Readers of this post might remember a recent article illustrating the way menstrual blood and images of vaginas paralleled the wound in Christ’s side in Medieval culture. (I promise I am not making this up.) A few posts later, I showed that before Europe’s scientific revolution, anatomists thought that breast milk was menstrual blood that […]
Medieval Belief that Jesus was a Mother Read More »
In the Central Middle Ages (c.1050-1350), the big-boss philosophers were the scholastics, and this guy here was one of the biggest. May I introduce to you the Franciscan friar and famed developer of epistemology (the philosophy of how we know things), William of Ockham. He lived from 1285 to 1347 and settled in many different
William of Ockham and “Ockham’s Razor” Read More »
Ossuaries, or containers where the bones of the dead are placed, are not unusual for many places in Europe, where burial ground space can be at a premium. But the archaeology site recently excavated at the Cathedral of Saint Bavo, in the Belgian city of Ghent, is one-of-a-kind. Nine walls have been uncovered that are
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Check out this monk, sneaking extra wine . . . Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere, right? This miniature was painted in the late 13th century and suggests that not all Medieval clergy lived up to their avowed profession that emphasized denial of worldly pleasures. Similar conclusions can be drawn by examining a genre of music
Monk Sneaking Worldly Pleasures Read More »
No, you are not looking at a university student’s blue book . . . But you are seeing a very famous logical proof. This is an image of an early copy of the Medieval philosopher Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) _Proslogion_, and it used logic to try to prove something unimaginably perfect: the existence of God.His
Anselm of Canterbury’s “Proslogion” Read More »
This is _The New York Times_ 1907 headline that sensationalized a science experiment by a man named Duncan Macdougall. He had decided to run a macabre series of tests to see whether a human soul had weight. Six volunteers close to death agreed to spend their last breaths on a scale in his medical office,
Does A Human Soul Have Weight? Read More »
When the Bubonic Plague hit Western Europe in 1347, it began a pandemic that killed between a third and a half of the population in only three years. The fear and horror of the sickness was exacerbated because no one knew why it was happening. Without the scientific method, germ theory, or knowledge of the
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When the Bubonic Plague tore through Europe after 1347, the irrational panic of many elites consumed them. Their social rank was no protection from infection and probably they felt more helpless than their less wealthy compatriots because of this. At any rate, the first wave of the plague witnessed horrific violence as many patricians and
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Sometimes in history, behaviors seem to repeat, but closer study shows they can be driven by wildly different impulses. Self-harming in our society today arises from a variety of causes, such as feeling unheard or feeling a sense of self-hatred. But in the Middle Ages, deliberately causing oneself physical pain had a very different origin.
Flagellants and Their Religious Devotion Read More »
Thinking ahead to Halloween 2020, I offer you you, dear reader, a suggestion, and one which is unlikely to be duplicated by your neighbors. Folks in Western Europe in the Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern periods would have been much likelier to identify this creature, because it was a type of monster that many believed
The Blemmyes of Western Europe Read More »
This is an image of a lesser-known hero of the Early Modern period, the Dutch physician Johann Weyer (1515-1588). In an age of witch-hunts, when many women accused of consorting with the devil were tortured into confessing imaginary crimes, tried in law courts, and executed by burning, Weyer outspokenly wrote that such practices were inhumane,
Johann Weyer and Inhumane Treatment During Witch-Hunts Read More »
There is a tradition of misogynist scholarship which traces continuously from Ancient Greece to the early twentieth century. Legal, medical, philosophical, and theological arguements promoted the idea that women were inferior to men, and this was sincerely believed by many educated people. Yet this scholar pictured here — Henricus Cornelius Agrippa (1496-1535) — stood in
Contrasting Opinions of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa Read More »
This cruel object is a Cat-O-Nine-Tails whip, dating from about 1860. Slave owners from the American South used whips like these against the people they had enslaved. Notice the metal spurs at the end of each rope. Millions of people experienced this inhumane treatment, and the “peculiar institution” of slavery of course became a motivating
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Here you see a physical manifestation of the phrase “bite the bullet.” These two lead bullets came from a hospital serving soldiers wounded in the U.S. Civil War’s famous Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863). In an age preceding anesthetics, patients were told to bite down on these so-called “Hospital” or “Pain Bullets” before surgery was
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In 1862, the port city of Charleston, South Carolina, witnessed one of the most impressive feats in the Civil War. An African-American named Robert Smalls stole an entire ship from the Confederacy and escaped to freedom with his wife, two young children, and several other enslaved people. He did this right under the noses
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In 1353, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio completed one of the most important works of fiction in history, _The Decameron_. The book tells the story of ten young aristocrats – seven women and three men – who spend ten days together, passing the time by taking turns telling different stories. The occasion for their gathering
“The Decameron” and Escaping the Bubonic Plague Read More »
Well dear readers, now that we’re all settled in for a while, we can hunker down and enjoy a strange Medieval love story that might better fit around Halloween. May I present to you the macabre tale of the life-and-afterlife relationship of Ines and Peter of Portugal.In 1339, Peter was a young Prince whose father
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In the north-central region of Maryland, the Catoctin Park has some of the oldest layers of the earth’s exposed mountains. The Appalachians rose out of a collision between plates in North America and Africa 200 million years ago, and parts of the convergence appear here, where the quartzite rocks you see are part of a
Maryland’s Catoctin Park and the Convergence Read More »
The social distancing requirements of today are stressful, but are much less deadly than measures of combating disease in the Middle Ages. Our word “quarantine” comes from the Italian words “quaranta giorni” for forty days, which was a standard length of time that sick and infected people would be shut off from the healthy population.The
The Medieval Quarantine Response Read More »
The Ancient Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet has a fascinating double role as both a vengegeful deity of destruction — especially bringing plague — but also a force that was thought to ward off disease. Her name can mean “The Mighty One” but she was also called the “Mistress of Dread.”. A particularly entertaining myth associated with
The Duality of the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet Read More »
