Thought Portal

What secrets can medieval human remains unlock? With exciting new developments in the science of palaeopathology, researchers are able to glean much more from human bones than ever before. Speaking to David Musgrove, Professor Alice Roberts explores what the study of these bones can tell us about disease and violence in medieval Britain – considering how learning about historical diseases, like the Black Death and leprosy, can help us to understand and tackle modern diseases too.

Where does the word "chivalry" come from? How should an honourable knight treat his vanquished foes? And do chivalric ideals underlie modern-day misogyny? In our latest Everything you wanted to know episode, medievalist Lydia Zeldenrust answers listener questions on the idealised code of knightly conduct that arose during the medieval era, in conversation with Rebecca Franks.

Join Dr. Andrea Myers Achi, Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art in The Met’s Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, for a virtual tour of Africa & Byzantium. Art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire (circa 330–1453), but less known are the profound artistic contributions of North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had a lasting impact on the Mediterranean world. Bringing together a range of masterworks—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, paintings, and religious manuscripts—this exhibition recounts Africa’s central role in international networks of trade and cultural exchange. With artworks rarely or never before seen in public, Africa & Byzantium sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of medieval Africa. This long-overdue exhibition highlights how the continent contributed to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of the vibrant multiethnic societies of north and east Africa that shaped the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.

Medieval violence

I think this is the article by Sarah Butler she is talking about.

Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe by Stuart Carroll

The Florida State University Department of History welcomes Hannah Barker for her presentation, 'That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500' (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2019).

Hannah Barker Lecture: The Most Precious Merchandise

teaching medieval slavery in captivity

Alexander the Great and his diving bell

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the military order founded around 1119, twenty years after the Crusaders captured Jerusalem. For almost 200 years the Knights Templar were a notable fighting force and financial power in the Crusader States and Western Europe. Their mission was to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land, and they became extremely wealthy yet, as the crusader grip on Jerusalem slipped, their political fortune declined steeply. They were to be persecuted out of existence, with their last grand master burned at the stake in Paris in 1314, and that sudden end has contributed to the strength of the legends that have grown up around them.

For centuries, people have been dazzled by the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. But how much do we know about the countless makers, collectors and connoisseurs who took care of them behind the scenes? Speaking with Emily Briffett, Christopher de Hamel introduces some of these extraordinary people – from a Norman monk and a Florentine bookseller to a rabbi from central Europe, a Greek forger and an American woman with a spectacular library.

Christopher de Hamel is the author The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

It was an enterprise that helped transform a marginalised language into a global powerhouse. Lydia Zeldenrust tells Spencer Mizen how, some 550 years ago, a middle-aged merchant called William Caxton did something that would change the course of literary history: he produced the first book ever printed in the English language. She also explores the challenges Caxton faced – from defying the hegemony of Latin and French to deciding which of England’s many regional dialects to plump for – in order to go where no printer had gone before.

If you feel unwell today you can pick up a prescription or head to a medical centre, but how did ill people treat their ailments in the Middle Ages? A major new project at Cambridge University Library aims to find out, by digitising, cataloguing and conserving over 180 medieval manuscripts, containing well over 8,000 medical recipes. Dr James Freeman speaks to Emily Briffett about what these weird and wonderful recipes – using ingredients like puppy stomachs and eel grease – can tell us.

New archeological find confirms and supports historical theory!

old age in medieval Europe

Hildegard of Bingen (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis; c. 1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages.[1][2] She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history.[3] She has been considered by scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.[4]

Hildegard's convent elected her as magistra (mother superior) in 1136. She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. Hildegard wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal works,[5] as well as letters, hymns, and antiphons for the liturgy.[2] She wrote poems, and supervised miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.[6] There are more surviving chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words.[7] One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play.[a] She is noted for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota.

Although the history of her formal canonization is complicated, regional calendars of the Roman Catholic church have listed her as a saint for centuries. On 10 May 2012, Pope Benedict XVI extended the liturgical cult of Hildegard to the entire Catholic Church in a process known as "equivalent canonization". On 7 October 2012, he named her a Doctor of the Church, in recognition of "her holiness of life and the originality of her teaching."[8]

The Greedy Peasant

One of my favorite things about social media is how I get to enjoying weird niche amazing art that would never ever get thru regular gatekeepers of art, tv, film, and music.