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.

© C. Dale Brittain 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).

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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. 

 

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!

© C. Dale Brittain 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.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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. 

 

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.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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. 

 

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!

© C. Dale Brittain 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.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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! 

 

Healthy meat

 The current belief (for most anyway) is that meat isn't really part of a healthy diet. We're told about societies where people routinely live past 100, and how they all eat dried beans, garlic, ancient grains, kale, and olives (or something like that).  In the US beef tallow and full-fat dairy products are experiencing a bit of a resurgence, but the overall consensus is that red meat is not healthy.

The Middle Ages thought about things differently.  For them, red meat was both a luxury and a health food.  Most people, most of the time, ate a basically vegetarian diet, a lot of bread (whole wheat for the most part), whatever vegetables were in season, dried beans and lentils, with the occasional egg or piece of cheese to round it out.  The wealthy added in red meat when they could get it, but other than the annual pork-fest (eat a whole lot of fresh pork at pig roundup time in November, salt and smoke the rest and try to make it stretch out for six months), peasants ate red meat very rarely.

(Those skeptical about the wonders of the whole-grain and kale diet might point out that medieval people rarely made it out of their 50s, but we're not going to talk about that now.) 

Monks ate a vegetarian diet all the time (as did even the wealthy on Fridays and during Lent, though fish was OK then), with one exception.  If they were sick, they needed beef broth! Everyone knew that a sick person needed something strong and nourishing, and beef broth did the trick.  Abbots would look with deep suspicion at monks who "got sick" with remarkable frequency, needing to spend time in the infirmary receiving sustenance.

Beef broth of course comes from boiling beef, with probably a few spices, some honey, and some onions to give it a little extra, if being eaten by someone not entirely ill.  (No potatoes for stew of course, as potatoes are New World, and no carrots, as carrots were not yet domesticated.  Maybe some turnips.). All medieval doctors agreed that boiling meat was better for you than roasting it, even though a lot of people preferred the roast-meat flavor (I certainly do).

An interesting work on nutrition written (and rewritten) during the Middle Ages was  "De observatione ciborum," or as we might translate the title, "Comments on Food."  It was originally written in the sixth century by a physician named Anthimus, in exile from Byzantium (where he was doubtless known as Anthimos). He came both to the court of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic the Great and to the Frankish royal court to serve the Merovingians.

He believed that if you ate the proper foods (including meat), and in the proper way (no gobbling or stuffing oneself), one would not need medicine.  (Sounds sort of New Age-y.  Everything old is new.) He listed several dishes that would (supposedly) help one recover from such ailments as dysentery or a fever.

Given that medicine at the time relied heavily on theories of humours, with blood-letting a big feature, and that the many powders and tinctures doctors might suggest had most definitely not been tested against a placebo, maybe one really would do better with some nice beef broth.

Anthimus is noted today not only for his healthy-living tips but some of his comments on typical behavior of the Franks.  For example, he said that they considered raw bacon a great delicacy.  (Not entirely clear if it was smoked and salted but just not fried, or if it was plain raw pork belly.  I think I won't be a Frank.)

Anthimus's work was copied and expanded in subsequent centuries.  It reappeared at the Carolingian royal court, where again it discussed a particular kind of diet as uniquely Frankish, an aspect of cultural identity.  It continued to be used and quoted at the courts of the powerful through at least the twelfth century.  We are what we eat, and the idea of building healthy living on a proper diet has a very long history.

Abby Riehl of Purdue University is making an extensive study of Anthimus and his work.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available everywhere in paperback

 

 

Medieval Monsters

 Medieval people talked a lot about monsters. Their "bestiaries," books that discussed the supposed nature of different animals (such as that dogs were very faithful, or that lions feared white roosters), also included such monsters as the manticore, a creature with a human face, the body of a lion (usually red), and the tail and stinger of a scorpion. It ate human flesh (note the leg in the monster's mouth).

