Was St Patrick a slave-trading Roman official who fled to Ireland?
With St Patrick’s Day upon us, a new study asks whether the saint fled his native Britain to escape a career as a Roman tax collector, only to arrive in Ireland and sell slaves.
The Irish Christian Holy Men: Druids Reinvented?
The druids as members of the pagan ‘priestly class’ were an important, high-status force in Celtic society. This class of druids was one of the most formidable groups that early Christian saints and missionaries had to face and overcome in order to establish firmly the roots of Christianity in pagan Celtic Ireland.
The Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Ireland: St. Patrick vs. St. Bridget
Both St. Bridget and St. Patrick are patron saints of Ireland, but each had very different methods of converting people to Christianity from paganism during medieval times in Ireland.
The Culture Shock of St Patrick
This article will shed new light on the Confession of St Patrick by examining it through the prism of the culture shock model.
HAPPY ST.PATRICK’S DAY: Books on all things Irish! Sláinte!
Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with these great reads and some green beer!
Old MacDonald had a Fyrm, eo, eo, y: two marginal developments of < eo > in Old and Middle English
It is widely accepted that the Old English diphthong /e(:)o/ generally monophthongized, around the eleventh century, to the central rounded /ø(:)/.
Has the lost Leonardo da Vinci painting been found?
Researchers are now even closer to answering the question if The Battle of Anghiari is still hidden in the walls Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Led by scientist Maurizio Seracini, a team of researchers have uncovered evidence late last year that appears to support the theory that a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting existed on the east wall of the Hall of the 500, behind Giorgio Vasari’s mural The Battle of Marciano.
New TV drama – “Vikings” – to be filmed in Ireland and Northern Europe
The History Channel in the US and History Television in Canada have announced they will be airing a scripted drama series, ‘Vikings’.
“Surat Bahr al Rum” (Picture of the Sea of Byzantium): Possible Meanings Underlying the Forms
In this paper I will display, examine, and deconstruct the ‘classical’ medieval Islamic conception of the Mediterranean as seen through colorful, miniature maps found in medieval Arabic and Persian geographical manuscripts from the 11th to 17th centuries.
The Health of the North in a Renaissance Encyclopaedia
In 1555 a private press in Rome issued a volume in Latin with some 400 woodcut illustrations, most of the specifically commissioned by the author, these being in the form of vignettes at head of a majority of about 600 short chapters of the work.
Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture: The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II
Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture represents the first art historical consideration of the patronage of the Ottonian Emperors Otto III (983-1002) and Henry II (1002-1024).
The demise of the walking dead : the rise of purgatory and the end of revenancy
Imagine a time when people actually believed in the existence of revenants, that is, the walking dead; there are records of people having heard them, seen them and partaken in countermeasures against these monsters, or at least those who recorded the stories fully believed the people who said that they had.
“The Letter Kills, But the Spirit Gives Life”: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1210-1310
The twelfth century was marked by a general enthusiasm for two phenomena: scholastic learning and voluntary poverty. The division of society into clergy and laymen maintained itself in response to these two enthusiasms.
Al-Idrisi and His World Map (1154)
Working for eighteen years under the patronage of the Norman King Roger II Guiscard of Sicily, who gathered scholars from many regions at his court in Palermo, the Moroccan geographer Al-Idrīsī in 1154 completed a description and an atlas of maps of the known world.
Medieval Guildhalls as Habitus
This chapter will be concerned with the archaeological and theoretical interpretation of York’s medieval guildhalls.
Making Christian Landscapes: Conversion and Consolidation in Early Medieval Europe
International conference to be held at University College Cork, Ireland on 21-23 September, 2012
Manuscript Variation in Multiple-Recension Old English Poetic Texts: The Technical Problem and Poetical Art
Twenty-six poems and fragments of poems are known to have survived the Anglo-Saxon period in more than one witness. These include poems from a variety of genres and material contexts: biblical narrative, religious poetry, riddles, charms, liturgical translations, proverbs, a preface and an epilogue, occasional pieces like ‘Durham,’ and historical poems like the Battle of Brunanburh.
Towards a History of Tolerance: Christian Attitudes to Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages
The sometimes benign, often neutral or mildly hostile, occasionally horrifically violent history of inter-faith relations from the time of the First Crusade in the mid-twelfth century through to the end of the fifteenth century forms the backdrop to much of what I have to say
Caring for the castles and abbeys of the Welsh princes
Gwilym Hughes – Cadw’s assistant director, historic environment – outlines the achievements of the Welsh Cultural Heritage Initiative.
Age in medieval plagues and pandemics: Dances of Death or Pearson’s bridge of life?
Death has long obsessed humanity. In times of plague and pandemic even more so. Medieval man saw four horsemen of the apocalypse, and of them, Death by disease was gathering the greatest harvest. How randomly did he gather? And how random is the death toll in later pandemics?James Hanley and Elizabeth Turner look at Karl Pearson’s visualisations of mortality.
Civic Knighthood in the Early Renaissance: Leonardo Bruni’s De militia (ca. 1420)
This little piece of buffoonery gives us a good idea of what knighthood had come to mean in the minds of many Italians by the late fourteenth century. For the Florentine judge, his knighthood was an honor which gave him the opportunity to dress up in a dazzling costume. It was a piece of merchandise he had purchased; nothing more. He had no sense of shame at his lack of bellica virtus.
Great Sites: Hamwic
Helena Hamerow on excavations at Southampton, which reshaped our views of the origins of English towns and of long-distance trade in the 8th/9th centuries.