Daily Medieval

It is common practice for popes of the Roman Catholic Church to take a new name—called their regnal name —upon elevation to the Throne of Pe...

Tying the start of a year to the season of spring makes perfect sense in agrarian cultures. The Romans started their year in spring for a lo...

[DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. The following is from 19 June 2012.] Re-cre...

[DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts.] Rosemary in England The fragrant and tasty ro...

[DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. For Christmas I received A Short History of Nearl...

[DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. Today's is new, however, inspired by a music C...

[ DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts .] The St. Scholastica Day Riot was one of the ...

From a facsimile edition of the Codex [DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. Today...

Christmas Day was not celebrated in the past with all the pomp and circumstance we grant it today. It was, however, an auspicious day. Comin...

Were the Norse Norns/Fates the "Mothers"? Among the notable works of the Venerable Bede (c.673-735) is De temporum ratione (T...

Let us look at a classic "political marriage." Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II of England and  mother of Richard calle...

Sicily, an island of less than 10,000 square miles just off the coast of Italy, would not seem to merit its own king, and for a long time it...

Given all the fuss about the Mayan calendar, I thought it would be fun to look at other times when people thought the world might end. The E...

While other history sites were celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of King Henry II yesterday, I was thinking about the anniversar...

What do a Jewish philosopher, a Greek fabulist, and a Latin poet have in common? The following story and its moral. The Book of Ecclesia...

In 1527, when the healer and alchemist Paracelsus wanted to display his contempt for tradition, he burned a book in the town square in Basl...

We don't talk enough about Anglo-Saxon, but the Yule season and Christmas traditions evoke Old English images and customs (at least, i...

Notker Balbulus (the Stammerer) Yesterday's post on cheese included an anecdote about Charlemagne, attributed to Notker the Stammer...

Cheese-making; molds can be seen on the left. Warm up some milk, add an acidifying agent, let it cool, drain off the whey to leave the c...

Nicholas Oresme While re-examining Aristotle, Jean Buridan used observation and brainpower to anticipate some of the ideas we attribute...

Averroes (1126-1198) undertook to explain and comment on the works of Aristotle, in an attempt to clarify the Greek philosopher's conce...

Realism [ link ] At the foundation of philosophy is a question: what defines reality? There are several questions that are connected to ...

Statue commemorating Averroes in C órdoba Averroes (1126-1198) was born in Córdoba into a family of distinguished jurists and scholars a...

Daily Medieval has frequently mentioned the importance of Arabic texts in the transmission of knowledge to Western Europe. Arabic, however...

How long has the universe existed? Has it been around forever? Did it have a beginning? Could it have a beginning? These questions troubl...

15th century portrayal of Ptolemy's map Prior to the Age of Exploration, human beings in the western hemisphere did not attempt to t...

The goal of Daily Medieval is to present a sampling of the infinite array of information about the Middle Ages in small, digestible amoun...

15th century woodcut of Nicholas In the introduction to Arian Christianity I mentioned how discussion at the Council of Nicaea in 325 b...