Life in the Middle Ages

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Varieties of modern fantasy

Fantasy has become a well developed genre, with lots of sub-genres, from romantic ("romantasy") to grim-and-dark to "cozy" to humorous. Today I want to talk about several recent excellent fantasy books as examples of the variety the field has embraced.

Okay, at the simplest, fantasy is a story with magic, usually (not always) set in an imagined past, often vaguely medieval. JRR Tolkien essentially invented the modern genre with The Lord of the Rings, and in the 1950s critics didn't know what to make of it, although they liked it a lot. "Super science fiction." "Fairy tales for grownups."

Tolkien-style fantasy has dominated for 75 years. It has a fairly well developed world in which the story takes place, generally with wizards, magical creatures like hobbits or elves or dragons, often a map. The material culture is pre-modern, swords instead of guns, horses instead of cars, hand-made instead of factory-made goods, wood fires instead of electric and gas. George RR Martin has this kind of setting for his on-going series beginning with A Game of Thrones. My main fantasy series, "The Royal Wizard of Yurt," falls more or less into this category (though I highly doubt anyone would compare Yurt to Martin's Westeros.)

One can vary this with fairy-tale fantasy, sort of the same but vaguer on setting, often including such New World items as chocolate and potatoes in a semi-European setting (even Tolkien included potatoes and tobacco), generally more lighthearted (certainly more so than Martin), and frequently involving princesses. Some authors retell classic tales like "Beauty and the Beast" or "Snow White" this way.

Alternately one can have a medieval setting that is pretty close to the real Middle Ages, although with magic. My husband and I did this with our Count Scar.

One can also set fantasy in something like the modern world. The book The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow, starts off in something sort of like modern England but then ranges back over the centuries to the Bronze Age or before, with efforts to remake history in pursuit of justice. It's been getting a lot of attention for its unexpected plot twists and strong characters.

This book just came out last year, as did Snake Eater by T. Kingfisher. This one is set in something close to the American Southwest, and it is very evocative of the creatures and myths of the desert and the native Americans. Its magic isn't time-travel but the idea of desert gods attached to native creatures (a roadrunner is crucial, definitely not the cartoon version). Again, excellent characters.

A third recent book I've very much enjoyed (though it's nothing like my own fantasy) is The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. This one is a few years older. It's set in something like modern Britain, except that a lot of children are born as magical creatures, and there's a highly questionable bureaucracy that is supposed to supervise them. Humor, very realistic children, and a touch of gay romance, lots to enjoy.

You will notice that fantasy is very rarely a quest to overcome the Dark Lord these days. Ever since Diana Wynne Jones published Dark Lord of Derkholme, a hilarious adventure where people from our world pay to take quests through the "portal" to a fantastic land and "slay the dark lord," we haven't seen it much. But there are lots and lots of alternate plot lines. Fantasy, when done right, raises real human concerns in a setting like and unlike ours. And I haven't even talked about sex-with-magical-creatures.

Sunday, August 16, 2026

Cows

We take cattle for granted. Beef accounts for a quarter of the meat eaten in the world. Our milk and dairy products are primarily from cows (half-and-half for our coffee, much of our cheese, butter, sour cream, and ice cream). Most of our leather comes from cows. We wouldn't know what do without them, even though most of us have few personal interactions with them.

Did medieval people have cows? Of course. But they were raised and treated differently than cows today, and there were no cows in the Americas before Christopher Columbus brought some on his second voyage (1493).

Cows are descended from the aurochs, a wild bovine that finished going extinct in the seventeenth century but had been very rare for centuries before then. The aurochs might be considered Eurasia's answer to the bison. It could reach six feet tall at the shoulder and had wicked horns. But the aurochs was domesticated into the cow around 10,000 years ago, probably roughly simultaneously in the Middle East (specifically what is now Turkey) and in South Asia (specifically what is now Pakistan). It became smaller, more mild-tempered, and stupider.

The generic term "cows" can either mean cattle of either sex (used this way in the term "cowboy") or else female cattle in particular. The feminine is the term used for the species as a whole. (Fun fact: The same is true of geese.)

Cattle change a landscape. They trample through the mud and eat all the grass. In the medieval Mediterranean region they were relatively uncommon, because sheep and goats did better in a dry landscape and could eat plants cows wouldn't touch. The Romans had mocked the Germanic peoples for preferring cows to goats when they showed up along the margins of the Roman Empire. But then they mocked the Germans for liking butter and for not speaking Latin.

Medieval cows were smaller than our cows today, which really can be enormous, as you'll know if you've had any personal interactions. Medieval cows were usually brown, not the black-and-white we often assume. Dairy cows did not produce milk year-round (or almost year-round) as they do now, which meant farmers were not slaves to their cows, who now require twice-daily milking.

Today most beef cattle are free-range for much of their lives, wandering around eating grass without much human supervisions, then rounded up, taken to livestock yards for fattening up (mostly on grain and corn), and slaughtered. Dairy cattle are kept in good sized herds, from twenty cows up to a couple of hundred. Medieval cows were mostly kept one-at-a-time, in close contact with their humans, as I have discussed earlier.

