Vaz Dourado authored at least four different nautical atlases, each of them including 20 maps, painted between 1568 and 1580, which is to say at the pinnacle of Portuguese cartography.
How did people depict England, Scotland and Wales in the Middle Ages? Here are 15 images of maps created between the 11th and 16th centuries, which shows how maps developed over history.
This paper relies on new masonry and dendrochronological evidence and the system of medieval ecclesiastical preferments to argue that this monumental world map was originally exhibited in 1287 next to the first shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe in Hereford Cathedral’s north transept.
Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Researchers at Yale University have started a project to recover details from a 15th-century world map which had been obscured after centuries of fading.
The Ebstorf Map, the largest medieval map of the world whose original has been lost, is not only a geographical map.
How good are your geography skills? Try to identify these 15 places based on how they are depicted in medieval maps
This article will illustrate that an important part of rulers’ wish to create a Christian society was the introduction of Christian legislation.
For a proper understanding of the actions of men in the past it is necessary to have some idea of how they conceived the world and their place in it, yet for the medieval period there is a serious inbalance in the sources.
In this article I attempt to demonstrate that there is a connection between holy islands and notions of an Otherworld beyond water. I believe that the essence of holy islands is their location on the other side of water.
It is something of a truism that the Ocean Sea {mare oceanum in medieval texts and cartography) marked out a real and conceptual periphery for medieval Western Europeans.
Of all the legendary islands and island names on the medieval maps, Mayda has been the most enduring.
Based on medieval legends, fictional stories, or somewhat less than useful geographic reports, here is our list of ten medieval places you won’t be able to visit!
The rise of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century dramatically changed the opportunities for travel across Eurasia: for the first time we encounter those who traveled its full length and then returned home to narrate what they saw.
Several deserted medieval villages in Northamptonshire, will be officially protected as the British government has designated them as scheduled monuments.
The 1224 Mt. Etna eruption is a significant event both in terms of the mass of erupted materials and because it involved the lower eastern slope of the volcano, reaching down to the sea.
The Wonders of the East is an author’s attempt to not only introduce readers to strange sights they may never see with their own eyes (since most people did not travel extensively), but also to make sense of some things they might see every day.
Danielle Trynoski and Matthew Ziebarth talk about their project to locate previously unknown winter camps used by the Vikings during their raids into the British Isles and Western Europe
New research about mice on Madeira suggests that the Vikings may have visited the Atlantic island 400 years before it was colonized.
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