Daily Medieval

We have previously mentioned the dinar   here and here . Usually of gold, it was used alongside the dirham , usually of silver and of a les...

Many works of Christian mysticism in the Middle Ages are biographies or autobiographies of mystics, sharing their revelations, their visions...

Around 1100CE, monastic schools started to discover the works of Aristotle, thanks to Judea-Islamic translations. Just as scholarly study wa...

I suppose if we wanted to find a Christian parallel to Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas would be an obvious choice. Born into the aristocracy, not...

Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed  is available now in paper, digital, and audio form; in case you don't get around to ordering a ...

Moses ben Maimon (1138 - 1204) was a rabbi, a philosopher, an astronomer, and the personal physician of Saladin. (Saladin was most recently ...

Sar Shalom ben Moses got too big for his britches. Born into a distinguished family of royal physicians in the Fatimid court in Egypt, he he...

Let me start by saying that "tax farming" and a "tax farmer" are not really about agriculture, except in a tangential se...

First, let's talk about the name. He was born Moses ben Nachman. He sometimes called himself Ramban , an acronym for Rabbi Moses ben Nac...

The rounding up and burning of the Talmud and other important Jewish works, and the Disputation of Paris, in France in the early 1240s were ...