Image by Elias Holmquist. Charlemagne did indeed have an elephant! Abul-Abbas, likely an Asian elephant, was given to the Carolingian emperor in 801 CE as a diplomatic gift from Baghdad. How he got to the…
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On Mar. 2, 2024, the Center for Medieval Studies hosted its annual conference, with the theme this year being Courtly Literature: The Next Generation. This year’s conference was co-sponsored with the International Courtly Literature Society,…
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Matthew Paris was an English Benedictine monk (d. 1259) who chronicled, illuminated, and drew maps in several manuscripts produced in St. Albans Abbey of Hertfordshire. While many know him for his various chronicles of English…
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If the Wife of Bath and the Prioress, two characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, shared a conversation, what might they have said? The Wife is memorable for her unapologetic enthusiasm and recollection of…
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Studying in a city such as New York provides for some very interesting and out-of-the-box learning experiences for us medievalists. Mary Gets Hers, a production by the Playwrights Realm and staged at the MCC Theater…
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Money need not be metallic! Spice did serve as a form of money, from the 10th to the 14th century. It’s easy to imagine that pepper was bartered (traded for goods without following a set…
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Pangur Bán (sometimes also known as “The Scholar and His Cat” or “The Monk and His Cat”) is an anonymously-written Old Irish poem from the ninth century. It is from the perspective of a monk hard…
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This summer I received the Mary Magdalene Impact Fellowship to support a research project mapping allegations of clerical concubinage in a set of visitation records from the archdiocese of Prague, recorded 1379-1382. Although clerical marriage…
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At this year’s Fort Tryon Medieval Festival, my colleague Peyton Seabolt and I gave a panel discussing different kinds of animals and their uses during the Middle Ages (complete with puppets!). The Fort Tryon Medieval…
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On April 28, 2022 the Center for Medieval Studies returned to tradition and welcomed Elizabeth Comuzzi, the newest Medieval Studies faculty member, to give a talk based on her findings from the archives of the…
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