Still Medieval After All These Years

 I'm working on a new blog book!  This blog has been underway for nearly a dozen years, includes over 600 posts, and I still haven't run out of things to say about the Middle Ages.  My first blog book, Positively Medieval, which came out eight years ago, pulled together a lot of the ideas I had put into the blog so far.

That book focused on medieval life and society, seeking to introduce readers to what it would have been like to live then, what people ate, how they became educated,  how they got married and raised their children.  I had extensive sections on the medieval church, which played a larger role in most people's lives than did the government.  In the process I tried to refute some common misconceptions about what the Middle Ages were like, from "fall of Rome" to "code of chivalry."

The new book will be called Still Medieval After All These Years. The cover is below.  The image is a street in Noyers, Burgundy.  People today are continuing to live in the old medieval buildings.Note the bicycle in the foreground.

 

It will include a lot of social history and interesting things you may not have known about the Middle Ages, especially the peasantry, but the main focus will be how much of what we now take for granted as "modern" has medieval roots, or how other things we also take for granted would have been deeply disturbing to our medieval ancestors (and vice versa).

Both of these blog books (as you probably already figured out) are based on this blog.  But there's not a lot of order to how I post on the blog, as I choose topics based on contemporary events (like Groundhog Day), events in the news, a book I recently read, or something that occurs to me I've never covered.  (Sometimes readers point this out.)

So for the books I try to have a more coherent organization, putting similar topics together, writing transitions and seeking to minimize repetition.  The new book will be out this summer.  In the meantime, if there's a topic you feel I haven't addressed and would like to see, mention it in the comments, as there's still time to include it both in this blog and in the book!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

In the meantime, 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! 

  

Rats

 Modern cities have rats.  So did medieval cities.  The typical rats of European and now American cities are the black rat and the brown rat, the latter the so-called Norway rat (not to be confused with the Norway spruce). In spite of the evocation of Scandinavia, rats actually originated in eastern Asia, but they have spread around the world, now being found on every continent except Antarctica.

(The above photo is by Nikolett Emmert.)

Rats have adopted very well to humans.  In fact, although their ancestors lived in the wild, rats do not do well unless closely associated with humans.  They can survive in very cold climates by staying inside with the humans.  Their favorite food is whatever their local humans have left over and dump in the trash.  Italian rats, for example, favor spaghetti.

Cities are always trying to get rid of rats, but it's an uphill battle.  For one thing, rats are smart.  They can evade traps, hide so they won't be spotted, fight back against cats and terriers. They have large litters of pups at regular intervals, so even if sizeable numbers of rats are killed, they can quickly come back.

New York City thought they had kept rats out of residential neighborhoods more or less successfully until the Covid-19 pandemic. Then the restaurants closed down, and suddenly the rats found their favorite dumpsters empty.  Being resourceful, they headed out to the residential neighborhoods, which now had more food waste with more people eating at home. As restaurants reopened, the city was able to declare fewer rats in people's back yards.

One of the few places that I know that has successfully beaten back rat populations for good is in the Galapagos Islands, out in the Pacific on the equator.  There are a number of unique species there, not only the famous Galapagos tortoises, and those species had few natural enemies until the whaling ships showed up, complete with rats. In subsequent years, the rats were very harmful to the nests of ground-nesting birds and other creatures. However, recent vigorous trapping efforts have eradicated them from some of the islands where no humans live.

Because rats are intelligent and adaptable, they have been used in scientific research since the end of the nineteenth century (think of the expression, "like a rat in a maze").  They can be used for studying behavior and also digestion, since they eat the same range of foods that humans do.  Lab rats are generally white, descendants of an albino strain, and have become quite tame after generations of living directly with humans, rather than hidden in their walls.  Such rats are also sometimes kept as pets. Medieval people would be appalled.

The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a man who lures all the rats out of the city of Hamelin  with his magical pipe playing, has its origins in thirteenth-century Germany.  It has appeared in many guises over the centuries—I used a version of it myself in my novel Daughter of Magic. Most versions of the story take on a darker tone when the piper is not properly paid for ridding the city of rats. But for medieval people, the underlying premise was obvious:  their cities needed fewer rats (people in New York City today would understand).

Rats were considered to spread disease in the closely-packed late medieval cities. They were accused, accurately, for helping spread the Black Death in the fourteenth century.  They carried the fleas who transmitted the disease to humans.  People killed their cats and dogs to try to get rid of the fleas, but the fleas just jumped onto humans, and the rats, carrying fleas, eluded efforts to eliminate them.

