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Blog postInsurrection, rising up against one's government, is serious. And yet it has a strangely well established spot in American popular culture. The American Revolution (actually not a social revolution like the French Revolution but a war of independence) is always framed as freedom-loving folks rising up against an oppressive government. Star Wars is a series of stories about overthrowing the Evil Empire (you'd think they'd figure out that building a vulnerable spot into
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Blog postCreative anachronists and those who enjoy cosplay put great effort into creating more-or-less authentic costumes. They usually do not weave their own cloth (much less raise the sheep, shear the sheep, and spin the wool), and dying their own cloth is not common, but the more authentically-minded sew by hand rather than by by machine.
(Of course a lot of them buy patterns, in their size, and use the pieces of tissue to cut out pieces of cloth in the right shape, but -
Blog postWe think of armies as professional bodies, thoroughly trained, wearing uniforms, following discipline, able (in the US) to get their tuition paid to go to college. Since the era of the Vietnam War, the US has gone from a draft to a volunteer army.
Medieval armies were very different, starting with the lack of uniforms, training, and discipline. The Roman army had been more like what we think of as an army, young men recruited into a paid professional military force fo -
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Blog postThese days most of our communication is done by means other than talking to someone who is right next to you. We telephone, we skype or zoom call, we email or text, we make posts on Twitter or Facebook, sometimes we even write letters.
Other than the last of these, all were impossible during the Middle Ages. The ability to allow one's friends and relatives and co-workers, or thousands (or millions) of social media followers, to know what one is thinking has of course -
Blog postIt's the day after Christmas, Saint Stephen's day, so I will blog about Saint Stephen.
Most people probably only think about him in relation to the King Wensceslas song, which is always treated as a Christmas song, even though it doesn't mention Christmas, just "the feast of Stephen." Since his feast day is the day after Christmas, it all makes sense. The song is all about how the rich should remember and help the poor, which is a repeated motif in many old -
Blog postAt the same time as TV shows and magazines are telling us to simplify, to get away from commercialization and overspending and discover "the true meaning of Christmas," we are also being constantly urged by the same TV and magazines to buy lavish presents, especially for the children, though expensive electronics and jewelry seem aimed more at the adults.
(I discussed this in my short book, "Contested Christmas," available on Amazon and other on-line book sell -
Blog postWe think of queens as wives of kings, as of course they were, but they also were rulers in their own right. After all, Elizabeth II has been queen of England for going on for 70 years. Let's not forget the sixteenth-century Elizabeth I. There were ruling queens in the Middle Ages as well. And even as wives of kings, queens exercised real power.
Here a good example is Eleanor of Aquitaine, who I've discussed earlier. She was successively queen of Fran -
Blog postIn the modern West it has become common to have what used to be called old folks' homes (not to be confused with the Stephen Foster song about "old folks at home"). These assisted living facilities, senior centers, nursing homes, or the like have become necessary due to a lot of people growing older and less able to care for themselves easily, and in many cases not having anyone able or willing to care for them at home.
With the pandemic these facilities, where a -
Blog postWe tend to think of the medieval church as monolithic, as a single, unified entity. In fact, there were numerous different entities within it, as I have earlier discussed, popes, cardinals, archbishops and bishops, monasteries, shrines, houses of canons, nunneries, and they certainly did not always see eye to eye.
Even within a single entity there was a lot of difference and disagreement. Cathedrals, for example, had a bishop but also a cathedral chapter. This c -
Blog postIt's November, a month that seems stuck somewhere between fall and winter, can't figure out which one it wants to be. It's a month of major storms on the Great Lakes, as warm Gulf air comes up and meets Arctic air coming south, the "witch of November" as the weather pattern is called (referred to in the Gordon Lightfoot song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald").
The weather in November in the Middle Ages was moving toward what we would consider Decembe -
Blog postMills were the equivalent of medieval factories, places where machinery provided a lot of the hard work that made it possible for people to do more than they could have through their own physical labor. Although there were some precursors in the ancient world, mills, essentially in the form they kept through the nineteenth century, are medieval inventions. (Below is a picture of a nineteenth-century water mill.) Big electricity-generating windmills and water mills (&qu
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Blog postWhen one is writing historical fiction (or fantasy, because let's face it, most fantasy is some version of historical fiction for the setting, with the addition of magic), a question is how to handle dialogue.
Should one's characters sound sort of medieval? (or to be more accurate, like Shakespeare). Do you want them to say things like, "Zounds, thou hast e'en be-causèd me to besmircheth mine trew." Okay, let's hope that no one would actually have a charact -
Blog postLast week I blogged about anti-popes, that is men elected as pope but who are not ultimately recognized as real popes. Real popes were those men elected as pope who were indeed ultimately recognized. When you have both real popes and anti-popes (and you generally don't have an anti-pope without a pope), you have a schism, a split in the church when some people follow one pope, some the other.