 

Depictions of manticores in the 13th century often gave them features similar to the features found in images depicting Jews. Faces would have a big hooked nose and a scruffy beard, and the manticore might wear a so-called Phrygian cap, a conical cap with a peak that tipped forward. Thus the artist could make a cruel antisemitic statement while also drawing a monstrous beast. (Julia DeBardeleben has been studying such "Jewish" manticore images.)

(Interestingly, the Phrygian cap was used in ancient Rome to identify freed slaves and during the French Revolution to designate citizens revolting against tyranny. But in the Middle Ages it meant Jews. It had many uses.)

As this example illustrates, medieval monsters were often hybrids. They had body parts of several different kinds of creatures. Deformed features could also count as monstrous, which was rather hard on disabled people.

There were plenty of stories about Wild Men, monsters who were humanoid but large and hairy, one might even say like today's Bigfoot.   These monsters could be rumored to live in some distant, wild place, or be metaphors for what people are not supposed to be like.

Lacking rationality made you into a Wild Man. Jews (again) could be characterized as monstrous because they apparently couldn't grasp the perfectly logical (or at least logical to medieval theologians) arguments why Christianity was right and Judaism wrong.  (It is of course striking that medieval people assumed that your reasoning ability would lead you to the Correct view of religion, unless your brain was deformed.)

Monsters were not always scary. Sometimes they were just the strange creatures supposedly found in distant lands, like the upside-down people on the underside of the planet, with huge toes to cling to the earth so they wouldn't fall off, or the men with heads like dogs believed to live in India (Columbus looked unsuccessfully for them when he reached the Americas).

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval ideas about animals and religion as well as other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback. 

Thirteenth-Century Churches and Documents

 The thirteenth century is strangely neglected by modern scholars.

How can you say that? cry medievalists. After all, Charles Homer Haskins, who really began medieval studies in the US, called the thirteenth the greatest century. In the church, it was the time when the popes came closest to exercising the absolute power they would have liked to have had at several other times, and the new Franciscan and Dominican orders rapidly spread, transforming ideas of the holy. Kings started keeping good records, and great counts and dukes drew up lists of who owed them homage, making political history much more straightforward. It was a time of the glories of Gothic architecture, as seen with the cathedral of Reims (below). It was when a number of great works of literature were composed (both epics and romances).

 But for monasteries, for cartularies, for the documents one finds in the archives, the period is relatively neglected.  This isn't a result of a shortage of records.  This is a matter of having too much.  The great nineteenth-century efforts to collect, analyze, and put into print the documents of a region, a monastery, a bishopric, all tended to start at the beginning, back probably in the Merovingian era.  They published everything they could find up through the tenth century. For the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they tried to include everything they considered most significant.

Then they got to the thirteenth century.  Lots and lots of documents, a lot of them long and highly repetitive.   Someone at the time would make an agreement with a monastery, and several more documents would be drawn up by various people who agreed and confirmed.  The careful nineteenth-century editors looked at all those documents and shook their heads.

They weren't the first.  Those compiling cartularies in the thirteenth century (that is, books into which original documents were copied for ease of reference and safe-keeping), quickly lost steam.

The scribe who compiled the cartulary of the bishops of Auxerre in the late thirteenth century noted that the bishop's documents had been organized into boxes by topic, the boxes identified as A, B, and so on.  He started with A, carefully copying each document, though there were quite a few of them.  Then he got to box B, and his heart must have sunk.  He copied a few, then said, "And many more on similar topics."  On to box C, where he started abbreviating heavily.

At right about the same time, at the monastery of Montier-en-Der (in Champagne), a scribe chose a few major topics for his cartulary and carefully chose documents to copy for each topic.  He did not abbreviate, he did not start writing fast and sloppily, but he had selected only about 100 documents to incorporate.  He skipped over far more documents than he included.  We know this because those documents still exist, in the same bundles as the ones the scribe chose to include.  It wasn't as if he just skipped trivial documents. He even skipped many documents issued by popes, probably because these long, elaborate charters simply confirmed an agreement that had been reached locally.  Too many documents, the scribe seems to have thought, let's just hit the highlights.