Even when they weren't spreading disease, rats were a major problem for medieval people because they would eat the grain. Keeping the grain away from rats and mice is always important, especially as it represents both this year's food and next year's seed, and it was an especially critical concern for a society in which bread was the principal food. Cats were valued as rodent-hunters more than as pets.  There's a reason even now that farms have barn cats.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

A Bad Spell in Yurt

 How does one become a writer?  My first published novel, some 35 years ago now, was A Bad Spell in Yurt.  It was however far from the first book I'd written.  Like many authors, I'd been making up stories since before I even started school.  A lot of my early efforts were, shall we say, derivative.  But I loved writing stories and, in grade school, illustrating them.

I'm a pretty decent speller (in spite of how totally weird the English language is), and I think it's because when I was writing out my stories I'd keep asking Mom how a particular word was spelled, and I'd remember what she told me.

In junior high I moved from writing kids' books with pictures to writing novels.  In ninth grade I read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the first time (certainly not the last!), and it had a profound effect on me.  Fantasy rules!  From then on, the majority of what I wrote was more or less fantasy—although initially a lot of it was stories set in a pseudo-medieval world that had lots of action but no magic.

Starting when I was in college, I tried intermittently to get something published.  This was back when there was no self-publishing, so it was traditional publishing or nothing.  For years I didn't get anywhere, and it's probably just as well, because some of it I'd now be embarrassed to have attributed to me.  I was also busy being a graduate student and getting established as an academic in the field of medieval history (again, I think Tolkien is largely responsible).

But then I had an unusually vivid dream, which featured the opening of what became A Bad Spell in Yurt and much of the characters.  I started writing, and my husband encouraged me to finish and try to find a publisher.  And I did!  Some twenty-five years after I first packed up a manuscript and mailed it off to a publisher, my first novel was published (my first academic book preceded it by a dozen years). With a great cover by Tom Kidd, it became a national science-fiction/fantasy best seller.

 

(When I was about seven I'd decided both that I wanted to write fun books that people would read and that I wanted to write a "history of the world." Medieval history isn't the history of the whole world, but to a large extent I've achieved my childhood dream.)

 The publisher, Baen, brought out much of the rest of the Yurt series.  I hadn't planned on a series, but (again) my husband encouraged me to make it a series, and he was right.  But then the books went out of print, as books do, and once I got my rights back I turned to self-publishing.

Baen had published the Yurt books as mass-market (small) paperbacks.  I reissued them initially as ebooks, whch remains my best-selling format.  Here are the US link and the UK link.  The book is also available in other Amazon stores around the world.

As well as the ebook, I've brought Bad Spell out as a large-format ("trade") paperback and a hardcover. The rest of the series is available both as ebooks and as paperbacks (some in omnibus editions). I've also written and self-published a "Yurt, the Next Generation" series and some other books as well, having more time to write now that I've retired from that pesky day job.

Don't know if I'd recommend my path to anyone else, but that's how I became a writer. 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

Medieval people and psychology

 Medieval people were a whole lot like us.  This shouldn't be a big surprise.  One can talk to grandparents or other relatives who grew up in another country or another time, without the technology and popular culture we have now, and yet they have the same emotions and sense of humor the young folks do.  Medieval people didn't have phones or TVs or Taylor Swift, but they loved their children and got upset over unfair treatment and enjoyed doing things with their friends just as we do.

A lot of medieval literature does as good a job as modern literature (once you accept the different assumptions about how literature should be written) in showing psychological complexity.  In the tale of Tristan and Isolde, for example, King Mark, Isolde's husband, spends much of the book eaten up with a desire to "know for sure" if Isolde is unfaithful to him, even while he also knows that revealing the betrayal of the woman he loves would destroy him.

(Shameless plug. I've rewritten the Tristan and Isolde story to make it more accessible for modern readers, titled "Ashes of Heaven."  Available as an ebook or paperback, on all major ebook platforms or in your favorite book store.  Here's the Amazon link.) 

 But can we do psychoanalysis on medieval people?  For example, can we figure out that a particular count or duke was cruel because he was raised by a wet-nurse until he was two and then taken from her?  Can we postulate that someone decided to become a monk because his father died when he was very small and he needed an abbot as a replacement father figure?

Well, as soon as you put it that way it sounds rightly absurd.  After all, it's hard to make sweeping statements about an individual's development based on them experiencing the same thing everyone else experienced.  If being taken from a wet-nurse when very young would necessarily warp someone, we'd expect all members of the elite to be cruel and vindictive, which they certainly were not. Plenty of young men who converted to monasticism when they reached adulthood had fathers at home the whole time.

