Daily Medieval

Count Bernard I de Montbard (1040–1103) of Burgundy and his wife Humberto de Roucy had several children. Sadly, most of them died very young...

In 1107, a Burgundian woman from a noble family died. Her name was Alèthe de Montbard, and she had several children, one of whom was named B...

In 1098, some Benedictine monks from the monastery of Molesme in France (Duchy of Burgundy) founded a new abbey at Cîteaux. Molesme was onl...

In the 1170s, a canon of the Church of Saint-Evroult in Mortain (in northwestern France) wrote about a man who had died 50 years prior but w...

In a message for the World Day of Creation (27 June, 2024), Pope Francis said of Joachim de Fiore that he  "was able to propose the ide...

Aelred of Rievaulx took a successful abbey and made it even more grand (although the illustration will show that its fortunes have fallen so...

In 1134, a man in his 20s entered Rievaulx, a Cistercian abbey in North Yorkshire. A sentence like this has been written many times in this ...

Jacques Fournier (c.1285 - 25 April 1342) was born in Foix, a county in the southern part of France. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy at the...

When Peter of Blois ' old law professor, Baldwin of Forde (pictured here outside of Canterbury Cathedral), became Archbishop of Canterbu...

A popular source of stories of miracles and of subjects for sermons was the body of work produced by Caesarius of Heisterbach (c.1180 - c.12...

I have mentioned the 12th century heresy called Catharism . The attempts to stamp it out are called the Albigensian Crusade (and sometimes t...

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...

Saint Hugo persuades Bruno of Cologne to found the Carthusian Order (cathedral window in Grenoble, France) The Carthusians have been me...

Hugh of Jabala tells Pope Eugene about Prester John Many of you know about the decades when the papacy was headquartered in Avignon (fi...

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...

From a facsimile edition of the Codex [DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. Today...

Let us look at a classic "political marriage." Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II of England and  mother of Richard calle...

The name "Hedwig" is now familiar to millions as the name of Harry Potter's owl, but it has a long history that predates its u...