Where the Middle Ages Begin
I recently visited the British Museum and enjoyed their Witches and Wicked Bodies exhibit which runs until January 11th, 2015. It displays art depicting witches from the middle ages up to the late nineteenth century. This post looks at a few late medieval interpretations of witches and the artists behind these works.
This project documents and analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.
Here are some spooky medieval books for you to celebrate with over Halloween!
My interview with fiction author, SD Sykes about her fantastic medieval crime novel, Plague Land.
My review of SD Sykes brilliant medieval thriller, Plague Land.
The tensions which existed between the indigenous pagan tradition and the nascent Christian Church in Ireland are evident in this tale. We are faced with ‘the opposition of two philosophies, the first being the native, the druidic, the doomed… The other embodies a prophecy of the coming of Christianity’.
Starting at least by the late tenth century, Byzantine emperors took icons of the Mother of God with them on campaign. This article examines the appearance of such icons in the narratives of historical texts.
The supernatural has become what Renan said it was: ‘The way in which the ideal makes its appearance in human affairs.’
A diverse yet distinctive group of magical amulets has periodically attracted the attention of scholars from Renaissance times to the present. The amulets take many forms, including engraved gems and cameos, enamel pendants, die-struck bronze tokens, cast or engraved pendants of gold, silver, bronze, and lead, and rings of silver and bronze.
This thesis focuses on the significance of blood and the perception of the body in both learned and popular culture in order to investigate problems of identity and social exclusion in early modern Europe.
Offers a brief explanation on the foundations of medieval astrology. Astrology reveals itself as a complex body of knowledge, with specific rules and methods. Its principles were based on the natural movement of the celestial bodies: the rising and setting of the Sun, the sequence of the seasons, the phases of the Moon.
Little by little, out of the old conviction —pagan and Christian— of evil interference in atmospheric phenomena evolved the belief that some people may use malign sorcery to set off whirlwinds hail, frosts, floods and other destructive weather events.
Werewolves, Lycanthropes or Man-Wolves appear in many German, French and Scandinavian stories. Nowadays there exists an image of these creatures, which combines almost all the aspects of the werewolf-myths around the world, that was brought to us by Hollywood.
Defining the term ‘faerie’ is not easy; some definitions include only specific, pre-Christian types of mythological creatures while other definitions include all of the spirits, angels and supernatural animals as well as the souls of the dead. I will take a middle road and include the spirits and the souls of the dead, since the dead and the faeries have an intimate connection in the folklore of the British Isles.
‘When a human being dies, both flesh and bones die.’
This was the deviant burial, which had been buried (or reburied) intact along with a further leg and lower arm bone…Without speculating wildly on the implications of the iron studs, it is known that treatment of this sort was accorded to bodies which had died unnaturally or when there was some reason to fear the supernatural’.
Some spooktacular reads to celebrate Medieval Halloween!
People learned how to “tie up a portion of lightning” only recently. We have no information aboutany experiments of medieval scientists with lightnings, and even the fundamental dictionary of thehistory of science by Mayerhöfer is silent about it.
I will examine two forms of transformation, the werewolf transformation and the monstrous human transformation, both of which feature shape shifters who presumably cannot be trusted
At the same time, however, their differing responses to the remedy attest both to the variation of beekeeping practices and the multivalence of Wið Ymbe itself. The fact that two beekeepers interviewed within two days and two hundred miles of each other can respond differently to the charm’s advice on swarms suggests that we reevaluate unilateral assertions regarding what the text might have meant across the hundreds of years that we now know as the Anglo-Saxon period.
This paper situates The Pied Piper story as an exilic narrative, part of a larger repertoire of stories that follow the romantic quest-myth formula, a formula that conveys a totla metaphor for the “journey of life”.
Although Joan’s trial took place in France and The Malleus Maleficarum was published in Germany, they are suitable for comparison because this text became the definitive manual for witchcraft inquisitors across Europe.
Medieval Chinese and Japanese literature provides numerous examples of near-death experiences, episodes in which the narrator claims to have gained personal images of the after life.
William believed that a demonic conspiracy existed to deceive humans into false worship, and his concerns led him to precisely define the capabilities of demons according to the latest scientific views of spirits, to characterize opinions with which he disagreed as demonic lies and to label their holders as demonic dupes.
PETERBOROUGH MONASTERY AND ITS CHRONICLE: ANNALISTIC HISTORY AS AN EXPRESSION OF INDEPENDENT IDENTITY Hall, J. Megan M.A. Thesis, The University of Georgia, December (2003) Abstract The fenlands of East Anglia are rife with superstition and folklore and are home to a highly independent culture of people. The character and qualities of these fen-dwellers have been […]
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