To know whether a particular experience was what made someone behave a certain way, and to help that person deal with that experience if they needed to change their behavior, you'd need to repeatedly have long, personal discussions with them.  There's a reason why one hears references to years of counseling.  The tricky part of doing counseling with a medieval person is that they've been dead for centuries.

This didn't necessarily stop historians.  For a while, back in the 1970s, there was a major interest in so-called psycho-history, analyzing people of the past through the lens of psychoanalysis.  It appealed even more if the historian didn't know much about psychoanalysis other than having read a couple books by Freud and maybe one other psychologist.

This didn't work out very well, and historians quickly moved on, trying to suggest they'd never dipped into psycho-history.  I myself consider historians trying to grab a few tidbits of some social science (sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography) as lusting after false gods.  Those are perfectly good fields in their own right, and we historians cannot just grab a few tidbits and pretend we're a "scientific" field and not a form of the humanities (which is what we are).  We'd be rightly upset after all if an anthropologist read some medieval social history book and announced he now understood our "primitive ancestors" to compare to people in modern-day third-world countries.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

Buttons

 We take buttons for granted.  They fasten our shirts, our coats, our waistbands.  They're now most commonly made of plastic, but they can also be made of metal or bone or wood or shell.  The image below shows buttons made of shell on a sweater.  

 Buttons can also be a fashion statement; the buttons on a suit jacket sleeve really have no practical purpose, and a double-breasted jacket has lots of buttons that don't do anything.

 For much of the Middle Ages, clothes were not fastened with buttons.  Whereas the modern standard for buttoned openings is to overlap two pieces of cloth, with the lower level having a button that goes through a buttonhole on the upper one, medieval clothing typically butted two pieces of cloth together, side by side  They were held together by stitches, by toggles, or by a clasp.

Interestingly, early medieval people did have buttons, or things that look like buttons, little knobs sewn onto clothes as decorative features, the way today we might put souvenir pins on a hat or campaign "buttons" on a jacket.  Some buttons were even jeweled. They just weren't used to fasten the clothes together. 

The basic item of clothing then for both men and women was a tunic, basically a long T-shirt.  It would have to be loose enough to wiggle one's way into without zippers or buttons or any sort of opening, though fancy women's dresses were cut on the bias, giving the fabric enough stretch that it could be cut closer to the body.  Fancy tight sleeves would have to be stitched on once someone pulled on their sleeveless tunic; at night the stitches would be cut and the sleeves removed.  One sleeveless tunic could be paired with several sets of sleeves for different looks.

This changed in the thirteenth century. It's not clear if other parts of the hemisphere (which too had long had decorative buttons) had earlier invented closing openings with buttons paired with loops or buttonholes, or if Europeans invented the idea. But at any rate this use of buttons reached Europe. The aristocracy loved them.

A tight fitting jacket or vest (known as a doublet) could be cut to follow your upper body's shape without worrying about how you'd wiggle into something so tight.  Instead, it was open down the front until buttoned right up with a couple dozen buttons. Funerary carvings of the deceased often showed them with all their buttons.

The military of the post-medieval period adopted buttons with a vengeance, lots of brass buttons, both for buttoning and for show.  As a result, when the Amish appeared in the seventeenth century, with one their central tenets non-violence, they rejected the use of buttons as too associated with the military.

As I have discussed previously, the modern Amish are not living in some version of the Middle Ages, but like medieval people before the thirteenth century they do not use buttons. Small children may, but adults use hooks and eyes (Velcro counts as hooks and eyes) and pins.  It is apparently quite a move toward adulthood when an Amish girl can graduate to the use of all straight pins, rather than buttons, to hold her outfit together.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

 

Linen

Linen was the standard cloth for any medieval clothing not made of wool.  Linen is still in use today but has become far less popular, mostly because it wrinkles easily (unlike most cotton-polyester blends).   It's still found in handkerchiefs, bedding, and some shirts, but many people may own no linen clothing at all (interestingly, underwear, now universally made from cotton and maybe nylon, is often referred to collectively as "linen").

But when silk was extremely expensive, polyester and nylon and rayon were unknown, and cotton was rare (it really only reached western Europe in the thirteenth century), linen was the cloth you wanted next to your skin.  (It was also the cloth from which sails were made.)

Linen even now has advantages over a lot of other kinds of cloth.  It is never itchy, as wool can be if not processed properly.  It is strong, stronger than cotton, and is never munched on by clothes moths, as is wool. It is cool and thus good to wear in hot weather.  It also takes up dye readily. 

