Simon Trafford, School of Advanced Study, University of London
King Cnut has the dubious honour of being the first person recorded in English history to have been disturbed by something frustratingly urgent just as he was about to enjoy a bath.
Did this seal symbolize the order’s poverty, homosexuality or companionship with Christ?
Hinterkappelen/Wikimedia Commons
Warrior-monks crusaded for Christianity throughout medieval Europe. Adding to the ongoing mystery surrounding the military order is their enigmatic seal.
Qualipu Mi’kmaw scholar Christopher Crocker has examined how fascination with Norse contact dominates Newfoundland tourism at the expense of pre-colonial Indigenous studies and representation. L’Anse-Aux-Meadow National Historic Site in northern Newfoundland.
(Shutterstock)
Indigenous and critical race approaches to narratives of the Middle Ages help reveal more accurate histories, and combat the misuses of ‘the medieval’ for hate.
Richard II became king of England when he was 10 and was deposed at 32.
British Library/Wikimedia Commons
By compiling stories about the accomplishments of women, Christine set out to build an allegorical city where women and their achievements would be safe from sexist insults and slander.
One of the earliest depictions of flying witches is in a 15th-century text entitled “Le champion des dames,” or “The Defender of Ladies.”
Martin Le Franc/W. Schild. Die Maleficia der Hexenleut' via Wikimedia Commons
The iconic image of a witch on a broomstick has apocryphal origins. But whether they could actually fly didn’t stop Christian society from persecuting them.
A miniature of the Erythrean Sibyl, writing.
British Library, Royal 16 G V f. 23.
Meg Leja, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Your doctor’s MD emerged from the Dark Ages, where practicing rational “human medicine” was seen as an expression of faith and maintaining one’s health a religious duty.
The medieval is part of the mosaic of modern Australia. Our nation’s heritage on this island continent is full of it: in aesthetics, institutions, laws, languages, identities, moralities.
Nebuchadnezzar – William Blake (c.1805). Tate Britain.
Humans have attempted to understand and treat mental illness for centuries – from ancient Greek medicine, Middle Ages exorcisms and the rise of asylums, to modern medical breakthroughs.
Battle in the margins from the Gorleston Psalter (1310-1324).
British Library
Standards of beauty have been embedded in different cultures, in varying forms, from time immemorial. What endures is that women are still regarded as inferior to men.
A depiction of an earthquake in a 14th-century Apocalypse.
British Library
We might expect that accounts of earthquakes from the medieval period have been lost to history, but some have survived.
The medical school of Salerno as it appears in a miniature of Avicenna’s Canon. The image represents the legendary story of Robert, Duke of Normandy. Mortally wounded by an arrow, he was heroically saved by his wife who sucked out the poison as prescribed by the physicians of Salerno.
Wikipedia
During the Middle Ages, women were steadily excluded from both the practice and the study of medicine by an overwhelmingly male-dominated, institutional and hierarchical system.
Churches’ struggles to respond to the plague and constant warfare in the 14th and 15th centuries helped shape the kinds of Christianity in the world today.