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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading
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…
Continue Reading