medieval history

The medieval English matriarch was a force to be reckoned with

14 September 2024 9:00 am

Like many 15th-century women, Margaret Paston was a fearless protector of her family, supremely capable, in her husband’s absence, of defending their property against predatory neighbours

When the local wizard was the repository of all wisdom

11 May 2024 9:00 am

Before the arrival of ‘proper’ doctors, everyone in the Middle Ages, from rulers to peasants, turned to magic practitioners and cunning folk for healing and advice

Sixteen cathedrals to see before you die

27 August 2022 9:00 am

There can be no clearer illustration of the central role that great cathedrals continue to play in a nation’s life…

How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler

27 August 2022 9:00 am

Frances Wilson describes a group of self-obsessed intellectuals united by mutual loathing in a small university town in the 1790s

Sex and politics in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral

26 March 2022 9:00 am

In the tight dark maze of alleys that wind between the Thames and St Paul’s the pleasures of the living…

What the Anglo-Saxons made of 1066 and all that followed

5 March 2022 9:00 am

By any yardstick, the Norman Conquest was a ghastly business. Within two decades, the English aristocracy had been more than…

From pirates to princes — the heroic transformation of the Normans

19 February 2022 9:00 am

The Normans had an astonishingly good run. Not only did they take over England in 1066, of course, but they…

The magic of manuscripts

2 October 2021 9:00 am

Nothing captures medieval life more vividly than a manuscript that has passed through many hands, says Jonathan Sumption

They weren’t all that pious in the good old days

31 July 2021 9:00 am

You need to be wary of being too flattering about English churches. As John Betjeman said: ‘Be careful before you…

What happens next? Gauging the fallout from the pandemic

5 June 2021 9:00 am

What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there…

Gazing heavenwards: the medieval monks who mapped the planetary motions

3 October 2020 9:00 am

We can probably blame George and Ira Gershwin. It was that brilliant duo who, in 1937, penned the memorable lyric…

The crusaders were not such incompetent zealots after all

15 August 2020 9:00 am

One of the strange effects that modernist, progressive society has had on what the French Annales school would refer to…

Robert the Bruce — master of guerrilla warfare

11 January 2020 9:00 am

The story of Robert the Bruce runs from the death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 to Robert’s own…

Eleanor of Aquitaine is still as elusive as quicksilver

16 November 2019 9:00 am

Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous woman of the Middle Ages: queen of France and England, crusader, mother of…

Homage to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor

10 August 2019 9:00 am

It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a…

Heroism in a hopeless cause: why the crusades remain fascinating

15 June 2019 9:00 am

The crusades are part of everyone’s mental image of the Middle Ages. They extended, in one form or another, from…

Rebel girls of the 13th century

13 April 2019 9:00 am

Women who can — however tenuously — be described as ‘rebel girls’ are big in publishing now. Goodnight Stories for…

The Siege of Acre, depicted in Chroniques de France ou de Saint Denis (1487)

The Siege of Acre: a monstrous blot on the Third Crusade

12 May 2018 9:00 am

Lionheart! Saladin! Massacre! There is no shortage of larger-than-life characters and drama in the epic, two-year siege of Acre, the…

The ruins of Dougga, Tunisia convinced Ibn Khaldun that North Africa had once been extremely prosperous and heavily populated

How a 14th-century Arab thinker influenced Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy

3 March 2018 9:00 am

  At a press conference in October 1981, Ronald Reagan quoted Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in support of what is known…

Dyers at work. There was a tradition that Jesus was apprenticed to a dyer when young

The pilgrims’ ways

21 October 2017 9:00 am

Liza Picard, an chronicler of London society across the centuries, now weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting…

The Templars’ final disaster: Guillaume de Clermont on the ramparts of Acre in 1291. Painting by Dominique Papety

Crusading passions

9 September 2017 9:00 am

In W.B. Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, a testing allusion emerges amid a scene of nightmare: Monstrous familiar…

Detail of mosaic depicting the martyrdom of Saints Castus and Cassius, 12th century, at the Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily

Norman Sicily was a multicultural paradise – but it didn’t last long

9 April 2016 9:00 am

There are lessons to be learned from the disintegration of this once majestic multicultural Norman kingdom, says Martin Gayford