Daily Medieval

John Arderne (1307 - 1392), of whom I first wrote many years ago , has been called the father of English surgery. He earned this by producin...

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 , also called the "Black Death," first hit the European Middle Ages primarily in 1348-1351, but that wasn't...

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...

Because there are no "hard and fast" dates for cultural eras (although I nominate 1453CE for one), the Italian Renaissance painti...

Giovanni Boccaccio's best known work to modern readers is his Decameron , a Greek word that means "Ten Days." In it, seven yo...

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) was eight years old when Dante died, but he revered the man and wrote a biography about him. He even gave ...

Dick Whittington 's cat might have made his reputation according to the legend , but cats were not always a welcome sight in the Middle ...

Catherine of Siena is an example of how one can be connected to a religious order and still influence events "in the world." She w...

(If you want to see parts one and two .) The second part of the Hundred Years' War was the Caroline Phase, named after Charles V of Fra...

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 ...

The Plague, also called the Black Death, spread across Sicily shortly after the arrival of a fleet of a dozen Genoese galleys bringing go...

Here is a description of a medieval cult: At length, when the novice has come forward, [he] is met by a man of wondrous pallor, who has b...

The walled town of Nördlingen in Bavaria Henry of Nördlingen was an interesting character. We don't know when he was born, nor when...

[ source ] Yesterday we mentioned Dr. Sharon DeWitte of the University of South Carolina, who examines skeletons from the Middle Ages ...

The much-disputed Crimean Peninsula On the north coast of the Black Sea, a peninsula extends from the southern part of Ukraine. If you l...

The climax of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 On the heels of the recent news article about how victims of the Bubonic Plague still exi...

After the first catastrophic outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in 1348-50, Europe continued to suffer about every decade. The Plague returned...

Dimashq. دمشق. Dimishe'. al-Sh ām. The City of Jasmine. "Oldest continuously inhabited city in the world." Damascus. I...

Romsey Abbey was, for a brief time, the home of Matilda of Scotland and her sister Mary. It is called "Romsey" because it was or...