Daily Medieval

Simply put, the Hundred Years War was an argument over the rightful ruler(s) of England and France. Officially, it ran from 1337 to 1453, ma...

The Middle Ages in Europe recognized the value of cavalry and put resources toward evolving it. Stirrups so the rider can brace himself (see...

St. Martin of Tours as a young man was a cavalryman, and likely a member of the  Equites cataphractarii.  Of all the cavalry styles Rome use...

In "The Shipman's Tale" of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , a monk gains the trust of a friend's wife by invoking St. Mart...

American author Henry James took a six-week tour of France in 1883, in which he mentions the "chatty nun" who guided him through M...

Yesterday I presented a series of facts (as we know them) about the founding of Battle Abbey . Today we take a look at a story of the found...

You would think that the name "Battle" for a religious house must be an abbreviation of some more appropriate term, and you would ...

The special nature of the Virgin Mary—having been born without sin so that she could bear the Savior—made her the focus of attention as Chri...

On 1 November 1950, Pope Pius XII declared as dogma the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that her body was taken up into heaven becaus...

John of Damascus was born into a well-to-do Arab-Christian family in Damascus around 675 CE. His father was an official serving the Umayyad ...

Buddhism started seeping westward during the time of Alexander the Great, and many Greek colonists adopted Buddhism or parts of it. Commerce...

Many works of Christian mysticism in the Middle Ages are biographies or autobiographies of mystics, sharing their revelations, their visions...

Richard Rolle's career as a hermit left him plenty of time for writing. He chose a wide variety of topics—although Psalms figured heavil...

Richard Rolle (c.1300 - 30 September 1349) was born to a North Yorkshire farming family. He showed promise as a young man and was sponsored ...

Margaret Kirkby (c.1322 - 1391/4 CE) was an anchoress in a couple locations in England. Although she withdrew from public life to devote her...

Sometimes, devoting yourself to a religious life meant a life of service: going out into the world to help others. Sometimes, pursuing a rel...

Hospitals in the Middle Ages could be designed for different clientele. Some (like the Jerusalem Hospital ) were specifically for pilgrims/c...

Much of the medieval "medical" care happened in the home—herbal remedies and such—but hospitals did exist, run by religious groups...

When the relics of St. Geneviève were paraded through there streets of Paris in 1129 during an outbreak of St. Anthony's fire, they seem...

St. Geneviève was born a peasant in Nanterre around 419/22 CE. One day, while St. Germanus was passing through Nanterre, she told him she wa...

After Germanus defeated the Pelagians in Briton (through sheer force of his rhetorical skills, apparently, having studied eloquence and havi...

There are some stories about Germanus (c.378 - c.445 CE) that are difficult to believe and hard to substantiate. The Vita Germani ("Lif...

Although St. Patrick gets credit for spreading Christianity widely in Ireland, he was not the first Christian sent there for that purpose. H...

History is written by the victors, or so it is said, and I was warned in graduate school always to question an author's intent. Everyone...

The Battle of Clontarf took place on 23 April 1014. It turned Brian Boru into a national hero, although that may have had more to do with pu...

Everyone is probably familiar with the valkyries, the "choosers of the slain" in Norse legend. They didn't just carry the dead...

I remember the character Queenie in the TV show "Lark Rise to Candleford" (based on the partially autobiographical books by Flora ...

Sugar cane was cultivated thousands of years ago—in Southeast Asia; mass cultivation and importation to Europe was not available in the Midd...

The value of honey was no doubt discovered long before human beings started keeping written records. The Egyptians were maintaining bees as ...

Childeric I was presumably a child of Merovech, and the first king of the dynasty called Merovingians. He lived from about 437 until 481 CE....