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Medieval News- Medieval News Roundup: The Viking Facebook, drunken archaeologists, competitive jousting in Australia and ranting about Lancelot
- An interview with Deborah Harkness, author of The Book of Life
- Vikings: Lives Beyond the Legends - exhibition now underway at Royal BC Museum
- Is this how the Bayeux Tapestry would have ended?
Italy Archive
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England’s First Attempt to Break the Commercial Monopoly of the Hanseatic League, 1377-1380
Posted on July 27, 2014 | No CommentsDuring the second half of the fourteenth century English traders first seriously threatened the Hanseatic League's commercial monopoly in the Baltic. The League, attempting to defendits monopoly, treated the English unjustly,where upon in 1377 the English Parliament rescinded the charter that granted the League important concessions and privileges in its English trade. -
Foreign dangers: Activities, responsibilities and the problem of women abroad
Posted on July 18, 2014 | No CommentsI consider a very important issue in dealing with the subject of Empires: the problematic position of women, and their contradictory witnesses not only in representations in early medieval sources but also those deriving from their gendered roles as they have been imagined -
Goths, Lombards, Romans, and Greeks: Creating Identity in Early Medieval Italy
Posted on July 16, 2014 | No CommentsThis essay explores how two different non-Roman historians represented the past to their peoples: the Gothic historian Jordanes’ sixth-century work, the Getica, and the eighth-century Lombard historian Paul the Deacons’ History of the Lombards. -
Researchers discover genome of Brucellosis from 700-year-old skeleton
Posted on July 15, 2014 | No CommentsA 700-year-old skeleton from a medieval village in Sardinia has given researchers new insights into a chronic disease that causes profuse sweating and muscle and joint pain. -
Mosaic from Venice
Posted on July 7, 2014 | No CommentsThis mosaic was made in the first half of the twelfth century as part of a decoration at the west dome in the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. -
The transition between late antiquity and the early medieval period in north Etruria (400-900 AD)
Posted on July 2, 2014 | No CommentsTraditionally, the idea that the Roman empire ‘declined and fell’ was considered a historical fact, not a matter for debate. The beginning of the ‘decline’ was usually dated to the 3rd or 4th century AD. -
The Medieval Life of the Colosseum
Posted on June 30, 2014 | No CommentsArchaeologist working on Rome's Colosseum have discovered that the ancient landmark continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages, but not as a gladiatorial arena. Instead, it was used homes, workshops and even stables. -
Claude, Duke of Guise and the Battle of Marignano, 1515
Posted on June 26, 2014 | No CommentsThe Guise brothers, Claude, Antony and Ferry had become separated during the action. Antony frantically searched for his brothers. -
The Influence of Humanist Culture on Sephardi Scholars Active in Medieval Italy
Posted on June 17, 2014 | No CommentsThis talk will set the context by introducing three generations of the Iberian Shohams, a late 14th-mid-15th century Sephardic family moving from Sicily to Apulia and Calabria. -
Tomb of Vlad the Impaler may have been found in Italy
Posted on June 16, 2014 | No CommentsResearchers from Estonia believe that the remains of Vlad III, better known as Vlad the Impaler, are buried in a church in Naples, Italy. -
Florentine politics and the ruling class, 1382-1407
Posted on June 10, 2014 | No CommentsAlthough outwardly the regime respected the institutions of communal Florence and republican formalities, real power in the state supposedly resided in the hands of a narrow group of families. -
MOVIE REVIEW: Flesh and Blood
Posted on June 7, 2014 | No CommentsMy review of the late medieval movie, Flesh and Blood. -
CONFERENCES: Renaissance Drinking Culture and Renaissance Drinking Vessels
Posted on May 29, 2014 | No CommentsThis paper took a closer look at Renaissance drinking vessels and drinking culture and examined the types of vessels commonly used in Italy and the Netherlands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. -
