Daily Medieval

Folk in Classical and Medieval times developed many methods for avoiding getting pregnant , but sometimes the inevitable happened. The Bible...

Yesterday we talked about medieval parents having large families. Today we're going to talk about preventing large families. Although Ca...

It was Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s in Vienna who noticed a link between illness (and death) and unsanitary conditions, specifically a link...

The Bubonic Plague's first appearance in medieval Europe from 1348-1351, and it was terrifying. At least one-quarter to one-third of the...

Gentile da Foligno was a physician who learned his art at Padua and Bologna and then became a teacher—quite a wealthy one, as it happens. At...

1582 woodcut demonstrating impetus with artillery Impetus is the force or energy with which a body started to move. The term itself ent...

Rabies, from the Latin rabies  which means "madness," has been noticed for a long time. The Codex of Eshnunna (c.1930BCE), foun...

The Abbasid Caliphate has only been mentioned so far as a target of the Assassins , but deserves more attention. Descended from Muhammad...

(I apologize if the title—or the topic—is too crude for some.) The poor fellow to the right (the one half showing) is suffering from an an...

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...

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

Expositio & questiones manuscript Jean Buridan (c.1300-c.1361) was a University of Paris scholar who was not afraid to tackle some ...

The history of medicine includes many brave and progressive thinkers who were not willing to follow the herd or be content with what was alr...