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Blog postIt has been suggested that everyone with European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne.
You remember Charlemagne. He was crowned Roman emperor by the pope in the year 800, the first independent western Roman emperor since the late fifth century--although there continued to be emperors in Byzantium (basically modern-day Turkey) who were considered Roman emperors until the fifteenth century.
Charlemagne's empire is sometimes called the Holy Roman Empire to keep it se -
Blog postThe wealthy in the Middle Ages liked luxury goods—as of course do the wealthy in the modern world. Something unusual, rare, exotic, and gorgeous, which also cost a whole lot, was both something to enjoy and something to show off to other people.
Rare and unusual animals were real luxury items, both because they were expensive and because the proper care and feeding were complicated and expensive. Both Charlemagne at the beginning of the ninth century and the emperor F -
Blog postIn a medieval-style fantasy or historical fiction about the Middle Ages, the people always seem to eat a lot of stew, which tends to be characterized as "brown." The elite are shown eating meat (generally whole haunches) cooked over an open fire. But what about the fruits and vegetables?
When I first started this blog two of my earliest posts (still popular favorites!) were on what medieval people did or did not eat. More recently I discussed a ninth-c -
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Blog post"Count Guillaume is the biggest, boldest knight in southern France. So why does he keep needing a woman to get him out of trouble? A rollicking (semi) epic tale. Adventure, humor, a touch of romance, and occasional sword fights."
I've got a new book! It's called The Knight of the Short Nose. As I mentioned earlier, I originally posted the story on Kindle-Vella, where people can read it one episode at a time on their phones (first three episodes are free, plus you -
Blog postHistorians love and rely on archives. An archive is a storage facility for documents, and there are hundreds and hundreds of archives in the US and around the world. In these days of digital imaging, it is no longer always necessary to travel to an archive (and the dangers of losing everything in a fire or other disaster are to some extent mitigated), but most documents have never been digitized and may well never will be.
A local historical society may accumulate suc -
Blog postMedieval buildings, just like modern buildings, needed roofs. Medieval people didn't have asphalt shingles or roll roofing or roofing tar, but they still had plenty of options.
Near the Mediterranean, the most common roof was clay tiles, as seen above in a modern building. This is the kind of roofing the Romans had used, and indeed which is still found in southern Europe and in places like San Diego and Texas in the US. Basically clay rectangles were sh -
Blog postAmazon has just announced a new way to read books on line: as serials. Their platform is called "Kindle Vella." Here's the link to the main page.
The idea is that a lot of people enjoy reading serials, one short episode at a time, on their phones, perhaps while on the bus to work, perhaps in a brief break while at work or while contemplating whether that laundry really needs to be done now.
So far there are about 5,000 stories on the site, some -
Blog postA generation ago there was a great debate among medieval historians about what was termed a "feudal revolution" of the year 1000. It has more or less exhausted the debaters, but it still keeps popping up in discussions of the eleventh century, so I thought I should discuss it. (Note: medievalists these days all hate the word feudalism, with its plethora of contradictory meanings, but it keeps popping up anyway.)
This is what is called a "historiographic -
Blog postRight now the sacrament of communion (Eucharist) is in the news, because the American Catholic bishops are deciding whether President Biden, a Catholic, should be denied communion because of his position on a woman's right to choose. So I'll blog about communion.
Its origins of course are clear in the New Testament, which is why it's found, in one version or another, in all Christian denominations. The Last Supper, the evening before the Crucifixion, Jesus is recorded -
Blog postAll the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) stress the importance of prayer. The Jewish Bible talks about praying multiple times a day. One of the most important Christian texts of the New Testaments is the Lord's Prayer, that Jesus taught his disciples. Followers of Islam are expected to pray five times a day; it is one of the Five Pillars of the faith.
Although in majority-Muslim countries it is common to hear the call to prayer coming at regula -
Blog postBecause the Vatican seems sort of medieval—after all, the pope is guarded by guards wearing outfits inspired by those of Swiss mercenaries of the sixteenth century—it's easy to lose track of how young it is. It's one of western Europe's newest countries, having been founded on this day (June 7) in 1929. It's also the world's smallest sovereign state, only 121 acres (roughly 1 square kilometer), with a population of under 1000.
Above you can see a modern Swiss Guard at -
Blog postThe Bayeux Tapestry is one of our best sources of information about what the 1066 Norman Conquest looked like, that is, what kind of weapons, what kind of ships, what kind of clothes were considered normal in the eleventh century. It's not really a tapestry, but rather a series of seventy embroidered linen squares, sewn together in a long series, some 230 feet long and not quite 2 feet tall. It is probably missing a square or two at the end. (Officially a tapes
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Blog postOne of the biggest challenges for independent author/publishers ("indies") is having their books noticed. There are probably at least 10 million ebooks on Amazon alone, plus 30 million paperbacks and hardcovers. Analogies like needles and haystacks come to mind.