Scholars today, understandably, find it easiest to start their research with printed documents.  All serious medievalists studying society and the church will spend some time in the archives, but again the temptation is strong to stick with the printed record,with just brief excursions into documents that exist only in manuscript.  Those who analyze documents from a wide range of sources, over an extended period of time, which is what one does when studying events in the twelfth century or earlier, find the thirteenth-century plethora of records overwhelming and thus not worth investigating.

 Things have changed by the time one gets to the fourteenth century. There are even more records, especially as the spread of paper, far cheaper than parchment, greatly expanded the number of things considered worth writing down.  But scholars have adapted, focusing on just one manor, for example, or the acts of just one bishop.  They could, if they wished, go back and do the same with the thirteenth century, but they find the fourteenth century too interesting (which it is), between pope-king wars, gunpowder, the spread of eyeglasses, the Black Death, and so much more.

So people doing the sixth-twelfth centuries stay away from the thirteenth century, and those doing fourteenth-fifteenth also stay away from the thirteenth century.  Opportunity for grad students looking for a project!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

Pope Gelasius I

 As the discussion of the proper relationship of pope and king (or, more specifically, pope and president) continues to gain attention in the US, it seems appropriate to discuss Pope Gelasius I. After all, he is responsible for the Gelasian framing of the issue.  (Um, yeah, I hear you saying. Don't worry.  All is about to become clear.)

Gelasius I (pope 492-496) was only in office for four years, but he made them count. A native of North Africa while it was still firmly under the Roman emperors (though some scholars think his parents may have moved to the city of Rome before he was born), he is best known for his extensive pronouncements on church governance and on heresy vs. orthodoxy, many contained in letters that were copied and circulated.

Indeed, he was so well known for his writings that a number of works by other authors, written more or less around the time of his life, became attributed to him. Modern scholars have spent a good deal of energy trying to sort them out. He is indeed sometimes credited with determining which books actually belonged in the Christian Bible out of all the accounts written in the first centuries AD, because he composed a treatise defending the list, although it had in fact been determined a century earlier (at least for western Christendom) at the 397 Council of Carthage.

And now we come to the Gelasian framing of church and state, or more specifically church and empire. Let's have some background.  Gelasius argued that the emperor (now in Byzantium) and the patriarch of Constantinople were completely wrong on doctrine. Although the Nicene creed of a century and a half earlier had emphasized the dual nature of Christ, both fully human and fully divine, the emperor and patriarch insisted that Christ only had a single divine nature. Rank heresy! said the pope, who was also trying to assert that popes were over all Christians. The patriarch did not count as equal to the pope, because, as Gelasius pointed out, he himself was the heir to Peter, chief of the apostles, and who knows what the patriarch was heir to.

(Interestingly, Gelasius was able to carry on cordial relations with the Ostrogoths, a Germanic group who had taken over political rule in much of Italy, and who were Christian but followed the Arian version, which made Jesus essentially a totally-human-though-inspired prophet.  The Ostrogoths were after all right there, not like the emperor and patriarch off in Constantinople. You gotta pick your battles.)

When the emperor tried to reply to Gelasius that he, as emperor, was over everybody (including pesky popes), Gelasius came up with his famous formulation, "There are two."  Basically (paraphrasing here), he said that there were two that governed the world, the priests and bishops on the one hand (this included popes), and on the other hand princes and kings (which included emperors).

Interestingly, although he said there were "two," he did not specify if this meant two authorities, two powers, two principles, or what, but his meaning was clear. He went on to clarify that  the worldly power was inferior to the priestly power in matters of religion and the spirit (take that! mistaken idea of the nature of Christ), though the priestly power was inferior to the temporal (worldly) in temporal matters.

This idea of two powers/authorities was tremendously influential in the Middle Ages, with popes and emperors claiming every issue that came up was either (respectively) religious or worldly/political.  It was also connected to the passage in the Bible where the apostles are wondering if they might have to take up arms to protect Jesus from the Romans and say, "Lord, here are two swords," and Jesus replies, "It is enough." (In the event Jesus did not fight when the Romans came for him.). The "two swords" became attached to the "there are two" Gelasian framing.