Medieval cattle were also very useful as draft animals. Oxen were used to pull carts and plows much more than horses, which are more flighty and more expensive to keep. (An ox is a male castrated as a calf, so it grows up with a bull's muscles but not a bull's aggression.) The ox transformed life in the Americas, giving the natives an animal that could be used to pull heavy loads, which they had never had before (for small loads, North American natives had used dogs, South Americans the llama—you can see this has serious limits).

For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.

Saturday, July 25, 2026

Count Scar

"Count Scar" is back in print!

Okay, let's back up a bit. Have you ever tried to write something jointly with someone else? My husband and I did. The book was "Count Scar" (and we followed it up with a sequel, "Heretic Wind."). How you ask did we do it without straining our marriage?

Actually it worked well. We each wrote one of the book's two main characters, alternating viewpoints. We had to consult of course on what was going to happen next, and had to go back sometimes to make sure the continuity worked, but overall each person's chapter belonged to that person (including sometimes setting up a surprise twist at chapter's end for the other person to deal with).

The two characters are Galoran, a scarred soldier who unexpectedly inherits a county and a castle when a distant cousin dies under mysterious circumstances, and Melchior, a priest trained in the highly dangerous magical arts, who has dark family secrets to hide. It's set in an alternate version of southern France at the beginning of the thirteenth century, in the era of the Albigensian Crusade. The two characters don't entirely understand or trust each other, but they have to work together when it becomes clear that heretics, far from being defeated in the Crusade, are planning an assault on the castle in the opening salvo of a magical attack that could destroy everyone.

In spite of the magic, the book is fairly close to being set in an accurate version of the real Middle Ages. Interestingly, "Count Scar" (and its sequel) and the three retellings of medieval tales which I've published all take place in something I'd recognize as the real social world of the Middle Ages. (The medieval tales-retold are "Ashes of Heaven," "The Sign of the Rose," and "The Knight of the Short Nose."). None are historical fiction because none of the characters are real figures, but the settings are about as real as I can get.

"Count Scar" was originally published in mass-market paperback some thirty years ago and has long been out of print, though it's been available as an ebook on all major ebook platforms and as part of a print omnibus along with the sequel. But we decided to bring it out again as a free-standing paperback, new cover but same content, for everyone who likes holding a book in their hands but is tired of dog-eared pages falling out of an old paperback. And also for those who've never read it but would enjoy it!

Here's the listing on Amazon. It is also available to be ordered through any bookstore, or will be shortly. Happy reading!

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Forest Primeval

Europe and North America don't have a lot of old growth forest anymore, for the simple reason that humans have cut it down. It is said that at the time of the American Revolution, a squirrel could travel from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic without once getting down from the trees. That squirrel would be in trouble now.

In Ohio, when the settlers arrived one of their first acts was to start cutting down the forests. Oaks hundreds of years old were chopped down and burned in big bonfires, not even saved for building materials or household cooking and heating, because the amount of wood appeared unlimited (spoiler alert, it wasn't). It was said the bonfire flames could be seen for miles.

There are a few patches of primeval forest left in North America, but the biggest stretch is the boreal forest at the northern edge of Canada, now suffering from wildfires. Western Europe has very little real forest, outside of some in northern Sweden and Norway, which is why it was considered miraculous when enough big oaks were found (mostly in eastern Europe) to rebuild the roof beams in Notre Dame the way they had been built in the twelfth century.

The early Middle Ages had had some fairly major forests, due in part to the reforestation of what had been cropland under the late Roman Empire, during the major population decline of the sixth and seventh centuries. "Second growth" forest can become "old growth" forest, given a few centuries undisturbed. Forests were considered scary places, the land of bandits and wolves. But as Europe's population grew, so did land clearance.

Already in the first half of the twelfth century, Abbot Suger of St.-Denis considered it miraculous when he found enough big timbers for his own church rebuilding in his immediate region (not having to send off to eastern Europe, as was the case with Notre Dame nine centuries later).

The Europeans in medieval times were a bit more cautious about clearing forests than were their descendants in. eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ohio. In spite of the forest advances of the early Middle Ages, there were still a lot more people needing open land for their crops and their flocks than there were in North America before the arrival of white people. Trees were too valuable just to burn in bonfires.

Trees were used for building and for firewood in the home, and it was recognized that wild animals (like deer and rabbits) and some wild foods (like mushrooms or wild fruits and nuts) needed forested land if they were going to produce human food without human labor. From the late twelfth century on, there were a constant stream of negotiated agreements about who could and couldn't cut down trees or carry fallen wood away. Forests needed to be managed. (Though not raked.)

