Daily Medieval

This blog has touched on the debate over the date of Easter in the past, but the truth is that the early Church went through different phase...

Rudolph of Swabia was referred to as an anti-king after he was defeated by Henry IV in 1080. Anti-popes are a common concept in history, ...

Today picks up from the previous post . Although canon law did not apply to non-Christian populations, that attitude changed when Europe...

Since I've been looking into canon law lately ( here and here ), I thought I would share an interesting facet of Medieval era canon law...

Ignorantia juris neminem excusat. Ignorance of the law excuses no one. Many years ago, comedian Steve Martin offered up a mono...

There is an ongoing debate in the modern age concerning how much vacation time an industrialized nation should allow its work force (5 w...

Did the greatest English poet of the 14th century and the greatest French poet of the 14th century meet, thanks to the Hundred Years War? ...

Plaque in Queenhithe. One of modern London's 25 Wards, Queenhithe, has an ancient history. It is currently quite silted up, but orig...

King Edward and his knights counting their dead after the Battle of Crécy, Hundred Years War Sir Richard Stury (c.1330-1395) was a membe...

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 ...