(For those who've read my Yurt fantasy novels, you may recall that a common saying was "There are three who rule the world," where I've added the wizards to the priests and the kings.)

Although the "two" doctrine was Pope Gelasius's chief long-term contribution, he also is noted for having shut down the Lupercalia. This was a pagan Roman festival, held in February.  Indeed, the name for the month comes from the Latin februum, meaning a purification or cleansing.  Romans had long celebrated this festival, but Pope Gelasius did not feel it fit well with Christianity, being pagan and all.  Perhaps to lead people away from the Lupercalia, new emphasis was given to the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, established on February 2, commemorating Mary's official "purification" at the Temple in Jerusalem according to Jewish law, 40 days after giving birth.  (This is way, way pre-groundhog day.)

Fun fact: The Roman calendar originally had ten months, as their number system (like ours) was base-10.  Ever wonder why the months September through December have names that sound like Seventh through Tenth?  That's why. The year ended at the end of December, essentially at the winter solstice, then there was "winter," and months started up again with March (named for Mars), getting underway for the equinox.  At a certain point, well BC, the Romans decided that winter might as well have months as well, January named for Janus, the doorkeeper god who stands between last year and the new year, and February for Lupercalia-time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

Sylvester I

 With the American president now feuding (verbally) with the pope, and people in his orbit even threatening to pull an "Avignon papacy" on Pope Leo, it seems appropriate to dip back into early Christian history for some context on church and state and a glimpse of the ways that secular and religious rulers interacted.

Popes are first and foremost bishops of Rome, the head Christian in their city. Bishops as rulers of their flock go back to the early days of Christianity.  Most Christian denominations have bishops, including the Amish.  In the first thousand years or so AD, bishops were locally elected (as they still are in Amish communities), and they ran the Church between them.  The sense gradually increased that the bishop of Rome should be over all other bishops, just as the Roman emperors were over all kings and governors.  It helped that the bishop of Rome was supposed to be heir of Saint Peter, who was the leader of the apostles.

(The Bible makes Peter the leader of the apostles, but it doesn't put him in Rome.  Rather, he preached in Antioch. Let's not worry about that now.  After all, the basilica of Saint Peter's has his bones.  Shouldn't that be good enough?)

 

This idea of the supremacy of the Roman pontiff really started with Sylvester I (pope 314-335 AD, pictured above in a later medieval image).  He was bishop of Rome at the time of Constantine, first Roman emperor to be baptized.  His feast day is December 31, so as you celebrate New Year's Eve, be sure to dedicate a glass of champagne to Saint Sylvester, as he is now known. (Germans sometimes refer to New Year's Eve as "Silvester" in his honor.)

Pope Sylvester presided over the Council of Nicaea, called in 325 to debate the true nature of the Trinity, resulting in the Nicene Creed, still the basis of Catholic teaching (and a lot of Protestant teaching as well).  Once Constantine made it acceptable to be Christian in the Roman Empire (formerly officially pagan, in spite of including a lot of Jews, Christians, and those with various other beliefs), Sylvester started the construction of the great church now known as Old Saint Peter's, which stood until the sixteenth century, when the current Saint Peter's basilica was built in its place.

Once Christianity was tolerated out in the open, and indeed soon became the official religion of the Empire, there began to be hints of a debate that was never fully resolved:  in a Christian empire, who is the ultimate authority? the primary Christian (the pope) or the emperor?  As I've discussed before, popes really only became the effective heads of organized Christendom in the eleventh century and promptly became involved in a knock-down drag-out battle with emperors and kings which lasted on and off for four centuries.  ("Oh yeah? I depose you!" "You can't! I excommunicate you!" "So what! You're a heretic!" "No, you're the heretic!" "Oh yeah?" etc.) The squabbles between president and pope going on now have a long historical background.

