Life in the Middle Ages

 As I discussed back when I first started this blog, it is wrong to think of the Roman Empire of antiquity as "falling" to barbar...

  In my previous post I discussed the idea of the Global Middle Ages, a fairly new aspect of the study of medieval history, taken up in part...

 Recently medievalists have begun talking about what is called "the global Middle Ages," that is extending their study beyond west...

  Medieval queens exercised a great deal of authority, sometimes from "behind the throne," sometimes in their own right.  As I hav...

 As I have discussed previously , knights in the twelfth century normally wore chain mail, made of iron rings riveted or welded together to ...

 Medieval people valued gemstones.  They were widely used metaphorically, as, for example, the Heavenly Jerusalem had its walls studded with...

We tend to think of medieval buildings as stone, and indeed that was the most common material for castles and churches, at least from the el...