Yesterday, I was fortunate to experience the full solar eclipse from the Pymatuning State Park Reservoir in western Pennsylvania. The light turned silvery as the sun neared total obfuscation, and green colors emerged and reds dimmed, the effect of our eyes’ cones coming offline and employing the rods more. Shadows close to the ground sharpened […]
Check out these Viking-era teeth, dating between 972 and 1025 CE. Discovered in 2009 in Dorset, England, they came from a burial pit of Scandinavian men who had all been decapitated after suffering violent deaths, as in, a mass execution (51 skulls were in the grave, and many of their accompanying bones were adjacent). These
Viking Dental Work Read More »
As a Medieval historian, one of the things I do is study saints of the Middle Ages — they were akin to our modern-day superheroes, and their special qualities give us a good lens for understanding the values of the distant past. The holy woman featured here today — Rita of Cascia, nee Margherita Ferri
Rita of Cascia, Patroness of Lost Causes Read More »
Medieval Europeans were well aware of the balanced network of living creatures that populated their existence, but the great thinkers of the Late Middle Ages (about 1050-1500) were less interested in writing about the web of life than they were about trying to demonstrate the way the natural world pointed to spiritual truths. The Medieval
Medieval Bestiaries Read More »
Slander against the Islamic prophet Muhammad was rife in the Medieval Christian world. The religion of Islam spread rapidly and successfully, and in the agrarian hinterlands of Western Europe, many people’s fear of Islam was matched by their ignorance of it. Many depictions of Muhammad from the 12th to the 18th centuries reflect this. Here,
Depictions of Muhammad in Medieval Europe Read More »
Medieval culture repeatedly drew connections between animals and moralistic qualities. The pig — an animal ubiquitously eaten by Christians throughout the Middle Ages — developed an unusually bad reputation. This detail from a 15th-century prayer book shows a woman stroking a pig. While the overall image looks benign — the larger painting is all about
Pigs in Medieval Culture Read More »
We need to talk about pig farming in the Early Middle Ages. Pigs weren’t usually the most important domesticated animal for folks living in Western Europe between 500-1000 CE, but they shaped the lives of almost everyone. In a Michael Pollan “who’s-dominating-whom,” sort of vibe, historian Jamie Kreiner’s research demonstrates that although Medieval folks of
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This elephant ivory plaque from the Cathedral of Salerno dating to 1084 shows an image of God creating the animals. Early Medieval ideas about the place of animals in nature were shaped by Christianity. On the one hand, following Augustine (d 430) et al., who drew from the Genesis story, intellectuals thought that the animal
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This is as close an approximation to a long-dead historical figure as we are likely to get: this is “Amir Timur” aka Tamerlane, one of history’s most brutal killers, who conquered much of Central Asia, modern Iran and Afghanistan during his lifetime of 68 years (d 1405). The reconstruction was done by a well-known Soviet
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“Born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth” is a common expression that means your family is rich. The origins of this saying go a long way back, and are connected to a tradition of giving silver spoons to infants getting baptized into the Christian faith. Wiktionary traces the first recorded statement to a 1721
Silver Baptismal Gift Tradition Read More »
This is a re-creation of the nomadic Seljuk Turkish dynasty’s tents, as they maybe looked in the late 11th century. The Seljuks are most well known for destroying the powerful armies of the Byzantines, inspiring their emperor to request military forces from Western Europe, and hence, kick-starting the Crusades. However, this is not the most
The Seljuk Turks and the “Plain of Testicles” Read More »
Oh, boo! Now I have to get walled off in a building surrounded by my own gold and given nothing to eat until I starve! — this might as well be the caption of the illumination here from the early 1400s, illustrating the death of the last ruler of the Abbasid Dynasty, often called the
The Death of the Last Abbasid Caliph, al-Musta Read More »
One of the most fascinating monsters in human cultures is the ghoul — here, you see a particularly nasty one about to be done in by the hero Shah Namah in a 10th-century Persian manuscript. The legends of ghouls extend back in time to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula, but have persisted into modern times, much
The History of Ghouls Read More »
So if you’re into certain video games, Swedish metal bands, or the Young Adult fiction writer Rick Riordan, you may have heard the name “Naglfar.” Regardless, you can say you read about the most hideous ship in all of human history here. And that’s because Naglfar was a boat from Viking mythology made up entirely
Naglfar the Viking “Nail-Ship” Read More »
One of the more bizarre expressions of Christianity comes from the Early Medieval Carolingian world. It is a poem we call “The Heiland,” probably written in the courts of Louis the Pious or Louis the German in the 800s to an Old Saxon-speaking audience. The Heiland is an epic poem (much longer than _Beowulf_) telling
The Heiland, a Medieval Germanic Rendition of the Gospels Read More »
A new article from the science journal _Nature_ throws another wrench in the mystery about the origins of the greatest pandemic in history, the Black Death. Here you see the Chüy Valley in modern Kyrgyzstan and one of the tombstones involved in the recent study. Dating to 1338, and written in Syriac, the stone’s translation
Oft I have I featured in these posts fabulous animals that Medieval people thought existed, but never actually did. The Bonnacon is yet another example, and boy oh boy it’s a doozy. Here — and in the following two images — you see illuminated paintings of various Bonnacons that appear in Medieval Bestiaries, writings that
If I had more time, I would read original treatises in mathematics. The reason is because — when I do get a chance to go over such writings — it is so much clearer to me that math isn’t just a bunch of static pronouncements that everyone agrees about, but a conversation built on emergent
Bhāskara II and the Pythagorean Theorem Read More »
The Catholic Church had a tremendous influence in Medieval society. This did not mean that folks didn’t write about sex, however. These two figures from a 14th-century manuscript show a monk and a nun canoodling with each other. They weren’t supposed to be doing that, btw. The writings about sex undertaken by Constantinus Africanus (died
Medieval Studies on Sex Read More »
These skeletons are part of a massive burial discovered in 2008, a find that put some metaphorical meat on the bones of our knowledge about a notorious state-sponsored killing known as the “St Brice’s Day Massacre”. Corroborated by two written sources that date from the time of the deaths, the St Brice Massacre happened on
St Brice’s Day Massacre Read More »
