Villard de Honnecourt

 Much of what we know about medieval building techniques is due to the so-called sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt.  We know very little about Villard himself, other than his name, and the fact that he lived in northern France in the thirteenth century.  But his sketchbook (perhaps better called a "portfolio"), is packed full of drawings of details of the buildings going up around him.  It also includes images of people, animals, siege engines (catapults and trebuchets) and an idea for a perpetual motion machine.

The image above shows a detailed rendering of a clock tower.

The portfolio is divided into several sections, sculpture, architectural features, masonry, and so on.  However, it is clear that some pages that were originally part of it are missing.  Architectural historians now think that the missing section was on carpentry.  Nonetheless, the parts that we do have include so much detail on how pieces of wood can be used and how they are attached together that it seems likely that Villard himself was primarily a carpenter.

The portfolio is a great boon to historians of medieval architecture, because we basically now have 800 year old buildings that have had 800 years of rebuilding and "improvement," so that it's almost an archeological exercise to figure out all the original details.  But Villard gave us, for example, the layout/floor plan of Cambrai cathedral while it was still being built, so we know exactly what the original architect intended.

Modern builders can also learn thirteenth-century techniques from the portfolio.  There are a number of sketches of Reims cathedral, which was brand new at the time.  The detailed drawings would have been a boon to the builders restoring the cathedral after it was gutted during World War I.

Other aspects of the portfolio pique our interest for different reasons.  He included a drawing of a lion (with a sketch of a porcupine off to the side).

In the caption Villard notes that he has drawn the lion "from life."  Okay, we ask, where did someone hanging out in northern France see a lion?  One has to assume it was in a cage, or Villard, standing right in front of it with his parchment and pen, wouldn't have been able to do a nice drawing.  Most likely this lion had been captured in Africa (maybe as a cub?) and sent along the trade routes until it ended up with some rich person, who kept it as a curiosity.  There were plenty of heraldic lions in the Middle Ages, used as signs of boldness and strength, but they didn't look as concerned as this lion seems to (and I'm not at all sure lions have eyebrows).

And let's not forget his perpetual motion machine, where a series of mallets would theoretically keep a wheel turning indefinitely once it was given a push.  (In fact it would not have worked in the thirteenth century any better than it would now.)

The portfolio is available in facsimile with commentary by Carl F. Barnes, The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt (Ashgate, 2009).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval art and architecture, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Lost documents

 We have now only a tiny fraction of the documents that existed during the Middle Ages.  Many of those losses took place during the medieval centuries, due to fires, mice (that will chew parchment), the disintegration of papyrus, the fading of ink so that even though the parchment survives the document becomes illegible, raids from Vikings or Muslim pirates, a gap in record preservation if a monastery lost its regularity for a while, or downright carelessness.

Early in the Middle Ages, up until the early eighth century, some cities still had municipal archives, in which all sorts of documents would be stored.  But these archives disappeared with the disappearance of notaries and, in probably most cases, the disintegration of the fragile papyrus on which most records would have been written.  Papyrus stopped reaching the West after the rise of Islam in the seventh century cut Europe off from Egypt, and it took a while to decide that parchment would do (especially since making it from sheep skin was a prolonged and expensive process).

In the next few centuries documents were rare.  Monasteries that were refounded in the ninth century, after the raids and the indifference (or even hostility) of the early Carolingians toward monasteries, to say nothing of the many occasions where a powerful layman took over a monastery, found they had very few documents.  They would assemble the best records they had, ask people with long memories what they might have heard, and ask kings or bishops to issue charters confirming everything that the monasteries had earlier acquired.

Most of the time, as near as we can tell, these lists of "property we used to have though the documents are lost" was fairly accurate, but of course it also provided an opportunity for creative embellishment.  Many monasteries, for example, claimed Clovis as their founder (though he actually founded zero monasteries) and had long lists of the property he had donated.  Sometimes the creativity was more plausible, and the monks really had owned the property, though perhaps it was someone less elevated than a king who had given it to them.

