Daily Medieval

The Etymologiae of Saint and Bishop Isidore of Seville (c.560 - 636) is an early encyclopedia that summarizes in 20 volumes all the knowled...

John of Garland (c.1180 - c.[at least] 1252) was an English grammarian and poet. (He wrote a poem about a recording demon .) Despite his Eng...

Many of you already know about the Norman Invasion of 1066 when William the Conqueror became ruler of England and the Anglo-Saxons within. T...

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...

Medieval scholars from very early on were fascinated by grammar  and analyzed it and language endlessly, trying to figure out how a word rel...

The term "Flemish" has been used since the 1300s to refer to a certain group of people. What does it mean to be Flemish? The word ...

  When King Edward III sent his son Lionel as viceroy of Ireland, there were issues on the agenda regarding the presence of the English in I...

A few days back, Ladino was mentioned in the first post about the Toledo School of Translators. I described it parenthetically as Judaeo-Spa...

In the beginning of the 12th century, European science lagged behind Arabic scholarship, in many ways because early Greek texts had not made...

Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187CE) was an important translator of Arabic texts into Latin. Born in Cremona in northern Italy, he went to Toledo...

When Catholic missionaries in the Middle Ages went to a new land, how did they deal with language barriers? They had to make their own lexi...

Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset, England, that has been inhabited since Neolithic times. A recent post discussed the discovery of ...

We note with sadness the passing of Ray Tomlinson  on 7 March 2016, whose name and history are unknown to the general populace but whose in...

In England there are still many "Commons" that are accessible by locals for grazing their animals. Their origin can be summed up...

You can get your own copy here The Leiden University Library in the Netherlands, founded in 1575, was an important part of the Enlighten...

Even those of us who have studied some classical Greek would be surprised when first running across a pattern/practice called antistoichia...

When we think of the history of schools, we imagine an unbroken line of buildings and teachers and groups of pupils sitting on chairs or b...

Why it happened, and why it happened the way it did, are still hotly contested. Also, there are no images for it that don't themselves ...

Iota, the smallest thing in the Greek alphabet, with the reputation for being ... the smallest thing. Even people who don't know a b...

[This is Part 1; the other 3 parts address Gothic Architecture, the Gothic Revival, and Fiction.] From the Middle Ages until 1974, the Kin...