The Great Schism involves late medieval popes. The story starts at Avi -
Blog postWhat are anti-popes? They are people elected as pope, in defiance of other people electing someone else as pope, who are later decided not really to have been popes at all. How can you tell the difference? Well, at the time it's hard to say. But the ones who won are, by definition, the real popes, and their opponents are the anti-popes.
As I've discussed earlier, the popes were mostly considered irrelevant until the second half of the eleventh -
Blog postFor most of the Middle Ages, the only sweetener available (other than the naturally occuring sugars in fruit) was honey. Honey could be gathered from wild hives if one were lucky (and avoided being stung), but medieval people also domesticated and kept bees. The honey bee, so necessary to pollination of fruits in North America, is descended from the medieval domestic bee. Note bee in the image below. (Honey bees, and with them the crops they pollinate, are in danger today due to so-called
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Blog postFor those of you who enjoy my fantasy books, you'll be interested to learn that I'm finishing a new book in my "Starlight Raven" series (aka Yurt the Next Generation). It's not quite finished yet, but I've got a cover!
As indie authors as we are called (independent author/publishers) have proliferated, writing and selling both ebooks and paperbacks, a parallel industry has grown up, to edit books or format them or illustrate them. I edit and format my own books, but my -
Blog postIt's October, time to fatten up the pigs, or at least it would have been in the Middle Ages.
Pigs were one of the few farm animals medieval people raised primarily for their meat. They would eat essentially any animal (at least after it got too old), but sheep were raised for wool and sheepskin (parchment), cattle for milk and leather and pulling the plow, goats for milk and wool, horses for transportation, and so on. Pigskin could be used for various projects, but the r -
Blog postUntil the era of Covid-19, Americans didn't worry too much about disease. Some diseases that had been real killers, like smallpox, have been eradicated, and others, like polio, have been nearly eradicated, due to vaccines. Some so-called childhood diseases, like measles and mumps, are unlikely if parents get their children vaccinated. There are vaccines for seasonal flu and for pneumonia.
These are all viral diseases, where the best bet is to build up the body's ow -
Blog post"Wash your hands!" We've been told this since we were little kids, and in a time of pandemic it's especially important. We assume (rightly) that soap is a crucial ingredient of the process. Did medieval people have soap? Yes indeed, though not our kind of soap, in handy wrapped bars or even decorative shapes, smelling delicately of verbena or sandlewood.
The ancient world had not been big on soap, although they knew about it. Athletes had clea -
Blog postIt's back to school time! Except for now, in the era of pandemic, a lot of schools are being delayed or carrying out teaching on-line (obviously impossible in the Middle Ages, or for that matter the twentieth century). Did schools open in September in the twelfth century?
Short answer, no. For starters, there were no public schools. In fact, what we think of as normal, that is more-or-less universal education provided at public schools, appeared for the first -
Blog postNow there's a curious word. Like Egypt, it looks like it has too many descenders (letters with tails that hang below the line). But it's a perfectly good word. Polyptyque means a survey of people and property on a manor.
Polyptyques were an invention of the ninth century, and although a few were created in later centuries, the ninth century was their golden era. They appear to have begun with Charlemagne ordering inventories of property and payments both on h -
Blog postToday I want to talk about Suger, one of the most important political and ecclesiastical figures of twelfth-century France (c. 1081-1151). And no, his name is not Sugar, it's Suger, pronounced soo-zhay. Here's an image of him from a stained glass window.
Suger is best known now as a counselor and biographer of King Louis VI (1108-1137) and as abbot of the monastery of St.-Denis. He was a lifelong friend of the king, because back when Prince Louis was attending scho -
Blog postLately I've been working on a book about medieval peasants. So I've been looking at medieval documents in which peasants appear (there are a lot more such documents than has generally been assumed) and also at scholars' attitudes toward peasants. If one assumes (as has too often been done) that peasants were silent, marginal, and passive and thus did not appear in the documents, then of course one will not look for them. (As you probably guessed, I argue instead for active peas
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Blog postThey did not have corn in medieval Europe.
Wait! say my British readers (or those who have been reading books by British medievalists). There are all these references to "corn"! Yes, but they are using the word "corn" in its broad sense of "grain." They certainly had grain (wheat, barley, rye primarily) in the Middle Ages. But there was no maize, corn in the American sense, Zea mays to be scientific.
I thought I woul -
Blog postAs I have discussed earlier, there were a large number of monasteries in the Middle Ages, houses where men (or women, though not both together) lived like a family, sharing their possessions, following a simple life cut off from the outside world (like in pandemic quarantine!), devoting all their attention to prayer and contemplation (not to Netflix binging).
Historians today tend to focus on the famous ones, like Cluny, whose church was the biggest in Europe, or Cîteaux, head
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