So indies have to advertise. Those authors who are published by traditional publishers (think Random House) have their books advertised by the publishing house's publicity department. Aft -
Blog postAs I have discussed previously, medieval people loved epic tales. Although there had been epics written in classical antiquity (the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, the Latin Aeneid), epic was re-invented in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Most famous of the medieval epics is doubtless the Song of Roland, but there were plenty of others, including the cycle of epics about William of Orange.
William was a real person, although there is only a slight overlap between the his -
Blog postShort answer: No.
As I have discussed earlier, medieval people were not advocates of "whiteness." Sure, they were intolerant of religious difference, especially of Christian heretics, but skin color was well down the list of things they would get upset about. This has not stopped a lot of people recently from trying to claim the Middle Ages as some golden age of white nationalism. As a medievalist, I must object to their careless and a-historical use o -
Blog postIn the Middle Ages, beards were mostly worn by old men. Venerable old men were described as having long white beards; in the epic Song of Roland, for example, Charlemagne is described like this. The length of the beard indicated age and wisdom. Hermits also would typically have beards. The image below is of a reliquary at Aachen containing part of Charlemagne's skull; you will notice he is shown with a beard.
But young or middle-aged -
Blog postThirty years ago this summer, I published my first fantasy novel, A Bad Spell in Yurt. I've been writing stories since I was in kindergarten, and I'd already published two scholarly books and a number of articles, but this was very exciting. Fiction uses a different part of the brain than scholarship.
Yurt went on to be a national Science fiction/fantasy best-seller and is still my perennial best-seller. Originally it was published as a mass-market (small size) -
Blog postIt's been two years today since Notre Dame burned. How can a stone building burn? you ask. Well, limestone (such as the church is made out of) will burn when hot enough (it's burned as one of the ingredients in cement), but the real problem at Notre Dame was the roof beams. The roof itself was lead (and the fire spewed the whole area around with toxic lead dust), but the beams were 900 year old oaks. After 900 years, as you can imagine, the wood had gotten very d
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Blog postPrince Philip has just died, a central part of the British monarchy for almost the last seventy-five years. The modern British monarchy has retained many aspects of the medieval monarchy, and Philip is an indication of how much is different and yet the same.
There was only one medieval English ruling queen with a husband who was decidedly not the king, and that was Mathilda. It shows how unusual Queen Elizabeth II is, Philip's widowed queen, that Mathilda doesn't even -
Blog postAs I have discussed earlier, medieval peasants were neither passive nor helpless creatures. After all, they outnumbered the rest of the population by a considerable amount, and if they didn't grow the food, the lord would have to be out there himself behind the plow, or else the food didn't get grown. Peasants were thus a valuable commodity, and at least some lords figured out that making them happy was usually preferable to beating and threatening. Medieval peasants l
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Blog postDaffodils are one of the most welcome signs of spring, bright yellow, big blooms, that usually (not always!) wait to bloom until after it really has stopped snowing for the season, unlike crocuses, which come out all eager and then get crushed by snow.
Daffodils were also a harbinger of spring in the Middle Ages. They were especially associated with Easter. Daffodils were not native to northern Europe, being it appears a Mediterranean-region flower originally, v -
Blog postMedieval people valued silk cloth. It was smooth next to the skin (unlike homespun wool), it took colors well, it was lustrous due to the structure of its fibers, it didn't fade, it was very strong for its weight, and moths wouldn't eat it. (Clothes moths have been a perennial issue for people and their clothes--there are clothes moths in the Bible, where heaven is described among other things as a place where moths will not crawl around and chew holes.)
But the early -
Blog postI've published a new book! As with all of my fiction, there's plenty of magic interspersed with elements of medieval culture. This one is entitled The Sapphire Ring, and it's the third in the "Starlight Raven" series, also known as "Yurt, the Next Generation." It's available as an ebook on Amazon (link here). A paperback version is also available, and ebook versions on other major platforms are also available (B&N-Nook, Kobo, iTunes).
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Blog postWhat did medieval people grow in their gardens? A glimpse into what was (at least) possible is provided by a document of Charlemagne, an order he issued around the year 800. In this so-called "Capitulare de villis," he laid down guidelines for how royal manors were to be organized, including a stone manor house that had a special room for women serfs to weave cloth. This "Capitulare" also included a list of plants he wanted every royal manor to grow
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Blog postI'm a fantasy writer as well as a medieval historian, so I periodically get asked why I don't write straight historical fiction, stories set in the real Middle Ages. Perhaps the closest I've come is in Count Scar, which I co-wrote with my husband, Robert Bouchard. It's set in a thinly disguised version of southern France in the early thirteenth century, in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade. But it has magic as well! The story is about Galoran, a scarred warrior and yo
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