Daily Medieval

Ramon Llull (1232 - 1315) has been mentioned before . Born in Majorca, he married but lived what he later called a licentious life until, at...

The modern knighthood ceremony in England is nothing like the original. Fortunately, we have the Buke of the Order of Knyghthood by Ramon L...

In Matthew 5:39, Jesus tells his followers "But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." In the ritual...

The Peace of God and the Truce of God wrought changes in the chivalric culture of Western Europe. Starting in the 11th century, knighthood ...

I once mentioned how the end of the Carolingian Empire and the loss of its centralized administrative system made it difficult to mail a let...

William I, Duke of Aquitaine, founded Cluny Abbey in 910. Built in the Romanesque style, it had a basilica that was the largest in the world...

When St. Benedict established the Rule of St. Benedict for the proper functioning and practices of monastic life, he could not have anticip...

When St. Benedict decided to create a place where men could quietly contemplate God, removed from the cares of the world, he chose a 1700-f...

Willibald spent ten years at Monte Cassino, sharing the experiences of his wide travels and helping to shape the monastic experience for Mo...

Although St. Willibald wrote about St. Boniface (to whom he was related on his mother's side), what we mostly know about him came from ...

Portrayals of St. Boniface almost always show an axe in his hand or in the background. This stems from the story of Donar's Oak, a tree...

About 675 CE in Wessex, England, a boy named Wynfrid was born to a noble family. Educated in the Benedictine abbeys of Exeter and Nursling, ...

Fulda is a town in Hesse, Germany. In 744 CE, a disciple of St. Boniface named St. Sturm built a monastery there, intended to be the largest...

Nowadays, Frisian or Friesian conjures images of horses. The Friesian is one of the oldest horse breeds, popular as a war horse in the 16th ...

Charlemagne is a known and respected figure in history, his reign establishing a re-birth of arts and education among the Franks, uniting mu...

There are two "Lives" of Charlemagne, one by Einhard who was a member of the Carolingian court for decades, and one by a "Mo...

Charlemagne, as has been mentioned many times over the years, brought many educated people to his court ( Alcuin , for example), promoting l...

Gregory of Tours mentions, regarding an event in which the body of King Clovis I was exhumed, "Though I did not know who he was, I reco...

Clotilde is considered a saint by both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. She was an early supporter of St. Geneviève , she b...

Childebert was the third of the four sons of Clovis I , who united all the Frankish tribes in Gaul for the first time, and then had it divid...

There flourished around 540 CE a ruler in Britany called Conomor the Cursed, so notorious for his cruelty that some think he provided the se...

Unlike most of the early Celtic saints, we know much more detail about the life of Samson of Dol (c.486 - 565), thanks to a biography writte...

The location of Wales on the south-western part of the island of Great Britain protected it somewhat from the pagan Germanic invasions that ...

Something about the 6th century British monk Gildas inspired later writers to create elaborate biographies for him. The first is referred t...

The 6th century British monk St. Gildas, also known as Gildas the Wise, is known by different biographies with wildly different claims and d...

Nennius, the lowly minister and servant of the servants of God, by the grace of God, disciple of St. Elbotus, to all the followers of truth ...

When the Romans in the 1st century CE reneged on their deal with King Prasutagus of the Iceni tribe, seizing property, beating his widow, an...

History doesn't usually commemorate the losers, but in some cases the figure involved has fought (and lost) so spectacularly that the ev...

The word for a Slavic epic hero is bogatyr . One of the best-known was patterned on Prince Vladimir's uncle, Dobrynya . His battle with...