Kings and bishops liked to confirm monks in their property.  It showed their authority, as chief giver and determiner of who owned what.  Modern editions of monastic records will often include mentions of "lost charters," a summary of a donation or confirmation made, say, by the Merovingian King Childeric, because an authentic document of Emperor Louis the Pious said he was confirming this earlier grant.  This drives documentary historians crazy, because we have no idea if the "King Childeric" document ever really existed, yet there it is, with page number in the modern edition, document number, a date, and a summary as a "lost charter."

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the numbers of documents greatly increased.  Cartularies, collections of documents copied into a single volume, began to be produced in large numbers.  (A thirteenth-century cartulary from Auxerre is shown below.)

 

Once a cartulary had been produced, the big, messy pile of documents in the archives was much less significant.  Archivists worried less about preserving individual charters when they'd been organized and copied into a cartulary.

The messiness really was a problem.  One sad cartulary entry refers to a lost document that had been seen within living memory.  The scribe said he'd looked for it for over a year and couldn't find it, so although he could summarize it in a sentence or two, he couldn't copy it.

Then there were wars.  The wars of religion on the Continent in the sixteenth century burned many documents. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII at the same time led to documents just being tossed, as were the relics of saints.  The French Revolution of 1789, when France went officially atheistic for a while, led to the wholesale destruction and loss of monasteries and their archives.

One noted nineteenth-century French medievalist got his start when his family acquired a former monastery, complete with a pile of old documents.  Mom cut up the parchment to use to seal her jam jars, but the future medievalist started saving out documents from the pile and studying them.

Today we still have a certain number of cartularies where the original documents once copied into them have long since disappeared.  Some cartularies long assumed lost, such as the episcopal cartulary from Auxerre pictured above, emerged in private hands in the 1980s.  Many other documents are still in private hands, such as the ones cut up to made decorative images to sell.

No wonder medievalists have to be intrepid in figuring out pre-modern history.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval documents, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Countess Judith of Flanders

 When authors decide to write historical fiction about a strong woman of the pre-modern period, they tend to go for the old favorites.  How many novels have you seen about Anne Boleyn, for example?  Or for the medieval period, Eleanor of Aquitaine?

But there were lots of interesting, strong medieval women who are worth studying for what they reveal about medieval society who would also make the great basis for historical fiction but who have been undeservedly ignored.  One of them was Judith of Flanders.

Judith was a Carolingian, oldest child of the king Charles the Bald of France and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne.  Like all people of the upper nobility, marriage for her was not based on things we take for granted, like love and shared values and compatibility.  Instead, as I have discussed earlier, politics played a major role in such marriages, which could strengthen alliances or resolve disputes.

Judith was first betrothed in 855, when she was probably twelve or thirteen, to the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelwulf of Wessex, who was about fifty at the time and was a widower.  Æthelwulf, as a good Christian king, was on his way to Rome on pilgrimage and stopped at the royal Frankish court.  There the marriage was arranged.  By this time the consent of both the future husband and wife was required for a valid marriage, but a young princess, who had been brought up knowing she was going to be married to someone rich and powerful who her parents wanted to make an alliance with, was not about to raise objections.

In this case, both King Charles and King Æthelwulf wanted to work against the Vikings, who were harassing both England and the French coast.  A marriage of the princess with the widowed Anglo-Saxon king was intended to ensure that alliance would last.

It is important to note that Judith's parents were not simply disposing of her.  When Æthenwulf returned from Rome a year later and they were formally married, Judith underwent a very elaborate, formal ritual marking her as queen of Wessex.  Anglo-Saxon queens had never had any particular crowning rituals, but King Charles wanted the best for his girl.  Lacking any Anglo-Saxon precedents, the Frankish bishops created a brand new ritual just for her.  (It may have been inspired in part by Anglo-Saxon rituals for the crowning of kings.)

When Judith got to England, her new husband gave her a wealthy dower.  This was money and property that would be hers even after he was gone.  In her status as queen, she sat next to her husband in council and witnessed his documents, something the wives of Anglo-Saxon kings had not done before.  Many at court thought this a little disturbing, but there was nothing they could do about it.  There was also nothing they could do about it when Æthelwulf died only about a year and half after his marriage (858), and Judith promptly married her step-son, Æthelbald, born to Æthelwulf's first wife.