![MOVIE REVIEW: Barbarossa – Siege Lord “I order Milan to be raised to the ground. None of its towers will ever be standing. I also order all the Milanese to […]](http://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BARBAROSSA-2D-packshot-115x115.jpg "MOVIE REVIEW: Barbarossa – Siege Lord")
MOVIE REVIEW: Barbarossa – Siege Lord
Posted on May 28, 2014 | No CommentsMOVIE REVIEW: Barbarossa – Siege Lord “I order Milan to be raised to the ground. None of its towers will ever be standing. I also order all the Milanese to […] -
Time, space and power in later medieval Bristol
Posted on May 26, 2014 | No CommentsWith a population of almost 10,000, Bristol was later medieval England’s second or third biggest urban place, and the realm’s second port after London. While not particularly large or wealthy in comparison with the great cities of northern Italy, Flanders or the Rhineland, it was a metropolis in the context of the British Isles. -
First historical evidence of a significant Mt. Etna eruption in 1224
Posted on May 25, 2014 | No CommentsThe 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. -
Catharism and Heresy in Milan
Posted on May 13, 2014 | No CommentsEvidence suggests that heresy in Lombardy proliferated during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a period of upheaval in the structure and form of politics and society, especially in itscapital city. From 1117 Milan operated as a commune, securing independent jurisdiction at thePeace of Constance (1183). -
Prophetic Statebuilding: Machiavelli and the Passion of the Duke
Posted on April 12, 2014 | No CommentsMy interpretation of Machiavelli’s use of Borgia highlights the biblical resonances of Machiavelli’s account of the rise and fall of this exemplary new prince—a prince whom both his subjects and the Florentine himself call by the exalted title “Duke Valentino.” -
The Cyrurgia of Albucasis and other works, 1500
Posted on April 12, 2014 | No CommentsFour surgical treatises, printed in the last year of the fifteenth century, make up the oldest illustrated printed book in the Sibbald Library. The second one, the Cyrurgia of Albucasis, is the most interesting and I shall deal only briefly with the others. -
Greek in Marriage, Latin in Giving: The Greek Community of Fourteenth-century Palermo and the Deceptive Will of Bonannus de Geronimo
Posted on April 12, 2014 | No CommentsThis article discusses the pitfalls that can occur in the study of ethnicity in the me- dieval period in the context of the potential existence of two separate Greek minori- ties—one indigenous and one immigrant—in fourteenth-century Latin-dominated Palermo, Italy. -
The Fables of Leonardo da Vinci
Posted on March 30, 2014 | No CommentsWhen wine is consumed by the drunkard, it takes revenge on the drinker. -
What is an Australasian parrot doing in a 15th century Italian painting?
Posted on March 24, 2014 | No CommentsThe Sulphur-crested Cockatoo is a species of parrot native to Australia and eastern Indonesia. However, you can also see one in the Madonna della Vittoria, a painting made in 1496 by Andrea Mantegna. -
Herb-workers and Heretics: Beguines, Bakhtin and the Basques
Posted on March 22, 2014 | No CommentsDuring the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the word beguine was used by women to identify themselves as members of a wide-spread and influential women's movement. The same term was used by their detractors and overt opponents, with the highly charged negative meaning of "heretic." The etymology of the term “beguine” and ultimate origins of the movement have never been satisfactorily explained. -
Death and the Fraternity: A Short Study on the Dead in Late Medieval Confraternities
Posted on March 22, 2014 | No CommentsSince the publication of Philippe Aries' ground-breaking The Hour of our Death, historians of confraternities have largely followed his lead and treated confraternities as a "guarantee of eternity." -
Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: a fresco in Todi, Italy
Posted on March 17, 2014 | No CommentsThis essay deals with the tradition of the revelation of Purgatory to St. Patrick on Station Island in Lough Derg, whose popularity is testified not only in literary texts in the various languages of Medieval Europe but also in a unique work of art in the convent of the Sisters of Saint Clair at Todi, Umbria