Thomas Aquinas – Dominican monk
Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background Like Ibn Rushd and Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas was a great thinke who tried to figure out the relationship between science and religion. But unlike Ibn Rushd [...]
Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background Like Ibn Rushd and Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas was a great thinke who tried to figure out the relationship between science and religion. But unlike Ibn Rushd [...]
Albigensians were also called Cathars This story starts about 1050 AD, not long after the Capetians took power in northern France. Some Christian people in the south of France began to think differently about God from the [...]
Egyptian caves where early monks and nuns lived The first Christian nuns, like the first Christian monks, lived in Africa - they lived alone in the desert in Egypt in the 300s and 400s AD, where they [...]
Christian monks: A monk shaving another monk What is a monk? Sometimes when a little boy seemed especially smart, his parents would take him to a monastery and leave him [...]
Medieval university Fewer universities than before With the fall of Rome, the universities of northern Europe closed too. The end of Mediterranean trade meant that nobody could afford to get an [...]
Clerks in the Manessa Codex threatening students with sticks (1300 AD) - Medieval schools Who went to school? In medieval Europe, even fewer kids went to school than in the Roman Empire. [...]
Madonna and child (Donatello) Medieval families The way people thought about each other in the Middle Ages, everyone was involved in complicated systems of relationships with each other. The first relationships [...]
Woman beating a man Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale is different from the other stories in the Canterbury Tales. It's the only one told by a woman. She's a woman [...]
Tristan and Isolde, in a German woodcut (1400s AD) In the story, Isolde was a princess in Ireland, and a great healer. She was the best doctor in the land. One day this guy [...]
Lancelot to the rescue! Notice the importance of his strong steel sword. (Knights of the Round Table) A framing device In the early Middle Ages, poets and story-tellers were telling a lot [...]