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Blog postMedieval people, like modern people, believed in miracles, as I've discussed previously. But miracles were not free floating events, being usually attached to a place, a relic, and a saint.
Miracles were one of the chief attributes of saints. All saints worked miracles, and from the twelfth century onward one could not become a saint without sufficient post-mortem miracles, all properly verified. (This is still the case for the modern Catholic church.) Thr -
Blog postWe think of summer as vacation time, a break from school, a chance to get to the beach or just sit under a shady tree sipping lemonade in a welcome break from work. A medieval summer had different expectations.
On the one hand, one didn't have to worry about keeping warm, a major worry in the winter. On the other hand, one did need to worry about keeping cool. We now take air conditioning for granted, but it only began to spread in the second half of the twentie -
Blog postOne of the challenges for any author is editing. Traditional publishing houses have full-time editing staffs, but the author had better edit her manuscript pretty thoroughly before submitting or the publishing house won't want the book anyway. And for indie authors (like me), everything the publishing house would do is up to the author herself: editing, cover design, layout, marketing....
So what is editing anyway? And why is it necessary? Short answ -
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Blog postChildbirth is always a perilous time. Even with modern medicine, it is among the leading causes of death for younger women (especially those in communities without good access to health care). It was, not surprisingly, even more perilous in medieval times.
Girls hit puberty then rather later than they do now, around fourteen or fifteen rather than at the age of eleven, which has become the most common age in the US. Partly they didn't have all the hormones now f -
Blog postAlthough for most of the time here I blog about medieval social history, occasionally I like to discuss my fantasy novels, which are informed by real history even though they are not historical fiction. So today I'm going to talk about A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel, and comment on publishing in the thirty-plus years since it first appeared.
It was originally published by Baen as a mass-market (small size) paperback and, after going through three printi -
Blog postAs I have discussed earlier, when talking about medieval soap, medieval people wanted to be clean. The wanted their persons, their clothes, and their surroundings to be clean. This was of course very difficult without washing machines, hot showers, vacuum cleaners, and all the soaps and cleaning agents you can now find at the store, but they tried.
Washing clothes without modern technology was especially a challenge, in no little part because there was n -
Blog postWhen it comes to medieval studies, the big three are Britain (mostly England), France, and Germany. Medieval France and England were both countries with a single king, located within borders that bear a resemblance to where they are today, and with medieval languages that are the origins of modern French and English (English by the fourteenth century anyway). Germany is more complicated, and in practice the territory we now think of as German had more centers of governance a
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Blog postThe Black Sea has been in the news a lot lately, because it's that major body of water past the eastern end of the Mediterranean that has the Crimean peninsula hanging down into it. Crimea is part of Ukraine but has been in Russian control for eight years. The entrance from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea is narrow, with the modern country of Turkey on both sides. Indeed, "Asia" was considered separated from "Europe" by this passage. (Thi
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Blog postWe live in a globalized world, where our household goods and even much of our food may come from North and South America, Europe, or Asia (less likely Africa, though that's also a possibility). Medieval Europe was never as globalized as we are (no shoes imported from China or blueberries from Peru), but there were always trade networks that stretched far beyond Europe's boundaries.
Accompanying the trade were travelers' tales of the bizarre people and creatures one might fi -
Blog postMost people take honey bees for granted. They make honey, we figure, and honey ends up in granola and shampoo and herbal tea, but we don't think much more about it. In fact, something like a third of our food would not be possible without bees.
This is because a lot of our crop plants have to be pollinated, the fruits and nuts and vegetables (though not the grains). They flower, but they don't set seed or fruit unless the flower is pollinated. And unless w -
Blog postCheese has been a staple food in the West for a very long time, probably going back to the period when people around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East first started keeping flocks of sheep and goats, close to 10,000 years ago. Milk is an excellent source of protein, but it doesn't keep well without refrigeration, and it is only available part of the time, when the mother sheep or goat or cow has just given birth. Also, a lot of people develop intolerance to the lactic
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Blog postSicily is the island that forms the football off the toe of Italy's boot.
Because it is as far from Rome or from the big industrial/financial centers like Milan or Turin as you can go and still be in Italy, it can be overlooked (though it is often evoked as a cradle of the New York Mafia). But in the Middle Ages it was an important crossroads, where different cultures met. It is a good indication that medieval Europe was not simply the white Catholic land it is often -
Blog postWheat is the single biggest food crop in the world today, and it was also the basis for the heart of the medieval diet, bread. Planting wheat around the world requires clearing off other plants and trees, to be replaced by fields of food. Now in 2022, the war in Ukraine is disrupting wheat growing, a real problem because Ukraine has been a major provider of wheat to third-world countries. Wheat production has really expanded world-wide in the last two or three
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Blog postAs I have discussed earlier, monasteries originally grew out of hermitages, places where men (and eventually women in their own nunneries) could live in uninterrupted silence, separate from the affairs of the world, engrossed in prayer and contemplation.'
