Category Archives: Literature

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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The Song of Roland

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Ruth

The “Song of Roland” was the most popular epic of its time. Composed by a Frankish minstrel named Turoldus, the poem first appeared in written form around 950. Its subject matter was Charlemagne’s invasion into Muslim Spain in 778. The … Continue reading →

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Baghdad of legend

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Ruth

The Abbasid dynasty endowed a scholars’ center in Baghdad; its first work was to collect and translate the Iranian books sitting in local libraries. We don’t know at what point they began to translate the Persian storybook that became the … Continue reading →

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May Day and Robin Hood

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Ruth

May 1 is mostly behind us, but still worth covering from the Middle Ages. May Day was a true folk holiday celebrating spring. It had nothing to do with the church, which generally opposed May Day games on prudential “they’ll … Continue reading →

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