For decades, I’ve been showing my medieval history students the “autonomous collective” scene from the 1975 film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The clip is funny because it features two medieval ...

The medieval period often gets painted as a thousand years of darkness, filth, and ignorance. Popular culture loves to show us dirty peasants wallowing in mud, superstitious fools who thought the ...

Discover how medieval swearing differs from today’s language, focusing on kings, oaths, and the sacred. Explore what words meant, their significance, and the social context of swearing in the Middle ...

Infertility was a source of stress and sadness for some medieval couples, as it is for modern ones. It was a personal matter, but also a public one. Both families and the church assumed that the ...

An agrarian economy dominated Europe during the stormy centuries after the demise of the Roman Empire, but in the 11th century, towns, trade, and industry began to grow—and with them, the guilds, ...