Daily Medieval

Alcuin of York is celebrated as a learned man and the head of the palace school of Aachen under Charlemagne, but one of his successors at Aa...

Before modern medicine and studies of biology, theories of how babies developed in utero  were "best guesses" based on what was ob...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy called Peter Abelard "the pre-eminent philosopher and theologian of the twelfth century. The t...

The English polymath Francis Galton (1822 - 1911) framed the debate calling the terms ...a convenient jingle of words, for it separates unde...

Ibn Khaldun ( alias Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī) was born 27 May 1332 in Tunis. He was a Muslim Arab from a...

De Gradibus  (Latin: Concerning degrees) was written by the Father of Arab Philosophy, Al-Kindi (801-873CE). In it, he applies mathematics t...

Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (801-873CE) is called the Father of Arab philosophy. Born in Kufa and educated in Baghdad, he...

Medieval philosophers categorized several logic puzzles as insolubilia , unsolvable things. Probably the most common of these was (and stil...

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

Boethius (left, with numbers from India) debating Pythagoras (right, with an abacus) while Arithmetic looks on Boethius has been mentio...

Sancho in a contemporary manuscript King Sancho IV of Castile (1258 - 1295), also known as Sancho the Brave, ruled the combined Iberian...

St. Peter Damian, letter writer Peter Damian (c.1007 - 21 February 1072/3), the author of the Liber Gomorrhianus , was more than just a ...

A brilliant scholar and fervent theologian/philosopher did such a good job at achieving his aims that the Church realized they had to supp...

I shocked myself the other day when I mentioned Duns Scotus in the post on St. Ivo and found that I had nothing in this blog to which to ...

Realism [ link ] At the foundation of philosophy is a question: what defines reality? There are several questions that are connected to ...

Statue commemorating Averroes in C órdoba Averroes (1126-1198) was born in Córdoba into a family of distinguished jurists and scholars a...

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

The goal of Daily Medieval is to present a sampling of the infinite array of information about the Middle Ages in small, digestible amoun...

Buridan's Ass is the name given to a paradox: that a hungry and thirsty ass placed exactly in the middle between water and hay will be...