This musical score is the 15th-century “Agincourt Carol,” and it celebrated the English victory at the eponymously named battle. The English have Agincourt as a celebrated place in their history, because the battle came to stand as an example of triumph against overwhelming odds. Also Shakespeare loved it. And it was fought 607 years ago […]
By the time Gaius Appuleius Diocles retired from chariot-racing at age 42, he had amassed the equivalent of $15 billion, becoming the highest-paid athlete of all time. This third-century mosaic shows a charioteer from the white team: Diocles, who lived in the second century, spent most of his career racing for the red team. Sources:
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Finding a more arcane and mysterious text than the Voynich Manuscript would be difficult. Written in 1420, the script has thwarted the world’s best cryptogrographers – linguists have failed alongside computer A.I specialists to decode the 200-page book. Just yesterday a story broke that a British linguist has solved the code – he claims the
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Here are four rats rowing a tiny boat, painted in a 14th-century French book. Such an image calls to mind the rats that spread the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis during the worst pandemic in human history: the Black Death. The theory goes that rats carrying the infected fleas spread the bubonic plague that ended up
This past September of 2022, the planet Jupiter was both in opposition (opposite the sun relative to earth) and at its closest position to earth (known as perigee), and the planet is still very bright in our evening skies. Medieval people had a great deal of lore surrounding each of the planets, and Jupiter’s was
This is one of the most fantastic pieces of pottery ever. Dating to about 1590, it depicts three women changing into geese, with the label “Winchester Geese” at the bottom of the platter. The shapes surrounding the geese might look like rounded diamonds, or alternatively, like vulvas. Give me a minute, and you’re probably going
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The two pictures in this post seem to have nothing to do with each other, but they are connected by a surprising history: “white gold,” aka guano, i.e. bird excrement. This stuff once drove human cultures in these now depopulated areas. The first image shows the Atacama Desert of Chile, the driest non-polar desert in
The Medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” survived from a single manuscript which has three other poems, probably all by the same author. Scholars have long attempted to guess at who this writer might have been, but his written work certainly far surpassed the childlike illustrations in British Library Cotton Nero A x.
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If ever you were to consider the history of fabric-making, you are unlikely to have associated it with horror. But that is just what this contemporary rendering of the Norse poem “Darratharljóth” conveys, and it’s really quite sick. In the poem, which appears in a 13th-century Icelandic saga, a man sees a vision of twelve
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In the northern mountains of Spain in the region of Aragon lies the tiny Medieval village of Trasmoz. Once it held 10,000 people, but now there are fewer than 100: except for June, when a festival called “Feria de Brujeria” celebrates the fact that the town is known for its history of witches and being
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This lead Viking-era pendant of Norse God Thor’s hammer was unearthed this past summer of 2023 near the Swedish town of Ysby. Similar to others such as the 10th-Ödeshög pendant shown in the second image, it speaks to a continuity of the Norse religion in an area where Christianity was steadily encroaching. Like the crucifixes
The Italian Renaissance produced some of the greatest artwork of all time, but its glassware doesn’t get the spotlight that it should. It was valued throughout Europe and beyond from the late Middle Ages into the Early Modern period for its beauty and unique qualities. After the fall of the Roman Empire, glassmaking went into
Slavery is a horrible human invention that has been around at least since the development of cities. And probably just as ancient were slave rebellions by those discontented with their situation, many of them ultimately failures, but nonetheless important for understanding the history of resistance to oppression. The Zanj Rebellion of 869-883 is a fascinating
Poor little toads of the Medieval period, getting stuck with horrid associations of despicable things — putrefaction, death, and lust. And did you notice how all three of those adjectives were lumped together? That’s because the Christian Church at the time intentionally set about trying to make carnality associated with disgusting things, because church doctrine
The Chateau of Montségur might look Medieval, but it was actually built up on the destroyed ruins of the Medieval fortress where about 210 people belonging to the Christian Albigensian sect were burned as heretics in 1244. In the early 1200s, Pope Innocent III enacted an Inquisition — a legal investigation — to determine who
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The way cutting-edge technology lets us see into the distant past is so cool. Recently, a technique called “photometric stereo workflow” enabled Medieval historian Jessica Hodgkinson take a fresh appraisal of the pages of a manuscript written in south-east England in the first half of the 700s. The historian discovered that the name of a
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This is a sword by Goro Nyudo Masamune (c. 1264-1343), considered to be the greatest swordsmith in Japanese history. His swords have a recognizable set of characteristics, one of the most famous being his skill in producing a quality called “nie” an appearance in the blade of Martensite (hard steel in crystal formation) embedded in
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Scholars think that the diameters of these various circles on the wall of this church of San Nicola, in Pisa, Italy, were an intentional representation of the famed Fibonacci sequence made in the 13th century. (They represent the first nine numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and 55.) Leonardo Fibonacci was from
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If you look carefully, you will see a corpse dressed in white lying in a coffin in this illustration of the Laws of Hamburg from 1497. This painting shows the Medieval practice of _cruentation_, a type of jurisprudence where someone convicted of murder would put their hands on their alleged victim – the idea was
These are elements of the necklace that is making news headlines today: the “Harpole treasure” discovered back in April of 2022. On December 6, news was officially released about the burial dating from 630-670 CE that archaeologists from the Vistry Group unearthed in Northamptonshire. One of the most significant of its kind, it contained a