But medieval families were very much involved in monasteries. Even though a monk supposedly gave up his fleshly family for the family of brother-monks under the fatherly direction of the abbot (abba just means father), the -
Blog postBenedictine monasticism was the dominant form of monasticism in the Middle Ages. But who was Benedict and why did he get a whole lot of monasteries following his Rule?
As I discussed earlier, monasticism began in the third century in Egypt, as first Saint Anthony, then men following him, then ultimately women began retreating from the ordinary life of the comfortable cities of late antiquity to try to lead a more austere life, in conscious imitation of the lives of the Apostles.& -
Blog postWe are now in the season of Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter. Forty days is always a significant period in the Bible; Noah after all had to build an ark because it would rain for 40 days and 40 nights. These 40 days were intended to be a time of fasting, contemplation, and forsaking pleasures. The idea of "mardi gras," "Fat Tuesday," a day to be hog-wild just before the beginning of Lent, is a more recent development.
In the Middle Ages -
Blog postAs a historian, I study real medieval people, but my medieval-themed fantasy is mostly populated by people who, I hope, will immediately engage with the modern reader because they are like modern people even if in a fantastic setting. But I've got exceptions, books that are still fantasy (and I hope engaging!) but are closer to real historical fiction. The first of these is Count Scar.
I wrote it with my husband, Robert A. Bouchard. It's set in an alternate vers -
Blog postWe take paper for granted. It's all around us, piling up on the desk or table (or chairs or floor...) in the form of memos, magazines, books, and random jottings. We also use paper for cleaning, that is paper towels and bathroom tissue, to say nothing of cardboard boxes. Remember when computers promised we would soon have a "paperless office"? Yeah, like that's going to happen. But medieval people did not have paper before the thirteenth century.<
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Blog postIt's easy to think of countries as self-evident units. After all, England was a country in the Middle Ages, with its borders pretty much the same as they are now (well, that's cheating, most of its borders are ocean). France was a country, and although big parts of what's now Belgium were part of France in the Middle Ages, and the medieval kingdom didn't include much along its eastern edge that's now firmly part of France (Alsace, the Jura region, Provence), most of what's F
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Blog postRussia is not usually considered part of medieval Europe, but its history is closely tied to the countries to the west. For that matter, it's difficult to draw lines between western Europe, eastern Europe, central Asia, and east Asia, given that they are all on a big contiguous land mass with no sharp dividing lines (south Asia, that is India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, at least has the Himalayas for demarcation).
Everything happened later in Russia, if one takes medieval -
Blog postThree years ago this spring, the cathedral of Notre Dame burned. This was a heartbreaking loss of a cathedral that had stood in the middle of Paris for 850 years. Today it is being restored, and the goal is still, as announced in April 2019 right after the fire was put out, to have it open again by the summer Olympics of 2024, which will be held in Paris.
So what exactly does "restoration" mean? It has a specific meaning that is not just rebuilding or -
Blog postIceland is a parliamentary democracy, established on an island with a lot of volcanoes (a source of geothermal heat and electricity), one of the world's largest islands (in Europe second only to Great Britain, being bigger than Ireland), and a member of NATO. Sounds sort of normal and boring, right? But it's a country shaped by its medieval past even more than most of the rest of Europe.
The first human settlers of Iceland came from Scandinavia during the ninth centur -
Blog postAs I have discussed previously, the idea of a "fall of Rome" ushering in the Middle Ages is a misconception. Both the city of Rome itself and the idea of a Roman empire continued throughout the Middle Ages. Since after Charlemagne was crowned Roman emperor by the pope in 800 there were Roman emperors right there in western Europe, as well as the Roman emperors in Constantinople, it's kind of hard to say that Rome disappeared.
But many things were different. -
Blog postFashion has been important throughout human history, at least for those who could afford it. By wearing clothes that are the latest fashion, one establishes oneself as the leading influencer, the person all others must copy. The well to do of the Middle Ages were just as eager to dress fashionably as is a modern teenager who would (she claims) rather die than go to school dressed grossly out of fashion.
In the Middle Ages of course, just as now, the latest fashions we -
Blog postMy husband makes a very good winter-time dish, pork and sauerkraut, which could also have been made in the Middle Ages. It takes him a couple of hours to make. Onions, apples, sauerkraut, and caraway seeds are fried up together with pork loin, then it's baked with some citrus juice (one could substitute white wine, though we don't). These are all ingredients readily available in the Middle Ages, except for the juice (medieval people would have used wine). Though
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