Daily Medieval

I'm going to start with a quotation from a website about transubstantiation and Paul to the Corinthians: Evidently Paul believed that th...

Peter of Bruys is known to us because of the writings of two of his enemies. He was born in southeastern France and became a Roman Catholic ...

After being slapped down at the Council of Pisa in 1135, Henry of Lausanne refused an invitation to join St. Bernard at Clairvaux, opting ...

When Bishop Hildebert returned to Le Mans after his visit to Rome (to ask the pope to let him resign from his position), he faced a situati...

He didn't want the titles he got, he didn't write the things people said he wrote, he wasn't the saint that some said he was, he...

In the past few days we've been looking at some early history of Poland. Although there are other chronicles, the person recognized as P...

I wanted to offer more detail—some of it quite grisly—on yesterday's mention of the blinding of Zbigniew of Poland by his younger broth...

Zbigniew of Poland was the first-born son of Władysław I Herman, Duke of Poland, but because he was born out of wedlock he was not considere...

Władysław I Herman (c.1044 - June 1102) had a problem known to many nobles: he needed an heir who could succeed him as Duke of Poland. He ha...

Yesterday's post on the Zbruch Idol mentioned that one interpretation of it is that it represents Triglav, the three-headed god of the ...

A drought in August 1848 in a village in the Austrian Empire (now part of Ukraine) exposed the bottom of the Zbruch River. The villagers spo...

In the early days of Christianity, legend has it that the Apostles dispersed across the known world to spread the words of Jesus. (We mentio...

After King Ferdinand I of Aragon annexed Sicily and dismissed Blanche as its regent, she returned to Navarre, where Ferdinand arranged her ...

After the death of her sister Joan in 1413, Blanche (6 July 1387 - 1 April 1441), the second surviving daughter of King Carlos II and Eleano...

After the embarrassment of returning to Navarre from Castile with her daughters to find the palace filled with her husband's concubines...

Lanzarot* was an illegitimate son of King Carlos III of Navarre, whose wife Eleanor of Castile only bore him daughters.  He was born 15 Apr...

I mentioned yesterday how King Carlos III of Navarre brought in midwives from Toledo to help his wife. The reality is, of course, that want...

Although discussions of midwifery recently emphasized how they were considered lower in status than licensed medical professionals, they we...

As mentioned yesterday , midwifery was one of the few professions that was not considered worthy of a guild early on. That may be partially ...

As mentioned recently, since questions of health were managed almost entirely by men, questions about specific women's health issues wer...

We've been having quite the run through some Medieval Era concepts on human reproduction , notably conception and fetal development . B...

We've been looking at the Medieval theories of women's reproductive systems and conception , and now it's time to see how they ...

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

Yesterday's post claimed that there were few medical treatises about women as compared to those on men's health. We do have a few t...

Yesterday's post about menstruation left with the question: How did women deal with it? Well, it was pretty much the same way they deal...

Hamlet referred to the "thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to." Throughout the history of humankind, headaches and tiredness...

One of the earliest discovered (so far) forgeries was the 9th-century Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals. A decretal is a papal decree concerning a ...