Daily Medieval

Chapels of the Bardi & Peruzzi families in Santa Croce, Florence Florence was the headquarters for some powerful families in the Mi...

The ultimate character witness. Throughout several centuries and many countries, establishing your innocence or trustworthiness in a court o...

Nicholas Oresme (c.1325-1382) likely came from humble beginnings; we assume this because he attended the College of Navarre, a royally fu...

For some reason, a 12th century Norman knight named Jocelin did not want his son to follow in his footsteps. We do not know why, but a commo...

Image from Adelard's translation of Euclid's Elements of Geometry Being inquisitive is the first step to learning.* In the early...

Hole Roman Emperor Henry IV When Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV took the Walk to Canossa and asked forgiveness of Pope Gregory VII in orde...

On the heels of the three "Church & State" posts, it is appropriate to talk about a clash between an emperor and a pope. Today...

Part 1 showed how Christian writers eventually came to the conclusion that the State was not the result of Man's sinful nature, and had ...

Yesterday we looked at some of the history of political philosophy analyzing the proper relationship between the spiritual institution of th...

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) had very strong feelings about the difference between spiritual and temporal authority and structures. In his...

Saint Walburga (c.710-779), mentioned yesterday because of the "Oil of Saints" that flows from the stone and metal on which her re...

Yesterday's post on St. Menas and the flasks of water leads to a discussion of oleum martyris , literally "oil of martyrs" bu...

In 1905, C.M. Kaufman of Frankfort led an expedition into Egypt and made excavations that unearthed the legacy of St. Menas. He found the ...

Electrical and Mechanical Engineers have their own patron saint—at least, in the British Army they do. Saint Eligius (or Eloi, or Eloy) was...

Almost 100 manuscripts exist that are part of the legend of Prester John , mostly copies of the letter supposedly written from him to one or...

That "inaccessible area" in Asia mentioned in the Finding Paradise entry fascinated Europeans. Knowledge of the lands to the ea...

One of the decrees that came out of the Fourth Lateran Council of Pope Innocent III was that "every cathedral or other church of suffi...

Higden's map, with Eden (and East) at the top Medieval mapmakers , if they wanted to be thorough, of course had to account for t...

"Grammar" comes from the Greek gramma , meaning "letter of the alphabet" or "thing written." Their word gramma...

Yesterday we looked at the use of the word "school" in the Middle Ages. Today, let's look at the descriptive term "gram...

When we think of the history of schools, we imagine an unbroken line of buildings and teachers and groups of pupils sitting on chairs or b...

King Oswiu (also Oswy or Oswig), who was a friend of Benedict Biscop , ruled Bernicia, a small section of Northumberland between what is n...

The cleric and writer called the Venerable Bede has cropped up many times here; his learning is known to us by his translation of parts of ...

Pope Gregory at the Second Council of Lyons The Second Council of Lyons, mentioned yesterday, accomplished many things. It was called by...

Today is the anniversary of the death of Pope Gregory X. He has already been mentioned in Daily Medieval, but let's take a closer look a...

Christian persecution under Emperor Decius Novatianism was one of the philosophies mentioned by Socrates Scholasticus . It was a (litera...

When American actress Grace Kelly married Rainer III of the House of Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco, in April of 1956, the world suddenly notice...

Until the beginning of the fourth century historiography remained a pagan science. With the exception of the Acts of the Apostles and its ap...

Relic of True Cross at Cortona, near Florence Yesterday's post told of Empress (later Saint) Helena, the mother of the Emperor Const...

Yesterday's post mentioned a nail from Christ's cross that had been possessed by the Emperor Constantine (c.272-337), the first Chri...