However, this marriage lasted no longer than her first one, and in 860 Judith was widowed for the second time.  The English were probably starting to suspect a pattern.  (Æthelbald was succeeded by his brother Alfred, one of the most successful Anglo-Saxon monarchs, who united all of England against the Vikings, but that's a story for another day.)  Judith quickly sold all her dower property and headed back to France as a wealthy woman.  She was still only in her teens and had had no children.

Her father Charles was probably concerned that a rich Carolingian princess would become the prey of fortune hunters.  While he tried to decide on who to marry her to next, or whether it might be better for her to become a nun (and while he tried to deal with issues like rebellious nobles), he sent her to the royal palace of Senlis, where she was carefully guarded.  Her younger brother Louis, the future King Louis II of France, was also living at Senlis at the time.

The guarding was inadequate.  Judith by this time had a mind of her own.  She decided to remarry, this time choosing her own husband, and she chose Baldwin, young count of Flanders.  Flanders (now part of Belgium, the Dutch-speaking half, then part of the French kingdom) was at the time a fairly small and unimportant county, but Baldwin had ambitions.  He came to Senlis in 862 to negotiate with Judith's brother Louis over some territorial issues, and there he met the young dowager queen.

Did he abduct Judith?  Or did she willingly elope with him?  Did Louis help the couple?  The Flemish in later centuries had all sorts of stories about their elopement.  At any rate, there is no indication that she objected.  Judith now is usually taken as a good example of a noble woman with the ability and determination to shape her own life, though in earlier accounts she was often portrayed as a disobedient daughter or, alternately, as a helpless maiden carried off by a rapacious count.  There was even a strain in English history of Judith as a sex-mad slut who lured her step-son into an incestuous coupling.

King Charles at any rate was furious with his daughter, with Baldwin, and with his son Louis.  (It didn't help that Louis and his brothers decided on a brief rebellion against their father at this point.)  Charles had the archbishop of Reims excommunicate Judith and Baldwin, saying that he was a rapist and she was no better than she ought to be.  The pair fled to the court of her cousin Lothar II, king of the "middle kingdom" between France and Germany, who helped them persuade the pope to lift the excommunication.  (Lothar was officially king of Italy, part of the middle kingdom.)  Charles grudgingly agreed to a formal wedding ceremony in 863.

With this marriage, the next generations of counts of Flanders gained Carolingian ancestry, of which they were intensely proud.  (Judith did have children with Baldwin, in spite of having no Anglo-Saxon offspring.)  Flanders became a wealthy county, especially with the growth of trade in the twelfth century, as the area imported raw wool from England and spun it into cloth for the Champagne trade fairs.  When Charles the Good of Flanders was murdered in 1124, as I previously discussed, there was a great deal of competition for this rich county.

There.  Wouldn't Judith make a better subject for historical fiction than another book starring Anne Boleyn?

For more on Judith and how she has been portrayed over the centuries, see the new book edited by Steven Vanderputten, Judith of West Francia (Brepols, 2024).

 
© C. Dale Brittain 2025
For more on medieval kings and queens, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval German and Latin

 Many of western Europe's languages are derived from Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, plus the regional variations like Sicilian, Occitan, and Provençal.  But many are Germanic, derived from the language (or languages) Germanic peoples spoke as they wandered west into the Roman Empire and its outskirts.  The dividing line between Latin-derived and Germanic languages is roughly the Rhine river, which also formed the eastern boundary of the Empire.

(I'm leaving aside here languages like Hungarian and Finnish, which come from a very different tradition, as well as English, which in its modern form is a mix of French/Latin and German vocabulary, and I'm not discussing today the Nordic languages, which are a different version of Germanic.)

In the early Middle Ages, in the area that had been part of the Roman Empire (excluding Britain), everyone assumed they were speaking Latin.  But as time went on the spoken language simplified, dropping Latin's case endings in favor of more use of prepositions, and using what we now consider the normal subject-verb-object sentence structure, rather than the classical Latin version where the verb often ended up in the final spot.  Pronunciation also varied, so Latin "quatuor" (meaning 4) began to be pronounced more like "katre" (as in modern French).

