Daily Medieval

John Wycliffe (c.1324-1384), first discussed yesterday , started his career as a respectable Oxford scholar and theologian. His religion and...

A church reformer gets his start. We don't know a lot about the early years of John Wycliffe (c.1324-1384). There were likely a few ...

A lunar eclipse was recorded for July 1 in 828 very early in the morning. A second one occurred on Christmas Day, and was recorded thusly in...

Since today will have one extra second added to it, I thought it would be a good time to talk about calendar corrections in history. We...

The fragrant and tasty rosemary (from ros marinus , "dew of the sea") grows natively in the Mediterranean. Perform an Internet s...

After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Turks, Nicholas of Cusa (c.1400-1464) wrote De pace fidei (On the Peace of Faith), in which...

Nicholas of Cusa (c.1400-1464) believed in using reason to determine how the universe worked. He did not exactly take a "scientific...

American History has a charming anecdote that the head of the US Patent Office once declared there was nothing left to invent. The backgroun...

Yesterday I mentioned Gervase of Canterbury and his fairly unremarkable life. What follows is the reason he makes an appearance in footnote...

Gervase of Canterbury (c.1141-c.1210) was a monk of Christ Church in Canterbury. He was ordained on February 16, 1163 by Archbishop of Cante...

Approximately 1100 mappae mundi (maps of the world) have survived from the Middle Ages; about 200 are separate maps; the rest are in book...

As the unknown becomes close and familiar, imagination must seek new realms further away. Modern fiction doesn't write about alien life ...

The first full day of summer seems to be the appropriate place for this: Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweþ sed and bloweþ med...

According to legend, a rich widow named Berta di Bernardo left 60 coins in her will for the construction of a campanile , a bell tower, for ...

Herman of Tournai (1095–1147), an abbot of St. Martin of Tournai (in Belgium) wrote an account called The restoration of the Monastery of S...

On April 19, 1213, Pope Innocent III declared via papal bull that a great council would be held; the Fourth Lateran Council started November...

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious is making news , and my desire to make this blog not just interesting and varied but also relev...

The Classical World and the Middle Ages wrestled with the cause of the tides for centuries. Although one early scholar (Alpetragius, who flo...

The "Great Charter" was signed on June 10, 1215 by King John. After the Norman Invasion of 1066, the kings of England started to...

When Edward the Confessor died, he supposedly made a deathbed statement committing his kingdom into the care of Harold Godwinson. As the m...

In 1051, when King Edward the Confessor was inviting more friendly Normans to join him in England, Duke William of Normandy visited. Accord...

Edward's life was a series of contrasts. Son of an English king (Ethelred The Unready), he nevertheless spent much of his life in Norm...

Early Anglo-Saxon England was filled with clans and communities that made policies and laws and settled disputes during a regular gathering ...

Robert Grosseteste (c.1175-1235) is considered by some to be the founder of modern English intellectualism. Among other topics, he focused (...

The Middle Ages had some serious opinions about meals, especially about how many there should be, and when they should be taken. Breakfast...

The daily schedule of the medieval Oxford student was very different from what modern college students go through. For the first few centur...

Plato's Timaeus contains a description of the origin of the universe that was much discussed in the Middle Ages. For Plato (or for Socra...

...and he's only 14! So... Tens of thousands have damaged London and remain a threat. King Richard goes out to calm them down and pr...

June 12th Wat Tyler and thousands of middle- and lower-class followers reached Blackheath by June 12th, and heard John Ball's famous s...

Wat Tyler & Jack Straw The Peasants' Revolt was not just the result of a stirring sermon by John Ball. All of the counties of Kent...

The Peasants' Revolt--Other Causes The lower classes were not just worked up by a sermon about social equality, or the statutes that t...

The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 The statutes that attempted to restrict the peasant workforce to pre-Plague levels of wages, etc., did no...

"Free"dom isn't "free" Before discussing the first "Occupy" movement--the Peasants' Revolt of 1381--...

Controlling the Workforce After the Black Death (1348-49 in England), the workforce was radically reduced. In a culture where 90%+ of the ...

The Transformation of Matter Of Lanfranc's (c.1005-1089) many accomplishments, perhaps the most far-reaching was his writing on the su...

Friar Clynn looks beyond the present Friar Clynn was a Franciscan living in Kilkenny in western Ireland at the time of the Bubonic Plague....

Scholar and Teacher, Priest and Politician There are two reasons why I want to mention Lanfranc today. One is because today is the 923rd a...

Concerning Nursery Rhymes Ring around the rosie A pocket full of posies Ashes, Ashes We all fall down! "Everybody knows"* t...

The ultimate character witness Throughout several centuries and many countries, establishing your innocence or trustworthiness in a court ...

Hype aside, what do we know? The Middle Ages called what was happening "The Great Pestilence." The "Black Death" was...

Richard II (1367-1400) had all of the elegance and none of the political savvy or military skill required of a king of England in the 14th...

A timeline for the Bubonic Plague (An incomplete list of) Breakouts of the Bubonic Plague: 540 C.E. -- Breaks out in Egypt and reaches C...