Daily Medieval

Taliesin (6th century) came a legendary figure of whom many stories are told and to whom many poems are ascribed—(almost) all of it fiction....

The 9th-century Historia Brittonum  mentions five especially renowned British poets, one of whom is Taliesin. In the 12th century he was con...

During the Celtic Revival , a Welsh stonemason named Edward Williams (1747 - 1826) took an interest in collecting old manuscripts and began ...

In yesterday's post on Eve of Wilton I mentioned that much of what we learn about her comes from the writing of Hilary the Englishman. ...

We saw yesterday how in 937 an alliance of former enemies came together to attack King Æthelstan, who had in the past proven superior in ba...

Yesterday's post mentioned how Kassia the Blessed was the only female poet whose verse was used in the Byzantine liturgy. It is recited...

One of the last written works by Christine de Pizan was the poem Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc ("The Tale of Joan of Arc"), publish...

The title of this blog post is almost "literal" in the sense that the Roman de la Rose was written in two parts: one by Guillaume ...

Let's talk about the most popular secular literary work in the Middle Ages. More manuscripts have survived of the Roman de la Rose  than...

Chaucer's Parlement of Foules had a very different purpose from the Conference of Birds by Attar of Nishapur  that I discussed yesterd...

Probably the best-known work of the Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur  is Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr , called in English the Conference of the Birds . In it, ...

Although little is known of his personal life, and he was not famous in his own lifetime, the Sufi poet known as Attar of Nishapur (c.1145 –...

Yesterday's post, " This Too Shall Pass ," tells about a particular poem from the Exeter Book with the theme that sorrowful o...

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 ...

William IX, Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony (1071 - 1127), also Count of Poitiers, had a shaky start in life. He was the son of Duke William V...

Troubadours originally referred to their songs as vers , but over time developed a set of several different specific types of composition. T...

The word " troubadour " was masculine, and the feminine form was "trobairitz" (both singular and plural). The term was r...

In the years 1100 - 1350, a type of musical performer arose called a troubadour. They did not call themselves troubadours; that term was fir...

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...

"Courtly love" is the phrase used to describe a set of "rules" expressed in medieval literature about the relationship o...