The different "romance" languages (those derived from Latin) all evolved in different directions, depending on region.  In Italy, where different regions had already developed different versions of their language before Rome conquered the whole peninsula, the different versions of what one might call Old Italian were as different as between, say, Spanish and Portuguese.

In the ninth century, Latin, real Latin, became a learned language.  It was after all the language of the Bible in the West, so it was important to get it right.  People studied the vocabulary, declensions, and verb forms and tried to write and speak using them.  In the monasteries and, from the twelfth century on, in the universities, Latin was the normal spoken language.  It was used for all legal documents until the thirteenth century, when occasionally a legal document would be written in the vernacular, though Latin persisted through the end of the Middle Ages.  Sentence structure however was usually that of the romance languages, and new words were added for things where there was no classical Latin term (like the mould-board plow).

Also in the ninth century, those in regions where Germanic languages predominated started trying to write down their language.  In Anglo-Saxon England, King Alfred had law codes and even parts of the Bible put into Anglo-Saxon, so everyone could understand them.  The priests and learned folks in ninth-century England knew that their spoken language was very different from Latin, so they adhered more closely to real Latin than did many of their counterparts on the Continent, who were doing mix-and-match with Latin and (for example) Old French.  The Carolingian court welcomed Anglo-Saxon scholars to improve their Latinity.

Meanwhile, over east of the Rhine, as the area was finishing being Christianized, it was important to have good Latin, but it was also important to be able to write down the local language.  There were multiple versions of German in various regions, as is the case even today, where the Bavarian dialect is not the German taught in schools, and Dutch (Flemish) and Letzburgh (the vernacular language of Luxembourg) differ again.  Those trying to write down Germanic languages had to deal with the various sounds, like -th- or -w- which have no appropriate letters in the Latin alphabet.

Even today we use T plus H for a sound that doesn't sound like T plus H, and W is made up of two U's put together (think of the name of the letter -- ever notice that before?).  A Merovingian king had tried, three centuries earlier, to come up with new letters for sounds not used in Latin, and been mocked for not speaking pure Latin where you wouldn't need such letters.  Anglo-Saxon England, less dismissive, came up with the "thorn" for the -th- sound, unfortunately not now used.

The ninth-century German priests trying to write Old German also had the problem that since spoken German varied from place to place, written German would too, unless they could figure out the "correct" spelling -- which one was it?

Most modern languages are relatively easy to pronounce if you see a word written out.  Spanish and Italian have direct correlations between letter and letter-sound.  French has a lot of letters that are not pronounced, but if you see a word written out you can say it, if you know some French.

Not modern English!  Spelling and pronunciation are unrelated.  Why do "frown" and "blown" not rhyme?  Why are the present and past tenses of "read' spelled the same but pronounced differently?  Why is the -g- treated differently in "finger" and "ringer"?  Why are "sew" and "sow" pronounced the same, except when "sow" means a female pig, when it's pronounced differently?  No one knows.  And don't get me started on the six pronunciations of -ough- : "though, thought, through, rough, cough, bough" (oh, aw, oo, uff, off, ow).  Don't bother having a first-grader try to "sound it out."  Just teach them the dang word with its pronunciation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval language and other aspects of medieval history and culture, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other on-line platforms.  Available as an ebook or paperback.

 

Stave Churches

 We think of medieval churches as made of stone, as indeed most of them were.  But stone churches always needed wood as well.  The scaffolding that was required when the church was being built, as the rows of stone blocks rose higher and higher, was of course made of wood.  And the rafters of the church, which held up the roof, were wooden.  As the fire at Notre Dame six years ago showed, if those centuries-old timbers caught fire the church itself would suffer serious damage.

Some churches were however made primarily of wood, most notably the Scandinavian stave churches.  There are over two dozen in Norway dating from the Middle Ages and one in Sweden.  The term "stave" refers to the vertical posts, one at each corner of the main, central part of the church, which supported the weight of the rest of the building materials.