England and Iceland especially were deforested during the Middle Ages. In both places there was a lot of raising of sheep, who will eat almost any plant down to the ground, making it hard for woodlands to spread. Especially since both of these are on islands, the ocean itself slowed down the spread of seeds. Interestingly, there are probably more trees in western Europe (including England) now than there were in the late Middle Ages. Modern agricultural methods (and fertilizer) have reduced the amount of open land per person required to raise food, and heating and building are primarily done with materials other than wood.

Friday, June 19, 2026

Langres

The city of Langres, located on the Burgundy-Champagne border, was an important city in Roman Gaul and a major bishopric during the Middle Ages, even though it's become a rather quiet provincial town in recent centuries, with a current population under 10,000.

It's located quite dramatically at the top of a steep hill, overlooking the countryside, and still has its Roman walls. Traffic has to drive in and out through some of its Roman gates. The gates pictured above are the best preserved of the Roman gates and thus are closed to traffic.

The Romans liked Langres for its strategic location, and a number of Roman roads met there. The strategic location meant that Langres continued to be important militarily up through the nineteenth century.

Like most bishoprics in what is now France, Langres dates its Christianization and first bishop to the third century. Autun was probably the original diocese covering what is now Burgundy, and other dioceses were carved out of it between the third and fifth centuries (Langres, Auxerre, Nevers, Mâcon, and Chalon-sur-Saône).

The bishops were important counselors to the Carolingian kings in the ninth century and continued to be major political players. During the twelfth century the Capetian kings granted the bishops the right to hold Langres and its region directly from the crown, rather than having either the duke of Burgundy or the count of Champagne be in authority over their territory. The bishops liked to say they were dukes in their own right.

The diocese of Langres was one of the most central in the early spread of the Cistercian order. A number of houses were founded on the Langres plateau. Unlike the monastery of Cluny, which always tried to exempt itself from the authority of its local bishop (Mâcon), the Cistercians always got along well with their bishops—some of whom were Cistercians themselves.

During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a son of Langres, Denis Diderot, established the first "Encyclopedia," volumes that purported to cover all of human knowledge, in the hope that educating the populace by whatever means possible would lead to a more rational and happier and prosperous population.

The city of Langres commemorates Diderot (who also rates a statue and a central square named for him) with a park bench made to look like an encyclopedia volume.

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Still Medieval After All These YearsAs

As I announced back in March, I've been working on a new book, and now it's out! It's called "Still Medieval After All These Years," and it started life with this blog.

The book's purpose is to discuss some aspects of medieval society I never got to in my first so-called blog book, "Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages."

Specifically, I have much more to same about peasants, their status and opportunities, and about food and beverage. (Did you know lasagna is probably a Norman dish? Introduced by them into Italy? No tomato sauce, though.). Then I go on to discuss how medieval buildings were built, how medieval people kept healthy, and a lot on the medieval church and religion.

But the newest aspect is a focus on how much modern society owes to the Middle Ages, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Even though we've decided we are "modern," the medieval keeps tempting us, including (strangely enough) notions that somehow life was better then and that we should be able to use the Middle Ages as a model for a racially and religiously pure society. (Um, that's not going to work.)

(I also talk about medieval-themed fantasy fiction. That aspect is fine.)

Anyway, the book is now available on Amazon, both as an ebook and a paperback. Here's the paperback link. It's also on Barnes & Noble as an ebook and will shortly be available on all major ebook platforms, and it can be ordered through any bookstore.

The ebook has color pictures if you read on a computer or tablet, black and white on a Kindle or as a paperback. They're all my photos, so you get in effect a travelogue as well as social history. Hope you enjoy!

Sunday, June 7, 2026

Marginalia

Medieval manuscripts, pre-printing press, naturally were all hand written and hand illustrated. Sometimes someone with artistic ability would just take an initial letter and make it fancy.

But often, for a high-class book, there would be actual illustrations. Most of these illustrations were something to do with the text itself. So the initial letter of one of the prophetic books of the Bible (like Isaiah for example) might include both the letter itself and a picture of a prophet with his long beard.

This wasn't enough for some illuminators (as they were called, the artists illustrating a book). They would do their appropriate illustrations, but then they would add things in the margins that might have nothing to do with the actual text. Although they would usually refrain if illuminating an actual Bible, other books were not off-limits to marginalia.

These marginal illustrations were often witty, sometimes bawdy. They might be a commentary on the society of their time. Rabbits frequently featured, portrayed for example as suited up in armor and jousting with other rabbits. Strange hybrid creatures sometimes appeared. Sometimes they were subtle or not so subtle digs at those in authority.

In the above image, a fox, wearing a bishop's mitre and carrying a bishop's staff, is preaching to his flock, quite literally a flock of birds, geese, swans, and other fowl that, presumably, the fox has intentions of eating. The birds seem quite attentive. There's a Dutch proverb that goes something like, "Watch your chickens when the fox preaches the gospel." A good warning indeed.

(The images above are, respectively, the second cartulary of Montier-en-Der from the thirteenth century, Archives de la Haute-Marne, 7 H 2; and from the fourteenth century, British Library Royal MS 10 E IV.)

For more on various aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback!