In the Middle Ages, when there was little idea of diversity of thought or acceptance of difference, and when governments were relatively weak, the court of public opinion was an effective means of ensuring group cohesion.
If you, like many at this time of year, have resolved to give up alcohol, then it might be a comfort to remember you are not the first in history to have attempted this. As Song dynasty writer Liu Xueji found, then as today, peer pressure and social obligations can test one’s resolve to cut back on wine.
The medieval idea of fighting a duel to determine who is right is one that has some appeal even in the modern-day.
January 1st is the Feast of Fools, notoriously a time of drunkenness and debauchery in the medieval church. But was it really? This…
Many of the most signature parts of Christmas in the Middle Ages (and today) actually come from pagan rather than Christian traditions. So, if you want to find out how you can make your Christmas and end of year celebrations just a little bit more pagan, read on!
This week on The Medieval Podcast, Danièle is joined by Peter Konieczny to discuss The Merchant of Prato and the lives of Francesco and Margherita Datini. Their story from 14th century Italy comes from one of the richest document finds ever made!
Marriage was an important part of many medieval women’s lives, but not all marriages followed the neat path that the church had laid out for them. This week on The Medieval Podcast, Danièle speaks with Dr. Bridget Wells-Furby about fourteenth-century heiress Lucy de Thweng and what her story can tell us about medieval marriage, adultery, and even annulment.
This episode tackles listeners’ questions about Byzantine ethnic identities. How do groups within the Byzantine Empire change their identities? How are new identities born and old ones lost? How did the ancient Greeks become Romans and when did that become an ethnic identity? Where does genealogy and biology fit into all this? What happened to the Romans of the west? What did the Byzantines call their state and language? What does modern Romania have to do with Byzantine Romanía?
Have you ever wondered how peasant children were educated in the Middle Ages? And if they even went to school?
Daniel Lord Smail examines slavery in medieval France.
What was it like to have this famous general as a father?
As the Bubonic Plague made its way westward from China in the 14th century, Christians, Muslims, and Jews in its path thought anxiously about what practices of public health and of piety might save them.
The Metropolitan Police Service – the first modern police force – was only created in London in 1829. So what were the structures in place for keeping order before that?
What did medieval people, living in a preindustrial time of food scarcity, think about fatness and thinness?
When it comes to taking care of babies in the Middle Ages, this meant swaddling them and rocking them in cradles.
This thesis is the first systematic examination of the textual and material evidence for disease and hunger in Carolingian and early Ottonian Europe, c.750 to c.950 CE
This week, Danièle takes on five common myths about medieval peasants.
This article explores the relative role of leaders and communities within Bury St
Edmunds, a town in western Suffolk under the lordship of the Abbey of St Edmunds.
Although adultery wasn’t sanctioned by the church, it made for some of medieval Europe’s most beloved stories, from romance to fabliaux.
Property was a desirable asset in medieval Cambridge, much as it still is today. Two new books examine the records of over one thousand properties in the town, all detailed in the Hundred Rolls of 1279.
In these times, I want to bring out one thing that medieval people knew but we seem to have forgotten: Touch is necessary and fundamental.
This dissertation is an exploration of Genoese institutionalism that demonstrates the way grain and grain distribution were intertwined with state debt and public spending in the exercise of political power in the medieval urban republic under the fourteenth-century government of Simone Boccanegra (r. 1339–1363) and his successors.
‘You thief, you son of a thief. We shall wipe you off the face of the earth!’