Category Archives: Literature

Rumi and the Whirling Dervishes, 1244

Posted on October 14, 2017 by Ruth

Jalal ad-Din Mohammed Rumi was born in Balkh, Afghanistan in 1207. There’s some unpacking to be done here: I think Mohammed would have been his father’s personal name, and Jalal his own. Ad-Din, of course, was a chosen or consensus-given … Continue reading →

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al-Jazari’s Book of Ingenious Devices, 1206

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Ruth

In 1206, an engineer named Ismail al-Jazari published a book about inventions. It was a Do It Yourself manual, showing 100 things he had built, with diagrams for how to build them yourself. al-Jazari was the chief engineer in the … Continue reading →

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Prester John’s Letter, 1165

Posted on July 8, 2017 by Ruth

“Prester John” was the unlikely name of a legendary Christian king somewhere far in the East. From century to century, people kept hearing and passing on rumors of his wealth and piety. A medieval Obi-Wan Kenobi, he was thought to be … Continue reading →

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St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great persuader

Posted on May 27, 2017 by Ruth

Bernard was a younger son in a noble family of Burgundy. His normal lot would have been war training for knighthood, but Bernard was clearly a scholarly, literary child who preferred the Church, so they sent him to school. As … Continue reading →

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Paul of Aegina: basic Greek surgery

Posted on December 15, 2016 by Ruth

We think of a surgical patient as passive, lying down, unconscious. In medieval surgery, the patient was a participant in that he was certainly conscious, and therefore he could help out by putting his (or her) body in various useful … Continue reading →

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Greek medicine’s pathway into Europe

Posted on December 15, 2016 by Ruth

The Big Story of Europe’s medieval period is something like, “How the rude northern tribes took over for Rome and then gradually learned to adapt to and surpass Rome’s standards of civilization.” You see this same shape in every topic: … Continue reading →

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Herbal remedies for head pain

Posted on July 26, 2016 by Ruth

I’m going to take some Anglo-Saxon herb lore books as representative of medieval herbal medicine. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms took to literacy fairly readily, especially after King Alfred made a serious initiative to teach reading and build up libraries. During a … Continue reading →

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Christine de Pizan

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Ruth

Around 1400, the most famous woman author was Christine de Pizan (or Pisan, both short for Pizzano, south of Bologna, Italy). Christine spent her life at the French court, originally moving there as an infant when her father was hired … Continue reading →

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Heloise d’Argenteuil, an educated medieval woman

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Ruth

Following on my profile of the life of a male university graduate, I want to profile two highly educated women of the Middle Ages, whose lives turned out quite differently. First, since I mentioned her yesterday, Heloise d’Argenteuil. What we … Continue reading →

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Mechanical engineering

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Ruth

Baghdad’s House of Wisdom also produced a collection of all of the mechanical engineering devices known at that time. It’s certainly a collection from China, India, Persia and Greece, like the other scientific works. We aren’t sure if the pictures … Continue reading →

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