Medieval

When Did the Medieval Period End?

As conventional wisdom has it, Europe began to see the light at the end of a dark age sometime around 1500. Four experts try to date the birth of modernity.

Statute of Kilkenny

The parliament of Kilkenny, which passed the eponymous Statute, opened on 18 February 1366.

A ‘Creative Microhistory’ of a Medieval Manor

The distant past is not often illustrated with plentiful descriptions of everyday life. Instead, the picture has to be put together from different sources, piece by piece, like a jigsaw. But there are often still gaps, which can be filled with historically informed creativity.

Take me to the Church

The medieval parish church was the meeting point of many different things, both sacred and secular.

Ira attacking Patientia, from Prudentius’ Psychomachia, English, 11th century.

Women at War

How did women experience warfare in early medieval Britain?

William II, ‘Rufus’, kneeling before Archbishop Lanfranc, from the Chronique de Normandie, French, 15th century.

The Sin King

The court of William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, was known as a ‘brothel of male prostitutes’.

Armenia’s Warrior Queen

Why are medieval women largely absent from current discussions of Armenia’s past?

A page from the florilegium containing the minim sentence at bottom right, 13th century, France. MS IV 524 Bl. 3r © Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library/Lower Saxony National Library/Hannover.

Medieval Minims

The hidden meaning of a medieval pen-twister.

The Hildegard altarpiece, Rochus Chapel, Bingen.

Death of a Medieval Polymath

Hildegard of Bingen died on 17 September 1179.

Abbots Ascendant

William Chester Jordan’s study of one of medieval Europe’s great monastic rivalries suggests that social mobility may have been more common in the Middle Ages than historians previously thought.