Local and Traditional on the Millennial Scale: Sustainable Waterfowl Management from Viking Age Iceland
Inhabited by Vikings since approximately 600 AD, the islands hosts an abundant, but terribly fragile resource, puffins, flightless birds that nest on rocky exposed cliffs, in easy range of the islanders other prime food source, pigs.
Breaking the Mold: The First Woman in Italian Literature
Active between 1260-1270, the woman known only as La Compiuta Donzella (the fulfilled damsel) attracted the attention of several male writers. Two of them were astonished that such wisdom could be found in a female.
Is it possible to accurately recreate a loaf of medieval bread?
I propose that the experimental process is the best way to gain a better understanding of what bread was like for our medieval forebears and how it compared to the bread that we eat today?
What Women Want: Female readers of Virgil’s Aeneid in the Middle Ages
Emma evidently knew Virgil’s epic, to which the text she commissioned makes explicit reference, and commissioned a Latin work modelled on it as a political tool to influence the actions of men.
Which Historical Figure Do You Share A Spirit With?
Is you soulmate from the Middle Ages, or another period?
Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara
On any given morning in 1471, the prostitute Giovanna of Venice, then resident of a Ferrarese brothel on Via Malborghetto, might have contemplated with resignation the options open to her for a day on the town.
The Crusades: A Very Brief History, 1095-1500
In this chapter, I trace the contours of the specific types of violent religious conflict always immanent within the historical structure of medieval war.
Margaret Beaufort, Mother of King Henry VII
Margaret Beaufort, Mother of King Henry VII By Susan Abernethy Lady Margaret Beaufort was the matriarch of the Tudor dynasty of Kings in…
Women’s Stories, Male Voices: Narratives of Female Misbehavior in Medieval Europe
In all the episodes I analysed, I found a search for autonomy and independence from social and cultural control on the part of the women. It is this wilful desire for autonomy that incurs the medieval authors’ disapproval.
Women’s role in politics in the medieval Muslim world
The objective of this paper will be to demonstrate in what ways medieval women (the upper-class women) of the Middle East made themselves visible and wielded influence or power over affairs of the state.
Which Of These Historical Events Happened First?
Can you correctly put in order these 16 events from history?
How Well Do You Know the Seventh Century?
Ten questions to the test your knowledge of the 600s.
Halt! Who Comes There?: Locking Up Tower of London – The Ceremony of the Keys
A review of the Tower of London’s medieval Ceremony of the Keys!
Up to 5 million archaeological sites in North Africa and the Middle East in danger of being destroyed
The archaeological heritage of the Middle East and North Africa, which is of international significance for all periods, is under increasing threat from massive and sustained population explosion, agricultural development, urban expansion, warfare, and looting.
Some Wise Advice from Francesco Guicciardini
Ten of our favourite maxims from the Italian Renaissance scholar Francesco Guicciardini
A Fifteenth-Century Merchant in London and Kent: Thomas Walsingham (d.1457)
In 1424 the London citizen and vintner Thomas Walsingham acquired the manor of Scadbury, then in the parish of Chislehurst in north-west Kent.
Global Approaches to the Middle Ages
This interdisciplinary panel discussion marks the appearance of the new journal The Medieval Globe.
The Beginning of Medieval Historical Fiction: Ten Novels from the 19th century
Historical fiction was just beginning as literary genre in the 19th century, but soon authors found success in writing about stories set in the Middle Ages.
This Week in Medieval Manuscript Images
Everyone is here to see the latest edition of medieval manuscript images..
Joan of Arc, a medieval Antigone and a (post-) modern myth?
Let’s admit, first of all, that it would certainly be, abusive to read the motive of Antigone tout court in the ambivalent character of Joan of Arc, although Steiner approaches the two figures by the…
The Papacy and Christian Mercenaries of Thirteenth-Century North Africa
Could one be a good mercenary and a good Christian at the same time?
Knight buried at Hereford Cathedral may have had jousting injuries, archaeologists find
The remains of over 700 individuals were discovered at the graveyard of England’s Hereford Cathedral between 2009 and 2011. Archaeologists are now revealing more details about some of the people that were buried here during the Middle Ages.
The Libraries of the Byzantine World
The evidence for institutional libraries—those of the palace, the secular and patriarchal schools in Constantinople, and the monasteries—gives an approximate idea of the nature and extent of their holdings.
From Viking Chiefdoms to Medieval State in Iceland: The Evolution of Social Power Structures in the Mosfell Valley
Norse settlers from Scandinavia arrived in Iceland in the 9th century AD and encountered an unoccupied and virgin landscape. This dissertation focuses on how these Viking Age migrants interacted with the local environment and with each other to develop a new society, and how that society evolved over the following four centuries.
Lady in the Lead Coffin revealed
A mysterious lead coffin found close to the site of Richard III’s hastily dug grave at the Grey Friars friary has been opened and studied by experts from the University of Leicester.