Daily Medieval

William of Poitiers (c.1020 - 1090) was born into a family of knights, and trained as a knight himself until his late 20s when he decided to...

Taking sole credit for a written work was not always as important as it is to some authors today.  William of Jumièges (c.1000 – post-1070) ...

Clonmacnoise Monastery was an important place in the Middle Ages. Occupying a major travel route in the center of Ireland, it grew to a comm...

Aelred of Rievaulx took a successful abbey and made it even more grand (although the illustration will show that its fortunes have fallen so...

When French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929 – 2023) set out to write an account of a typical French medieval village, based on certa...

Gerald of Wales (c.1146 - c.1223) provided us with extensive information on  Ireland and Wales and England of his time. Serving several Pla...

Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis, c.1146 - 1223) was a priest and a writer of history. That could be the introduction for many of the fo...

Matthew Paris (c.1200 - 1259) was a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of St. Albans, known to us for his numerous illustrated written works. We ...

Geoffrey of Monmouth may have been born in Monmouth, Wales, since he refers to himself that way (in Latin, he writes it "Galfridus Mone...

I've offered my own idea of when the Middle Ages ended , but of course there are other ways to look at it. I suggested specific events t...

Start typing the word "venerable" into a search engine on the Internet and one of the options offered will be "venerable Bede...

That is an odd headline (and topic) for a blog on the Middle Ages, but let's push on and see where we wind up. The Laffer Curve (named f...

When Robert Burns published his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect  (1786), no one knew that it would become such a success that the ...

[ source ] We have heard the phrase "since time immemorial" to refer to an origin of some practice or belief embedded so far...

One example of the "white mantle of churches" So...the Venerable Bede suggests that time be reckoned since the year of Christ...

This is the 500th post on the Daily Medieval blog. In its honor, let us look at the year 500 CE and how it overlaps some of the previous ...

A 6th century Roman politician named Jordanes turned to writing history in his retirement. He wrote Romana , about Rome, and Getica , abou...

from a 1499 woodcut by Jacob Locher Hippocrates was aware of the phenomenon of conjoined twins, and offered an explanation: the male pr...

Nithard, as Abbot of St. Riquier Charlemagne, looking around for suitable political marriages, chose a likely source of a bride for his ...

Orderic Vitalis (1075-c.1142) has been mentioned here and here for his history writing. The 13 books of his Historia ecclesiastica [...