These staves were made from entire trunks of an evergreen tree (a special northern species of pine).  An appropriately tall, straight tree would be chosen, its branches cut off, and its bark girdled.  It would now be dead, but it was left standing for several years.  This was believed to make the sap inside set up, making the wood very hard and resistant to rot and insect damage.

The staves were set on horizontal "sills," made from the same hardened wood, and clapboard siding was attached.  The churches were several stories tall, with very steep roofs that would shed Norwegian winter snow.  They were decorated with carvings on the rafter ends, the same way that stone churches might have gargoyles.

The result was something that to the modern eye looks fantastical, like something out of a fairy-tale, but they are treated by the local congregation as just their church (note the cemetery adjoining the church).

Because these churches do not look like the churches built in much of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, they are now often labeled "pagan."  This seems very unfair, as the earliest examples date from the end of the twelfth century, roughly 200 years after the region adopted Christianity.  (Remember, centuries were just as long in the Middle Ages as they are now.  We're talking about a time span comparable to the distance from us back to Thomas Jefferson as president.)

Movies and TV shows about the Vikings often give them "pagan temples" that look like stave churches, even though there is a grand total of zero evidence that Vikings ever worshiped Odin in anything that looked even vaguely like a stave church.  The carpentry skills that produced excellent long ships for the Vikings, however, carried over into the skills needed to build a stave church, and some of the techniques for the churches' clapboard siding are very similar to those used in ship construction.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other on-line platforms.  Available as an ebook or paperback.

Christian Ethiopians in Rome

 As I discussed in an earlier post, Ethiopia was predominantly Christian during the Middle Ages, with its own stories, for example, of miracles of the Virgin, stories that like their counterparts in Europe were intended to show that no matter how big a sinner you were, there was always hope for salvation.

Ethiopia had been Christian since at least the fourth century, when priests from Egypt became established there. (You'll recall that Egypt was a major center of Christianity in the first centuries AD.)  The Ethiopians indeed considered their attachment to the Judeo-Christian tradition to go back even further, to the days of King Solomon.  The "Song of Songs," a book in the Old Testament, has the king address his beloved, "You are black but you are comely."  Both Ethiopians and Europeans interpreted this as meaning the queen of Sheba, black as were the people of the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia).

Okay, the Song of Songs is supposed to be about Christ's love for His church, according to medieval theologians, not some king crooning to his mistress, but they would have been the first to tell you that a Bible text had meaning on more than one level.  At any rate, the kings of Ethiopia, from at least the thirteenth century, asserted descent both from the Solomon-Sheba alliance and from those who had brought Christianity to the Horn of Africa in the fourth century.  They also said that Sheba's son had brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia from Jerusalem, but we aren't going to talk about that now.

In the early days of the church, before the rise of Islam, Ethiopia had sent bishops to ecumenical councils.  They attended the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which addressed some of the issues of the nature of Christ that seemed still to be up in the air after the Council of Nicaea over a century earlier.  Christ was both human and divine, but was He both fully, or half and half?  The council settled on "one person, two natures," fully human and fully divine at the same time, accepted by both the Latin west and Greek orthodoxy.  The Ethiopians, along with some other Christian churches, held out for one person, one (blended) nature.  (Yes, most of us today would be scratching our heads over why this was a big deal, but trust me, it was.) Other differences also persisted, such as whether to celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday or Sunday. Also the Chalcedonian version of the church finished dropping any thought that Christians needed to follow Old Testament requirements of circumcision, which the non-Chalcedonian churches continued to follow.

Throughout the Middle Ages, although there wasn't much contact between western (Latin) Christendom and Ethiopia, once the Mediterranean basin became predominantly Muslim, they knew each other were there.  Pilgrims from Ethiopia periodically visited sites holy to early Christianity, even if in areas (like Egypt or the Sinai) now predominantly Muslim.  There were plenty of stories in Europe about "Prester John," a black priest (prester) who was sort-of-like-a-pope of some fabulous African land.

At the end of the Middle Ages, pilgrims from Ethiopia showed up in Rome.  They wanted to visit the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul who, being in the New Testament, were as important to them as they were to western Christendom.  They settled in the church of San Stefano Maggiore, an old church, located near Saint Peter's basilica, that had been in some disrepair for centuries and had most recently been used to house priests.  San Stefano became the Ethiopian guest house.

