Life in the Middle Ages

 Wheat is the single biggest food crop in the world today, and it was also the basis for the heart of the medieval diet , bread.  Planting ...

 As I have discussed earlier , monasteries originally grew out of hermitages, places where men (and eventually women in their own nunneries)...

Benedictine monasticism was the dominant form of monasticism in the Middle Ages.  But who was Benedict and why did he get a whole lot of mo...

 We are now in the season of Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter .  Forty days is always a significant period in the Bible; Noah after al...

 As a historian, I study real medieval people, but my medieval-themed fantasy is mostly populated by people who, I hope, will immediately en...

 We take paper for granted.  It's all around us, piling up on the desk or table (or chairs or floor...) in the form of memos, magazines,...

 It's easy to think of countries as self-evident units.  After all, England was a country in the Middle Ages, with its borders pretty mu...