Horticultural Landscapes in Middle English Romance
Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Recovering the lost details of a medieval map
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: tradition and contents of a medieval picture of the world
The Ebstorf Map, the largest medieval map of the world whose original has been lost, is not only a geographical map.
Quiz: Medieval Maps
How good are your geography skills? Try to identify these 15 places based on how they are depicted in medieval maps
Fast and Feast – Christianization through the Regulation of Everyday Life
This article will illustrate that an important part of rulers’ wish to create a Christian society was the introduction of Christian legislation.
Real and imaginary journeys in the later Middle Ages
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.
Holy Islands and the Otherworld: Places Beyond Water
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.
A Peripheral Matter?: Oceans in the East in Late-Medieval Thought, Report and Cartography
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.
The World in 1467: The Maps of Nicolaus Germanus
Maps of the medieval world in 1467, by Nicolaus Germanus
The Problem of Mayda, an Island Appearing on Medieval Maps
Of all the legendary islands and island names on the medieval maps, Mayda has been the most enduring.
Top 10 Medieval Places That Don’t Exist
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!
Travel and Travelers in Medieval Eurasia
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.
Deserted Medieval Villages to be protected
Several deserted medieval villages in Northamptonshire, will be officially protected as the British government has designated them as scheduled monuments.
First historical evidence of a significant Mt. Etna eruption in 1224
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 Wonderful Wonders of the East
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.
Viking Winter Camps
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
Did the Vikings reach Madeira?
New research about mice on Madeira suggests that the Vikings may have visited the Atlantic island 400 years before it was colonized.
When was Offa’s Dyke built?
Historians have long believed that Offa’s Dyke was built in the late eighth-century, but new evidence suggests it might be 200 years older.
Leiðarvísir: Its Genre and Sources, with Particular Reference to the Description of Rome
For the last two centuries, Leiðarvísir has been the subject of great interest by scholars from a variety of disciplines: not only Old Norse scholars, but also historians, geographers, toponymists and scholars of pilgrimage have studied and analysed this work.
The emergence of concentrated settlements in medieval Western Europe: explanatory frameworks in the historiography
There is now a general scholarly consensus that the concentration of rural people into settlements in Western Europe (as opposed to dispersed or scattered habitations across the countryside) occurred in various stages between the eighth and twelfth centuries, though with regional divergences in precise timing, speed, formation, and intensity.
Call for Papers: Moving Women, Moving Objects (300-1500) (ICMA CAA 2015)
CFP: Moving Women, Moving Objects (300-1500) (ICMA CAA 2015)
The Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem
This documentary takes a look at the Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem – one of the largest and greatest atlases ever assembled.
The Crimea on the Map of South Sarmatia by Bernard Wapowski
The purpose of the present article is publication and analysis of the content of the map of the Crimea, practically unknown in Ukraine, which is a part of the map of the South Sarmatia of 1526 by ‘the father of the Polish Cartography’ Bernard Wapowski.
Arctic encounters between Norse and Natives
Contact between the Norse and Native peoples in Canada’s Arctic was more extensive and earlier than first believed, according to recent archaeological evidence.
Holy War and the home front : the crusading culture of Berry, France in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries
Le Berry, in the geographical centre of France, developed its own “crusading culture” that both affected the ideas of the people living there and effected new institutions and traditions in that society pertaining to the crusades.