Linen is made from flax, a kind of grass that can, when treated, be spun as one spins wool and then woven.   It has been in use since ancient times; the semi-diaphanous outfits people were wearing in Egyptian wall paintings were made of linen.  Scraps of linen fabric have been found in central Asia that are believed to be tens of thousands of years old.  Below is an image of the flax plant's details; note that blue flowers.

 Going from the grass-like linen plant to fibers ready to be spun and woven into cloth was a complicated process.  First the plants were "retted," soaked in pond water, where both the water and the bacteria in it would loosen the fibers from each other (medieval people didn't know about bacteria eating pectin, but they knew soaking in the right water got rid of the sticky stuff holding the fibers together).  Then the plants were "scutched," crushed to break down the stalks so that the fibers were freed of them.  Then the fibers were "heckled," combed to get rid of short bits, leaving only the longer fibers, ready for spinning.

In the Middle Ages, linen production, like wool production, could take place anywhere but was especially common in northern Germany and what are now the Benelux countries.  One might call it an industry, but there were no factories, rather villages in which a number of the houses contained spinning and weaving operations.  Women especially produced the cloth on small-scale hand looms.

Linen's natural color is a creamy white, but medieval people liked it even whiter and would bleach it in the sun. A sign of refinement was to wear very lightweight, very white linen.  All the heroines in the stories wore white linen.  It would of course need to be ironed, with a flat iron heated up in the fire.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

The Earth is a Globe

 Since the "flat earth" delusion seems to be making a comeback on social media, it's time to reiterate:  people in the Middle Ages knew the earth was a globe.

Okay, most of the population probably never thought much at all about the shape of the planet. But the learned certainly thought about it and knew it was a globe.  It was in fact obvious.  During a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth falls on the moon, and it is certainly round.

It couldn't just be a flat circle, because the earth's curvature is clear on both land and sea.  If you watch a ship sail out of harbor into the open ocean, it goes "hull down," disappearing from the bottom up as the ship goes over the earth's curve.  On land, as you travel toward distant mountains they appear to grow, at first you just see the top peaks, then more and more as you get closer, as less is hidden by the earth's curve.

The earth in medieval thinking also had to be a sphere because the heavens were a sphere.  Look at the sky on a clear day. It's a sphere (actually a hemisphere), and we're standing looking up at the inside of a globe.

Ancient people had also known the earth was a globe.  Aristotle in fact set out to calculate the size of the earth.  He underestimated, but it was a good effort.  Unfortunately for Columbus, he not only used Aristotle's estimate, but figured that because he would be sailing west well north of the equator, the distance around the earth was smaller yet, plus he seems to have forgotten to carry the 2... (or the equivalent).  But he and the Spanish court certainly  knew the earth was a globe, just thought the distance from Spain to the East Indies was thousands of miles shorter than it actually is.

(The idea that the Spanish court expected Columbus to fall off the edge of the earth is a complete canard, dating not from 1492 but from the nineteenth century and a "hilarious" anti-Spanish fictional story, written by Washington Irving, better known to us for the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.)

Where medieval people had their astrophysics messed up was the shape of the solar system.  Rather than seeing the earth and the rest of the planets rotating around the sun, they had the sun and all the planets (all of them globes) rotate around the earth.  Explaining their orbits was really tricky, as they seemed to go backwards sometimes as well as forward.  But they tried.

In addition, they generally assumed that as one went further south one would get progressively hotter, so that as the North Pole was cold, the South Pole was assumed to be hot.  There was also concern about how the people who were thought to live in the southern hemisphere could stay attached to the planet, given that they were (from the point of view of the northern hemisphere) upside down.

Sometimes these southerners were depicted with giant feet and toes, to grip the earth so they wouldn't fly off.  They were also bent 180 degrees at the waist, so that their head was still "up."  Yet other medieval thinkers had it right, that "down" was not an absolute direction but rather toward the center of the planet, wherever one was on it.  Dante, in describing a descent into Hell, said that once you got into the center, where Satan sat frozen in ice, you had to turn around, head where your feet had been, to continue up to the other side of the planet.

 Flat earth folks today have major problems explaining things like, if there's an edge to this flat earth, why has no one ever seen it?  How can planes fly around the world just as if it's a globe, if they argue everything is actually laid flat in two dimensional space?  If you go west from California, how do you suddenly end up on the east side of the planet, next to Japan?

One of the sillier arguments I've seen recently is that we must be a flat, unmoving space, with sun and moon and everything else rotating around us, because if we were actually on a swiftly rotating planet we'd fly off into space.  (Try this analogy: how can we drive along at 60 mpg in a car without being thrown from the front seat into the back seat and out the back hatch by the speed?)

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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