Life in the Middle Ages

 After last weekend's "No Kings" rallies, it seems appropriate to blog about kings. Kings have been the default for most socie...

 The new National Geographic (April 2026) has a very interesting article about a shipwreck recently discovered in the Mediterranean, a Byza...

 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...

 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...

 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 fir...

 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 ...

  We take buttons for granted.  They fasten our shirts, our coats, our waistbands.  They're now most commonly made of plastic, but they ...