medieval

  • Wishing and Hoping: Card Tricks, Love Spells, and Methods of Escape

    Wishing and Hoping: Card Tricks, Love Spells, and Methods of Escape

    I’ll go one further and posit that we need our illusionists: to disprove our eyes, investigate our dreams, and sometimes charm the money from our pockets.

  • Accessing the Past through Graffiti

    Writing for Aeon, historian Matthew Champion delves into contemporary research on medieval graffiti. Exploring graffiti (a visual medium) allows for historians to learn more about the actual lives of the medieval world’s largely illiterate populace.

  • Rushdie Goes Medieval

    Salman Rushdie, no stranger to controversy, now finds himself under scrutiny from a different sort of institution: the Times Literary Supplement. Michael Caines, writing for TLS, takes issue with Rushdie’s recent use of the word “medieval” in a statement made…

  • Cats Haven’t Changed Much Since the 1400s

    Elegant words from a manuscript painstakingly illustrated by a fifteenth-century scribe: “Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam.” Translation: “Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night.” The blog Medieval Fragments…

  • People of Color in Medieval Art

    A few days ago, Morning Coffee dispenser Dan Weiss mentioned Medieval POC, a blog examining the appearance of people of color in European art history. The blog’s creator, Malisha Dewalt, recently participated in a roundtable chat with other art historians and…

  • A Very Medieval Holiday Season

    If the usual array of winter holidays is simply not enough for you, you might consider checking out the medieval December saints calendar (part 1 and part 2). Who needs “New Year’s Eve” when you can have the Feast of…