Medieval News

“Why you?” a man asked Francesco di Bernardone, known to us now as St. Francis of Assisi. Francis (1181/2-1226) was scrawny and plain-loo...

THE WAR ON HERESY By R.I. Moore Published by Harvard University Press, $35  Long ago and far away, in lands now known as Southern France a...

When you enter King's College Chapel in Cambridge, England, the first thing you do is look up at the magnificent vault of the ceiling...

The Pope Who Quit: A True Medieval Tale of Mystery, Death and Salvation By Jon M. Sweeney Published by Image Books, 2012 Reviewed by Mic...

“Deus vult!” — God wills it! — was the battle cry of the First Crusade, in which armies of Europe, at the very end of the 11th century, ma...

Few figures in medieval history are as famous as Thomas Becket, and fewer have been subject to such utterly differing interpretations. To pi...

Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England was a surprise bestseller in 2009, introducing the reader to the customs and...

For a medieval saga of heresy, witchcraft or sedition to work really well, it requires the payoff scene where the hero or heroine gets burne...

The epic song cycles of the First Crusade, like Led Zeppelin’s debut album, plucked the same brash chord that was heard in Crusades Two, Thr...

In one of cinema’s most beloved scenes, Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator plays in his office with a beachball-sized balloon representing the...

Critic at large about new books on Rome. This season brings a number of new works on Roman history that focus not on the glories of Roman cu...

In The Canterbury Tales, American illustrator Seymour Chwast reimagines Chaucer’s poetic survey of medieval England. And, true to Chaucer...

The story is extraordinary. Even as the world was mired in medieval darkness, with the crushing hand of religion blocking all scientific inq...

Providence author Stephen O’Shea is more than a writer of historical narratives. He is designing engineer and pilot of a time machine that t...

Yeats said no face was more familiar to Western civilisation than Dante's, apart from that of Christ. Dante Alighieri is the greatest po...

England’s magnificent medieval cathedrals are acknowledged as one of the wonders of the world, but who built them and why? The aptly named...

Helen Castor's very readable " She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth " is, she writes, "the kind of bo...

The Wahhabi movement led by Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century Najd was inspired by Ibn Taimiyah. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab hailed...

Book Review: " The Medieval World: An Illustrated Atlas ," by John M. Thompson. This book is beautifully and lavishly illustrate...

Reviews in History , the online journal of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), publishes its 1,000th review this month. Launched in ...