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Articles on European Middle Ages

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This 15th-century medical manuscript shows different colors of urine alongside the ailments they signify. Cambridge University Library

Modern medicine has its scientific roots in the Middle Ages − how the logic of vulture brain remedies and bloodletting lives on today

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.
A diagram of a lunar eclipse from De Sphaera Mundi by Johannes de Sacrobosco, c. 1240 AD. New York Public Library

‘Like blood, then turned into darkness’: how medieval manuscripts link lunar eclipses, volcanoes and climate change

Medieval monks recorded hundreds of lunar eclipses. Centuries later, their descriptions are helping scientists unravel the role of volcanoes in historical climate change.
Burying Black Death Victims in Tournai, Belgium. Gilles Li Muisis, Annales, Bibliothèque Royal de Belgique, MS 13076-77, f. 24v.

The Black Death was not as widespread or catastrophic as long thought – new study

The Black Death is believed to have been the most devastating pandemic in Europe’s history. Now paleoecologists and historians have cast doubt on how bad it was.
As this reconstructed village shows, Vikings made it as far as Newfoundland during the Medieval warm period. Wikimedia/Dylan Kereluk

Climate explained: what was the Medieval warm period?

During the European Middle Ages, parts of the world experienced warming similar to that between 1960 to 1990. But the rising temperatures we’re observing now are global and exceed the past record.

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