Early this morning (as in, from 2:30-4:30 a.m.) my part of the world was treated to a near-total lunar eclipse. The shadow of the earth crept across the full moon’s surface, eventually turning it a reddish color (due to the refraction of light through the Earth’s shadow). As anyone who has seen a lunar eclipse […]
It’s my tradition each year to celebrate the season with historically themed Christmas carols — and so here you go: “Baldwin, it’s cold outside!” Set to the tune of “Baby it’s cold outside,” by Frank Loesser, this cover deals with the first super bad Viking raid in Western Europe. In 793, the pagan Norsemen attacked
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It’s _Beowulf_ day in my Early Medieval Europe class, which I absolutely never get sick of — the bloody wrestling match of Beowulf and Grendel, the heartbreaking moment when Beowulf puts on his armor for the last time knowing that the dragon will kill him, the poet’s anxiety about blood feuds wrecking societies while nonetheless
In the 6th century, a wandering monk from Ireland known as St Gall settled down at a monastery in Switzerland. The Medieval account of his life written about three hundred years later tells much of the saint’s holiness, which brought him the ability to do miracles (like – order a bear to put a log
The Ogham Alphabet Read More »
This is a late 12th-century illustration of “the Witch of Endor,” a prophetess from the Bible who could raise the spirits of the dead and talk to them. Artists have enjoyed illustrating her almost as much as religious people have enjoyed debating about her powers. In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament First Book of Samuel
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Moses Maimonides is not only fun to say (alliteration!), but also the name of one of the most important philosophers of the Middle Ages. Born around 1135 in Spain, Maimonides was influenced by the great mix of religious cultures that made the Medieval Iberian peninsula unique. And this brings me to one of his most
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After the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, the literature that had flourished went into abeyance. For instance, the entire genre of playwriting just went out of existence. It was finally a tenth-century woman named Roswitha of Gandersheim who revived this art. Her plays today read charmingly clunky, like fourth-grade presentations. As with much about
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy has emerged as a heroic leader in no small part because of his willingness to endure the dangers and hardships of the battlefield for a cause that seems larger than him. In this, he parallels the popularity of another unlikely ruler of the Middle Ages: King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, aka “the leper
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We’ve probably all seen pictures of the Bayeux Tapestry at some point, that amazing almost 70-meter /230 foot-long embroidery from the 1070s showing in cartoon-panel format how the English were vanquished by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. But few of us have had the opportunity to examine the embroidered figures up
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This is a 14th-century painting of Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria, who was one of the “monachoparthenoi”, a Medieval Greek term for “monk-virgins.” These were young women who disguised themselves as monks so that they could avoid marriage and live a life devoted to spiritual contemplation in male monasteries. It was a bit of a trend,
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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
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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
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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
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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 »
This humble assemblage of metal has been the subject of fierce debate among historians — it is a 10th-century viking-age stirrup found in England. Horseback riding today would be unthinkable without this contraption, but it was not always that way. When the stirrup was introduced to Western Europe on a broad scale and what difference
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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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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
Werewolf stories existed in Europe as long ago as Ancient Roman times, but the ways people imagined them changed. Whereas for much of the Middle Ages, werewolves retained some of their sympathetic human nature, by the late 15th century they began to figure as evil servants of the devil. Some men were even executed for
Statue made of Birchwood of the Virgin Mary, with glass eyes. Autun region of France, c. 1130-40.
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The ruins of Suso Monastery in San Millán de la Cogolla look eerily beautiful in this image, evocative of a distant past whose details are lost to us now. Situated in northern Spain, they are some of the last surviving remains of the Visigothic Kingdom that ruled the Iberian peninsula from the late fifth century
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