Daily Medieval

Hamlet referred to the "thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to." Throughout the history of humankind, headaches and tiredness...

Yesterday's post about "blue" jeans from Genoa mentioned indigo, a color dye that had to come from plantations in India until...

Actually, when Petrarch referred to Genoa as "la Superba" he meant "the proud one." Genoa, on the northwest coast of th...

Besides being attractive and easily carved into jewelry, amber was considered special in many ways. Its special attributes were first descr...

Amber has been a material of desire since antiquity. We know now that it is 40 million-year-old fossilized tree sap, but in ancient times th...

Our teeth would no doubt be better off if this had never been discovered, but Pandora's box was opened long ago. Different species of su...

Continuing our discussion about medieval hygeine , let's ask about soap and whence it came. The answer depends on how you define "s...

The Guild of Pepperers was established as early as 1180, and was responsible for the quality of spices and the setting of weights and measur...

We talked a little about the history of poison here , but now it's time to look at what Medieval Europe had at hand for killing enemies....

The use of poison—a toxic substance deliberately introduced to a living creature for the sake of incapacitating or killing it—is found as ea...

Fastitocalon is the name given to a sea creature in an Old English poem called "The Whale." This time I will with poetic art rehea...

When the oak gall wasp lands on a species of oak, it secretes a chemical that interferes with the tree's normal growth, producing a bulb...

Hospitals in the Middle Ages could be designed for different clientele. Some (like the Jerusalem Hospital ) were specifically for pilgrims/c...

The value of honey was no doubt discovered long before human beings started keeping written records. The Egyptians were maintaining bees as ...

Bread has all the characteristics of a staple food: the plant is easy to grow, the product is relatively easy and cheap to produce, and it ...

In 1977-79, a shipwreck off the southern coast of Turkey was investigated. It was determined to have sunk about 1025. The ship's hold c...

Lovely ceiling tiles at Cleeve Abbey with asbestos in them Pliny the Elder has a chapter in his Natural History on something he calls ...

A perpetual motion machine powered by magnetism, described by Peter Peregrinus Magnets/lodestones have fascinated people for at least ...

The term parchment is often applied to any animal skin used for writing on, but historically it was used for sheep or goat skin. Cow or c...

Yes, marshmallow. (Maybe Halloween has put me in mind of sweets.) Althaea officinalia (the "marsh mallow") is a perennial tha...