In Medieval Europe, horses were highly valued animals, and great amounts of resources went into their care and training. Horses, like the one shown in this miniature painting (c. 1200-1210), would have mainly belonged to the aristocracy, who prized them not only for their labor, but their use in battle. Sources show that nobles […]
This post is three days past the memorial day of the person featured here, Saint Agatha of Sicily. She’s one of my favorite regulars in the history of Christian artwork — right along the arrows all over St Sebastian and St Lucy with her eyeballs or Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel or John with
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You are looking at one of the most puzzled over artistic products of Early Medieval Britain — it is one panel of a rectangular container known as the Franks Casket. Made in 7th-century Northumbria in northern England, it has a fascinating hodgepodge of Germanic/Celtic/Ancient Roman influences, and scholars still debate the exact meanings of the
One of my favorite periods in history is when the Germanic- and Celtic- speaking peoples were Christianizing yet kept up a lot of their indigenous religious world views and culture. The Ruthwell Cross, probably dating to the early 700s, is one of the most beautiful products of this era. Ruthwell is now in Scotland, but
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In recognition of St Valentine’s Day, I thought I had better write about demon sex in the Middle Ages. And Church theologians thought this actually happened, where demons could appear to a woman and have sex with her, making her pregnant. The character Merlin from Medieval Arthurian legend, was born from a woman and
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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
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This lovely ship was one sight you’d not want to have been privy to if you were a French person from the 14th century. The black hulls and the red sails were the mark of ships belonging to Jeanne de Clisson, aka “the Lioness of Brittany,” a noblewoman who became a pirate in the name
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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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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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Last evening I had the pleasure of hosting my former history student Andrew Shriner, as well as Shippensburg University’s fencing instructor and coach Nickolys Hinton, as speakers. They gave presentations on Medieval sword-making and the development of Spanish swords from the 17th century to the present. My undergraduates, the Shippensburg fencers, and folks from the
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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 picture of Hvalsey Church, a Norse ruin from a settlement in Greenland that was abandoned in the 1400s. Scientists and historians have recently amended their ideas about what caused the collapse of this culture. In the late 900s, some Vikings from Iceland migrated to Greenland, setting up small communities that lasted
Today is April 20, aka 4/20, which has been associated in the US since the 1970s with marijuana. Here, we are in a transition phase regarding weed’s medical and recreational legalization, with some states allowing and others forbidding. But in the Middle Ages no regulation or moral questioning of the plant existed. Medieval Europeans
Everyone knows that the Medieval aristocracy was famed for the way they promoted the military prowess of knights on horseback. Gargantuan sums of money were spent selecting, breeding, and caring for war horses that could show off the status of their aristocratic riders. There is, therefore, a certain amount of glee to be taken by
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This is a post about a Medieval folktale that has come to be known as “the Green Children of Woolpit”. It’s also about how sources from the different past can be interpreted in such wildly different ways.Here is what the two Medieval sources dating from about 1189 and 1220 roughly agree upon about what happened:.Sometime
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Are you from the US and fancy a trip to Europe — but don’t quite have the funding? Just north of Philadelphia is a small district called Bryn Athyn, which has . . . A Medieval mansion and cathedral. Or, almost. Glencairn Museum falls into the category of “unique homes of the wealthiest business tycoons
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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,
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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
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