Efforts by the popes to establish supremacy within the Empire did not wait for the eleventh century (much less the twenty-first).  When Constantine moved his political capitol to Constantinople in the fourth century, Pope Sylvester stayed behind in Rome.  He was probably just as glad not to have the emperor there.  Constantine after all had ordered that the Council of Nicaea be held to settle questions of the Trinity, even though he himself was not yet baptized (that happened only as he was dying). Although he didn't influence the council's outcome, he sat right there observing.

With no emperor on hand, Sylvester and his successors became the effective rulers of the city of Rome and surrounding territory, including defending against Goths, Huns, and the like.  But that wasn't enough.  By the sixth century, an elaborate story had grown up in which Constantine contacted leprosy but was healed by Pope Sylvester.  In gratitude the emperor gave Sylvester his own crown and other imperial insignia, led the pope's horse by the bridle (acting as groom), and declared that the bishop of Rome was above all other bishops.  Sylvester, not to be outdone in generosity and humility, gave the crown back -- but note the implication, the pope is the one who gets to decide if a man deserves to be crowned.

In the eighth century this story was improved further by the "discovery" of the Donation of Constantine, a supposed letter in which Constantine, on his way out the door to Constantinople, gave rule of the whole western half of the Empire to the pope.  Both popes and emperors believed this document to real, not a forgery, until the Renaissance, but the emperors always had some good reason to argue it didn't apply.  ("At least not now. Besides, the pope was a heretic.")

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

Kings

 After last weekend's "No Kings" rallies, it seems appropriate to blog about kings.

Kings have been the default for most societies, once a group of people gets above a certain size. Greece and Rome, seen by American founding fathers as inspiring democracy and a republican form of government, had kings before Athens decided on democracy (unlike the other Greek city-states) and Rome decided to become a republic (and remember Rome later became ruled by emperors).  The ancient Mesopotamian city-states all had kings, and the pharaohs in Egypt were kings under a different name.

Medieval Europe took kings for granted. As new people settled in the old Roman Empire, whether Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Visigoths, or whatever, they were under the rule of kings.  A lot of these kingdoms were very small, but the idea of a single ruler being in charge of a territory seemed self-evident. Scandinavia had never been under Roman rule, but they too were ruled by kings.

Christianity also took kings for granted. After all, the Old Testament had been full of the doings of Hebrew kings, going back to Saul, David, and Solomon. Churches depicted these kings on their facades, as in the example of the royal head below, which was on the front of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris from the twelfth century until knocked off in the French Revolution (a new "improved" head replaced it in the nineteenth century).

 God and Jesus were often referred to as kings.  With the heavenly hierarchy organized with one central person in charge (or actually three persons united in one, let's not get distracted here), it made sense that earth too should have kings.

Kings have usually been hereditary, but there were always exceptions.  We might think of a king's oldest son as automatically being the royal heir, but it didn't have to be that way. William the Conqueror of England's oldest son, Robert, became duke of Normandy, and his second son, William II, king of England.  (Since the Conqueror had been duke of Normandy himself originally, that was the true family property, suitable for an oldest son.)

William the Conqueror himself, of course, as his nickname suggests, really became king by conquest, not by heredity, though he had a family connection to the last Anglo-Saxon kings.  In the Merovingian era, kings had routinely tried to conquer their brothers' or cousins' kingdoms. All early medieval kings were wary of marrying off their daughters to men who might see this connection as a justification for going for the throne themselves. And Charlemagne's own father became king by announcing he was a better man for the position than the current (Merovingian) king,whom he unceremoniously dumped into a monastery.

Medieval kings were never absolute. They were supposed to act with the advice of a council, which became formalized in England around the end of the thirteenth century with the establishment of Parliament.  Other countries set up similar bodies, representatives of the country as a whole (in practice the wealthy and powerful) to advise on important matters.  Even before Parliament, King John of England was reined in by Magna Carta (1215) when he seemed to be acting too much like a tyrant.

