Daily Medieval

Expositio & questiones manuscript Jean Buridan (c.1300-c.1361) was a University of Paris scholar who was not afraid to tackle some ...

Buridan's Ass is the name given to a paradox: that a hungry and thirsty ass placed exactly in the middle between water and hay will be...

Anna Comnena in Byzantine mosaic Anna Comnena (1083-1153) was the daughter of an emperor ( Alexios I ), the wife of a Caesar, and the mo...

Online version of this translation Dhuoda 's Liber manualis (Manual/Handbook) is a unique work by a female author from the 9th cen...

Bernard of Septimania, whose fate interweaves the recent posts on Carolingian civil wars, married Dhuoda on 24 June 824. She bore him two so...

Uzés was founded around an early Roman aqueduct Back here I mentioned that Bernard of Septimania married a woman named Dhuoda, whom he ...

Charlemagne's grandsons were not satisfied with the way their father, Emperor Louis the Pious, divided up his realm while still alive so...

Lothair, rebel with a cause After Louis the Pious dealt with an insurrection by his three sons (see yesterday's post ), Bernard of S...

Coronation of Louis the Pious, by Jean Fouquet (1455) Yesterday's post about William of Gellone didn't mention his family at al...

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is an area called The Cloisters. Built in the 1930s, it incorporated elements of several ...

Today is known in the USA as Black Friday. The term was coined in 1966 to refer to the practice of kicking off the Christmas shopping season...

What makes a pope into an antipope? In 355, the Roman Emperor Constantius II (317-361) wasn't happy with the pope. Constantius was an ...

Pope Celestine V might have needed Cardinal Benedetto Gaetani to find a justification for him to resign, but papal resignations had taken p...

Yesterday referred to the resignation of Pope Celestine V, and that there was some confusion about it. It was not common for popes to resig...

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

As attractive as astrology was in the Middle Ages, not everyone was willing to accept the premise that it was "easy" to use it...

[ In memoriam : William Shaw, 1917 - 2012] Have modern funerary practices always been in place? Were there different methods (and reasons...

Abu Ma'shar, from his Introduction to Astronomy Albertus Magnus , Robert Grosseteste , Geoffrey Chaucer —well-known names from the M...

Since the last two days have been about reconciling opposing views, and since today is the anniversary of the death of Albertus Magnus, it ...

William of Conches (1085-1154), as mentioned yesterday , wrote on Plato's Timaeus . The Timaeus was a popular work or analysis because,...

In 1620, Sir Francis Bacon published Novum Organum ("The New Organon," by which he meant a new interpretation of nature). In it, ...

Let's sum up: when the White Ship sank , taking the heir of King Henry I with it, he finally settled on Empress Matilda (Henry's ...

Before we conclude our three-part journey through the 20 years of civil war between Stephen of Blois (a usurper whom history calls king) a...

In 1135, upon the death of Henry I of England, his nephew Stephen of Blois (c.1192-1154) assumed the throne. All well and good, except tha...