Daily Medieval

The previous post mentioned the man who discovered the combination of chemicals that dissolved gold. He could not have done that haphazardl...

Detail, Allegory of Good Government Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338 The hourglass has become a symbol of medieval technology, one of our first...

[I am on a brief vacation, so here is a post from the past. This post first appeared 25 August 2012.] Speaking of æther ...* In Greek my...

Climbing Lucifer in Dante's Inferno A long time ago (it seems) I touched on gravity and said "there was no working theory of g...

The term parchment is often applied to any animal skin used for writing on, but historically it was used for sheep or goat skin. Cow or c...

Woodcut showing meteorite coming to Ensisheim. Today is the anniversary of the first meteorite the exact date of whose fall to Earth has...

Anthemius of Tralles (c.474-c.557) was mentioned as one of the builders (along with Isidore of Miletus) of the new Hagia Sophia . We know m...

Did a monk of the 11th century accomplish the first manned flight? There is reason to believe so. In the Gesta Regum Anglorum [Deeds of...

Image from Adelard's translation of Euclid's Elements of Geometry Being inquisitive is the first step to learning.* In the early...

[DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. For Christmas I received A Short History of Nearl...

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...

Nicholas Oresme While re-examining Aristotle, Jean Buridan used observation and brainpower to anticipate some of the ideas we attribute...

How long has the universe existed? Has it been around forever? Did it have a beginning? Could it have a beginning? These questions troubl...

15th century portrayal of Ptolemy's map Prior to the Age of Exploration, human beings in the western hemisphere did not attempt to t...

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

I have written about the Oxford Calculators , four men at Oxford University in the second quarter of the 14th century who made great strid...

Robert Grosseteste (c.1170-1253) has been mentioned in several posts . His early life, beyond having been born into humble beginnings in Sto...

For a long time, there were two competing theories about how the eyes see—both wrong. Alhazen ibn al-Haytham Aristotle believed in w...

Hermann, with crutch & Salve Regina Hermann of Reichenau (1013-1054) was born to Count Wolverad II and his wife Hiltrud in Upper Swa...

Locks are mentioned as far back as the Old Testament. The book of Nehemiah , which describes events in the second half of the 5th century, m...