Ethiopian pilgrims continued to visit Rome and stay in San Stefano for the next two centuries, through the late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation.  Some stayed only a short time.  Others lived there their entire lives.  They learned about the Latin version of Christianity, and a few converted to it.  They explained their version to the Roman priests.  These priests thought to draw these strange people they thought of as "Indians" (that is from some distant marvelous land) into their version of Catholicism, and simultaneously became disturbed at what they considered heretical beliefs and practices.  The pope, facing the split in western Christendom from the Reformation, tried to figure out how these Ethiopians could be on his side.

The Ethiopians' extensive writings on their experiences in Rome ended up in the library of the Vatican.  Samantha Kelly, who (unlike most of us) can read their language, has very recently published a book on these Ethiopian pilgrims, called Translating Faith, Harvard University Press 2025.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

Religious Women

 There were many ways for women to show their religiosity in the Middle Ages. The most obvious of course was by becoming a nun, entering a monastery for women.  Although such nunneries became common in the late Middle Ages, when a large proportion of the nuns had entered the cloister as girls, for much of the Middle Ages such houses were far outnumbered by male monasteries.

In the early and high Middle Ages, most of the nuns did not enter as girls but rather as mature women.  Men too did not always enter as boys; the Cistercian order, for example, was made up primarily of monks who had converted as young men, and many an elderly man decided to improve his chances at heaven by spending his final year or two as a monk.  But there were a whole lot of nuns who had entered the house in middle age, not old age, usually because they were widowed--a common event when women tended to marry much older men.

It was these experienced middle-aged women who tended to become abbess.  At the double-monasteries of the early Middle Ages and of twelfth-century houses like Fontevraud, where a male house and a female house had a single head, the head was always a middle-aged woman.

But how else could a woman be religious?  Nunneries usually followed the same Benedictine Rule as male monasteries, but just as there were houses of male canons, who lived more or less like monks but who also served as priests for their community, there were some houses for canonesses.  Although of course they did not serve as priests, they might take care of people at a hospital.  (Even today, nurses in Britain are called Sister, a reminder of this old function.)

Canonesses lived in a cloistered setting, like nuns, but one could still be a religious woman outside the cloister.  In medieval cities, from the thirteenth century onward, there grew up forms of the religious life for women where the women continued to live in their own houses and do their normal activities but still practice a more contemplative life.  They might have a rule formally endorsed by a bishop and practice chastity as well as meeting regularly for prayer.

But some of these lay sisterhoods did not bother with a formal rule.  They followed a life that combined religiosity in both a public and private setting but took no vows.  From their point of view, they were living like the original apostles as described in the Book of Acts in the Bible.  The Beguines, found primarily in cities of Flanders, sought to help their fellow citizens through good works as well as trying to be fair and honest in their own commercial dealings.  They met regularly to encourage each other and to pray together.

The danger was that, without vows or formal oversight from the church hierarchy, they were considered (at least by the church hierarchy) to be in danger of slipping into heresy.  Some of them did, making up their own versions of religious doctrine--which of course they believed was true Christianity (the bishops disagreed).  Some got into serious trouble and ended up shipped off to real nunneries.  Some were allowed to continue as long as they kept quiet about it.

And then there were the recluses, women who set themselves up in a tiny house build on the outside of a church.  They would of course need the approval of the priest or bishop.  This practice was more frequent before nunneries became common.  The woman in essence was a hermit in her cell, except that she was usually in the middle of town or village, not out in the woods, where everyone agreed (even including the women) females ought not to be by themselves.  Most of these recluses had enough food to live on donated by the pious and regularly attended Mass in the adjoining church.  But in an extreme version the recluse might be walled up in her cell and not leave at all.

These recluses are often referred to as "anchorites" by British historians, although no anchor was involved, and there is no medieval cognate for the term.

Some of ways medieval women showed their religiosity must have been very hard on their bodies.  But as Peter Abelard pointed out in the early twelfth century,  because women's bodies were weaker than men's, their virtue was so much greater in enduring physical privation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.