Kings of course would have liked to be absolute.  James I of England (James VI of Scotland) first spelled out the theoretical justification of divine-right monarchy.  But this was post-medieval, and his son, Charles I (seventeenth century) was beheaded when Parliament decided he was acting too much like a tyrant.  By the time his son was restored to the throne, England had decided it was going to continue to have kings, but that Parliament would have the final say on important matters (as they do now, when their kings have become essentially powerless).

In France the Estates General was much weaker during this time, and you get kings like Louis XIV declaring that he himself embodied France. ("L'état, c'est moi!") Kings and princes and dukes ruled small states in what is now Germany and Italy, their ambition to be absolute rulers checked primarily by the small size of their territory.

The American colonies were very unusual in deciding to become a country without a king.  George Washington in fact was offered a chance to be king and turned it down.  The colonies had had governors but, with a king over them in England, they'd never had kings on-site, so doing without kings was not too big a leap.  Towns and villages had been run locally ("town hall meetings"), so citizen participation seemed obvious.

Today few kings are.still in power worldwide. Those called king (or queen) have symbolic and ceremonial power for the most part but cannot dictate policy.  Presidents, elected men and women, may on occasion be seen eyeing the power that kings had in the post-medieval period and wishing some for themselves.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

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

 

Byzantine Shipwreck

 The new National Geographic (April 2026) has a very interesting article about a shipwreck recently discovered in the Mediterranean, a Byzantine ship that went down probably in the early eighth century.  Studying the remains of the ship and its contents provided the archaeologists some new insights into economy and trade in the period.

At this time the Roman Empire was alive and well (just ask, and the emperors would have told you), though the emperors lived in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), in the region of Byzantium (now part of Turkey), rather than in Rome.  The culture that had once embraced the entire Mediterranean basin—which the Romans had nicknamed the Roman lake—had been disrupted by the rise of Islam in the seventh century.  But eastern and western halves of the old Empire were still in communication with each other, and their versions of Christianity had not yet split.

The shipwreck was found off the coast of Croatia, where violent storms can suddenly come up on an apparently clear day.  Croatia is on the Adriatic, the narrow arm of the Mediterranean that runs up the eastern side of the Italian peninsula, and the archaeologists surmise that the ship was headed to Ravenna, near the top end of the Adriatic.  It never made it.

Ravenna was an imperial city, where the emperors from Constantinople preferred to go when they visited the more western parts of their Roman Empire, rather than Rome itself.  There had been regular trade routes between Constantinople and the Adriatic since the emperors moved to Byzantium in the fourth century, and the evidence of the ship shows that even the rise of Islam had not ended that trade.

The ship was carrying a number of amphorae, the big two-handled ceramic pots used to hold wine, olive oil, or sometimes grain.  Such amphorae are found in every wreck of a ship from antiquity in the Mediterranean.  There were also such miscellany as game pieces for checkers, oil lamps, dice, and a millstone.  But what startled the archaeologists was the golden treasure that had been silted over on the sea floor during the last 1300 years. They found Byzantine coins, jewelry, and several matching sets of big golden belt buckles and accompanying belt ends, all highly decorated and some set with precious stones.  (The Geographic has good photos.)

Someone traveling on the ship who owned all that gold would have been stunningly wealthy.  It wasn't the emperor (we'd know about it if it a Byzantine emperor had been drowned), but he (or they) must have had a connection to the imperial court, perhaps as an ambassador.  It's in fact unlikely that one man owned all the buckle/belt-end sets and liked to swap them off on different outfits on different days to show off.  More likely they were intended to be part of a diplomatic mission, to be bestowed as rich gifts to those who went along with Byzantium's requests.

The finding of the wrecked ship indicates that Mediterranean commerce did not die in the seventh century with the rise of Islam, as was once thought.  Some of the objects the underwater archaeologists have found suggest the ship may have made stops along the Muslim-held north African coast before sailing up the Adriatic.  Finds like these can also flesh out our knowledge of a period for which few written records remain.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

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!