Articles about 'medieval'

Geographic information systems – once limited to the domain of physical geographers – are emerging as a promising tool to study the past, as researchers are discovering for medieval history.

From the elixirs of legend to transmutation of base metals into gold, medieval medical practice and social mobility were steeped in alchemy.

Scholars from five different institutions, and both Christian and Muslim backgrounds, will gather in Cambridge tomorrow to look at medieval Islamic marriage and how it was viewed by contemporary Christian travellers and polemicists.

A mass grave found in Dorset could belong to a crew of Viking mercenaries who terrorised Europe in the 11th century – according to a new documentary on National Geographic which pieces together the story behind the burial.

The conventional colours of Christmas – red and green – are not, as many might suppose, a legacy of the Victorians. Instead, they hark back to the Middle Ages and perhaps even earlier, according to Cambridge research scientist Dr Spike Bucklow.

A new series presented by Michael Scott examines the history of luxury and the origins of our ambivalent attitude to the finer things in life.

Now mid-way through a year-long 21st-century pilgrimage to the settings of Iceland’s famous medieval Íslendingasögur (‘sagas of Icelanders’), Dr Emily Lethbridge has crisscrossed the country in her ex-MOD Land Rover ambulance on the trail of outlaws, shapeshifters, mound-dwelling viking-zombies, and ordinary men and women who lived in Iceland a thousand years ago.

An exhibition of precious objects found in East Anglia provides a window into the lives of both the people who lost their treasures and those who found them.

Examples of the world’s oldest science and literature – 2,500-year-old clay writing tablets – hold clues as to how ancient scholars acquired and used knowledge, as Dr Eleanor Robson explains.

Art historian Professor Paul Binski describes his ventures into the gold-embellished world of illuminated manuscripts.