Daily Medieval

Chaucer's Parlement of Foules had a very different purpose from the Conference of Birds by Attar of Nishapur  that I discussed yesterd...

John of Arderne (1307 - 1392) was an innovative English surgeon who devised a number of cures and procedures and is considered the first Eng...

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

The man who first came up with the concepts of the Matter of Rome, the  Matter of Britain , and the  Matter of France , was Jean Bodel (c.11...

There's an episode of The West Wing  in which Bartlett asks a retired English teacher if she made her students "read Chaucer in th...

Whan Adam delf, and Eve span, Wo was thanne a gentilman? This was part of a sermon allegedly delivered in Blackheath the night before that g...

Lionel of Antwerp, like many royal children, was obligated to be a political tool as well as a person. Born 29 November, 1338 in Antwerp (hi...

Large empires such as the Roman Empire needed ways to communicate quickly and efficiently with their far-flung domains. For the Romans, it w...

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 ...

On the 28th of May in 1378, a small expedition of 16 men set out from the City of London. In the financial records that manage their pay, on...

Somehow, in 770 posts on this blog, I never talked about Eustache Deschamps before. He was an extremely prolific poet who lived from 1346 un...

Available 2015(?) In honor of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), DailyMedieval is going on hiatus for the month of November so ...

A 12th-century depiction of the Wheel of Fortune from the "Garden of Delights" book by Herrad of Landsberg The Wheel of Fortu...

A page at work Lionel, the son of King Edward III of England and Queen Philippa, was born in Antwerp in Flanders in 1338 during the s...

Tolkien in his study Time to break one of my rules and discuss a 20th century event. Today is the 41st anniversary of the death of J....

When April, with her showers sweet, The drought of March has pierced to the roots... A poster for sale of Chaucer reading On this day...

Funerary monument to Hawkwood This is the story of how an English soldier of no particular background rose to such prominence that a mo...

We know that books were rare prior to the development of the movable type printing press, but they weren't unknown. They could be a st...

William Thorpe before Arundel, 1407; a case of heresy Yesterday's post discussed Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, and sugg...

Thomas Arundel, Lambeth Palace Collection Let us talk about the "Worst Briton" of the 15th century, according to a 2005 poll o...