Daily Medieval

The concept was simple: be good and go to Heaven, be bad and go to Hell. Each of these outcomes was eternal: you either had bliss or torment...

When Henry the Young King attacked his brother Richard in 1183, he had the support of a lord of Hautefort. Hautefort was surrounded by pro...

According to legend, Siena was founded by Senio and Ascanio, who were sons of Remus (who founded Rome with his brother Romulus). More verifi...

Cimabue (c.1240 - 1302) was an Italian painter and a designer of mosaics . In case you have not yet heard of this man, his name is pronounce...

In the 2nd circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno , Dante and Virgil see two lovers, Paolo and Francesca, condemned for lust (see the illust...

Giovanni Boccaccio played around with titles, and not only for his own works. Dante Alighieri's magnum opus was called by the author C...

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) was eight years old when Dante died, but he revered the man and wrote a biography about him. He even gave ...

During his lifetime, Dante Alighieri was embroiled in Florentine politics , but along the way he found time—well, he was in exile and had l...

Pope Boniface VIII had a grievance with Dante Alighieri . Dante at that time was a politician, having been in the very important position of...

The Guelphs and the Ghibellines were two Italian political factions in the Middle Ages, offering more and less support for the papacy, respe...

Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and politician, born in Florence to a wealthy landowner. His mother died when he was less than ten years...

I mentioned that, for all our talk of courtly love  in the Middle Ages, the only use of the actual phrase was in a single Provençal poem. Th...

The 12th century saw a burgeoning of literature by figures whose names we actually know, like Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes (menti...

St. Peter Damian, letter writer Peter Damian (c.1007 - 21 February 1072/3), the author of the Liber Gomorrhianus , was more than just a ...

Detail of the Venetian Arsenal from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum [1572] When we think of Venice and boats, we think of gondolas being...

[I am on a brief vacation, so here is a post from the past. This post first appeared 23 August 2012.] In Dante's Inferno , the eighth ...

Climbing Lucifer in Dante's Inferno A long time ago (it seems) I touched on gravity and said "there was no working theory of g...

The week, as you can imagine, is very hectic around the world for many people, and I am no exception. In  lieu of a regular post, here is a ...

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) had very strong feelings about the difference between spiritual and temporal authority and structures. In his...

When Pope Boniface VIII wasn't excommunicating people for treating corpses in unapproved ways , he was very busy doing lots of other t...